Nexus Omnibus Volume 7

Nexus Omnibus #7

by Mike Baron, Steve Rude (Illustrator)

Witness some of the galactic executioner's most memorable adventures to date, with unforgettable appearances from Clonezone, Vooper, and Judah the Hammer! It's Nexus at its best!

Created by Mike Baron and Steve Rude, Nexus is a superhero/science-fiction masterpiece! This value-priced omnibus collects The Origin , The Liberator #1-4 , Alien Justice #1-3 , Hammer of the Pentathlon , Galactic Tour 2494 , Hammer of Butch #1-3 , and the Clonezone Special .

Genres: Comics, Superheroes, Graphic Novels, Science Fiction

466 pages, Paperback

First published July 19, 2016

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Steve Rude returns to drawing Nexus, although most of this book still doesn't feature him. The four issues that do are very good - The Origin was an over-sized one-shot meant to revisit Nexus' origin as the comic had switched to Dark Horse Comics after First Comics went out of business. The follow-up Alien Justice three-parter finds the alien Merk empowering new Nexi, but Horatio can't leave it alone and feels responsible for all the mayhem these new executioners unleash. (The Merk's previously tenuous sanity is obviously sliding farther from anything we'd recognize as "good decision-making.) The comics lack the morality of the best Nexus comics (is Horatio really responsible for the new Nexi even?), but it is good scifi action.

Then there's a four-parter set early in Horatio's career as Nexus, written and drawn by creators other than Baron & Rude, and it's... serviceable, but it lacks their specific ideology and seems at odds with Horatio's long-standing reluctance to get involved with the aftermath of his assassinations (his ship is damaged, so he can't easily leave, but he never seems motivated to leave either).

The rest of the book is given over to one-shots and a three-issue-series featuring Nexus side characters - Judah the Hammer stars in a goofy (in a not-necessarily bad sense) one-off called "Pentathlon" and a mediocrely drawn three-parter called "Butch," which does give some interesting background on the Gucci homeworld, but meanders a bit too much. Mezz and Clonezone also get spotlights - the former's obvious, the latter's unreadable.

Interesting to me that Dark Horse included the Nexus-verse side projects that they published in their omnibuses, but the two Hammer of God miniseries published by First Comics don't seem to have been collected. I wonder why.

Anyway, four stars is for the Baron/Rude material, which remains good and is the reason we're all reading Nexus.

[Fraser Sherman · Rating 3 out of 5]

The three stars is a mix, as this volume is composed of several different miniseries.
Nexus: Alien Justice is first rate. The Merk creates some new Nexuses so Horatio and Sundra have to find a way to stop them. I didn't entirely buy the end, but it's a great story.
There's also a miniseries with Judah hunting his long-lost cousin on a planet of assassins that's also good.
But there's a Year One miniseries for Nexus (Nexus the Liberator) that's mediocre at best. And a story with the obnoxious, amphibian humanoid comedian clonezone, whom writer Mike Baron likes way more than I do.
As a Nexus fan, this was worth getting but it's way below the level of previous volumes.

[Stephen Theaker · Rating 3 out of 5]

The stories about Nexus in the first half are good. The second half, collecting various spin-offs, isn't as compelling, but I'm glad it's all included, and there's mercifully little of Clonezone the Hilariator.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Baron/Rude stuff is good.