Nexus Newspaper Strips Volume 1: The Coming of Gourmando by Mike BaronMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
When a spaceborne colossus named Gourmando threatens nearby planets, Nexus must stop him!
Nexus is one of those characters I've always been interested in but never read about. When the kickstarter for this one came up, I took the plunge.
Despite it taking me over a week to get through this due to outside factors, I enjoyed this quite a bit. The story is a Galactus trilogy homage at some level. Various planets have a giant insect called a Goliathon incubating in their cores. When it reaches maturity, it becomes Gourmando's favorite food, destroying the planet in the process.
While I knew Nexus was a space hero that killed his enemies, I had no idea how deep the character or his origins actually were. Horatio Hellpop is the son of a planet killing dictator who is driven by dreams and gets his powers from a godlike alien called The Merk.
Anyway, the story is told in one page installments and A LOT of information is packed into each page. This book has some serious meat to it. It was pretty dense for an adventure comic. There were some digressions that didn't seem completely necessary but Nexus going up against Gourmando and his herald, Gnosis, delivered the goods.
The art is the star of the show, though. Steve Rude is amazing. His slick artwork reminds me of Alex Toth quite a bit, minimalist but extremely powerful. This is one beautiful book.
About half of this edition is bonus materials, like a painted story featuring Nexus' wife in her early days, to process pages and letter pages.
Nexus Newspaper Strips Volume 1: The Coming of Gourmando is one great looking book and a cool take on planet destroying titans. 4.5 out of 5 Goliathons.
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