YMMV / Nemesis (Mark Millar)

• Complete Monster: The title character is a wealthy sociopath who paid to become a supervillain. Nemesis travels around the world, slaughtering innocents and targeting honest police chiefs for fun. Choosing inspector Blake Morrow as his next target, Nemesis terrorizes the United States: crashing a plane into Washington; gassing the Pentagon to kidnap the President; and blowing up a prison that detains him after letting himself get caught. To further torment Blake, Nemesis outs the former's son as gay, inseminates his daughter with his son's sperm and triggers her womb to collapse if an abortion is attempted. Confronted by Blake, Nemesis reveals he's strapped bombs to both the President and Blake's wife and ecstatically tries to force the inspector to choose who will die.
• Funny Moments: In Nemesis Reloaded, Nemesis tells Jake and Margot that one of them will have to kill the other for the right to be his butler and Margot in the midst of his explanation just shoots Jake pointblank in the head in one of the few times that caught Nemesis off guard.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • We now actually have an official Batman who becomes the Joker, and manages to one up Nemesis by trying to destroy MULTIPLE UNIVERSES.
  • Batman: Gotham by Gaslight ends up with a similar promise of a cape masked figure fighting the commissioner with their roles and moralities flipped.
• Improved Second Attempt: Nemesis Reloaded to some. While the original seems like it genuinely tried to take itself seriously, the reboot seems to intentionally revel in how stupid the whole thing is, with Nemesis' schemes being so outright cartoonish that you can't help but find them funny. It's a decent Black Comedy, if nothing else.
• Misaimed Fandom: The point of the series is to have a crazy awesome badass villain to end all crazy awesome badass villains, designed to have the reader rooting for him. With the third issue, however, far few people will cheer on a man who crosses the Moral Event Horizon in the way that he does.
• Moment of Awesome: The President demanding Blake to blow him up just so he can put Nemesis in critical condition. Also counts as a Dying Moment of Awesome.
• Moral Event Horizon: Nemesis kidnapped a young woman and had her impregnated by her gay brother, somehow rigging her body so that an attempt at an abortion will destroy her womb.
• Narm:
  • The entire comic, to some. It quickly becomes very hard to take Nemesis seriously as he comes off as less the Evil Genius the story makes him out to be and more like some laughable parody of a supervillain with absurd plot armor that allows him to Ass Pull his way through the most ludicrously stupid schemes imaginable. He can easily come off as an extremely poor attempt at an Evil Is Cool villain. Instead of him actually being smart or competent—the traits that actually make a villain cool—the entire story just bends over backward so Nemesis can steamroll his way to victory no matter how nonsensical his methods are. In Nemesis Reloaded, Mark Millar himself seems to have picked up on it, and instead just intentionally plays up the sheer absurdity of Nemesis' actions.
  • The above-mentioned moral event horizon? It's described so clinically that the scene just comes off as ridiculous. Not to mention that the whole thing somehow made front page news.
  • At the end of the story, the protagonist receives a letter from The Man Behind the Man that describes all of the events that occurred down to every specific detail, but the person who delivers it says that they've had the letter for 10 whole years, meaning that the person responsible was able to accurately predict everything that happened. Already pretty extreme, but he was able to predict everything right down to Blake's daughter having triplets from her rape. From 10 years prior.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: It's pretty hard to find investment in a story where the title character and main focus does nothing but kill, maim, and spread chaos in the most absurd ways possible. But unlike The Joker, who Nemesis takes inspiration from, none of the charisma or mysterious intrigue is there to keep the reader interested. It becomes even more insulting when it's ultimately revealed that Nemesis is just some rich guy who became a supervillain out of boredom, not only telling the reader that their patience in finding out the full details of the character's apparent Freudian Excuse was a waste of time, but also that they had been following the exploits of a completely one-dimensional character who has done horrible things for no reason at all.
• The Woobie: Morrow's children, who Nemesis not only kidnaps, but also forces to have sex with each other, impregnating the daughter and forcing her to bear the child or else her womb with explode. The son in particular gets pity points for being gay and severely depressed for thinking his father won't love him if he knew (actually, he does love him, and just wants him safe), and because what Nemesis did to him is heavily implied to be a form of humiliation for him alone.

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