Characters / Nemesis the Warlock

Credo

Nemesis the Warlock

The main protagonist of the series. He is the leader of the organization known as Credo, which is committed to bringing Torquemada and his empire down.

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• '90s Anti-Hero: Nemesis is a brutal demonic warlock with an edgy name and a dark, edgy design who is fighting the evil Torquemada largely for the fun of it.
• And Show It to You: Nemesis can create undead zombies by ripping someone's heart out.
• Anti-Hero: Part of the course for Pat Mills' protagonists. He is the main protagonist of the series but he turns out to fight for all the wrong reasons instead of being concerned with the freedom and safety of the various sentient races of the Galaxy like a traditional Space Opera hero would do. Although he gradually starts to care about Others in later chapters.
• The Archmage: Nemesis is immensely powerful and skilled by Warlock standards, with a huge array of magic spells that effectively make him a One-Man Army.
• Badass Boast: He often introduces himself with some variation of the following:
  "I am Nemesis the Warlock. I am the Shape of Things to Come, the Lord of the Flies, Holder of the Sword Sinister...The Death Bringer...I am the one who waits on the edge of your dreams. I am all these things and many more."
• Blood Knight: His original motivation to fight Torquemada and the Termight Empire? He wanted a good fight.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Nemesis' morality is one that is very complex. He can be best described as amoral.
  Candida: What do you really stand for, Nemesis? What do you really believe in?
  Nemesis: The oldest force in the universe... Nothing.
• Breath Weapon: He has the ability of projecting a stream of fire as shown in the picture.
• Catchphrase: "Credo!"
• Challenge Seeker: He started the revolt against Termight mostly because he thought Torquemada is a challenging enemy to test his fighting and magical prowess with. It later became more personal after the death of his wife and his son.
• Cool Ship: Seth the Blitzspear is a Living Ship that acts as Nemesis' main method of transportation. Blitzspears originated in his homeworld, Murduk, and they are close relatives to Nemesis' race, with near-identical heads and horns. Nemesis tamed Seth and telepathically linked his mind with it as part of an adulthood ritual. By the time of the Distant Finale, he had an even bigger ship, the Milchspear, which can travel through time and space and alternate realities.
• Cool Sword: Nemesis' main weapon other than his magic is Excessus, the Sword Sinister, an Absurdly Sharp Blade made of a dense living metal known as "tcham", originating from the star Sothus. He found it on an abandoned human colony world called Novala. The sword originally belonged to a human named M'strom, who wielded it in the first war between humans and aliens. His last descendant, a farmer called Olric, went on a grueling quest for 15 years to find it and kill Nemesis with it, only to fail and be cut down by him with that very blade.
• Cooldown Hug: Gave one of these to his son Thoth, shortly before the latter's death.
• Dragon Knight: He resembles a dragon, wields a sword, dresses in armor, and can breathe fire.
• Full-Frontal Assault: Zigzagged. Nemesis is basically a nudist and usually fights wearing nothing but a cape, as he can harden his body with magic, making armor unnecessary. He does occasionally wear clothing and armor if it’s plot important. Luckily, Barbie Doll Anatomy is used to block out Nemesis’ private areas. Also, his sexual organs aren't in his crotch... if Torquemada is to be believed of course.
• Green and Mean: A rare non-villainous example. His skin is naturally green, and he's a huge Jerkass.
• Heroic Sacrifice: At the final issue, Nemesis is near death and he uses his necromancy to absorb the Final Solution's explosion into himself to save the aliens and hybrids. He does make sure that Torquemada dies with him after raking him with his claws. At the same time, he fused himself, his ship Seth, and Torquemada into one being, trapping the three of them in a Sealed Evil in a Duel for one billion years.
• Horrifying Hero: He looks like a demon or a dragon, which makes Torquemada's propaganda against him more effective.
• Invisibility: Nemesis can turn himself invisible, which is useful for sneaking around Termight. A young Purity was pretty startled when he appeared right in front of her after wondering if he even exists.
• It Amused Me: Nemesis' real motive for prolonging the war against Termight and letting Torquemada escape time and time again. He's a super-powerful Blood Knight with no real opponent to fight, and Torquemada makes for a decent challenge.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Nemesis hates humanity and sees all of them as insects (Purity can be considered an exception). He does care about other aliens persecuted by Torquemada and even went as far as sacrificing himself to take down Torquemada for good and stop his plans.
• Kill All Humans: After losing his family to Torquemada, Nemesis' hatred towards him extended to the rest of the human race, to the point that he sought to destroy them all. His friends and allies, including Purity, who is a human, called him out on many occasions.
  Hammerstein: You can't blame all humans for Torquemada's crimes!
  Purity: What about me? Am I included in your plan of genocide?
  Nemesis: The race that spawned Torquemada must pay... IN BLOOD!
• Magic Knight: He possesses immense sorcerous powers as a space warlock, but he's absolutely capable of fighting any opponent directly with the Sword Sinister.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: He's a alien-demon-dragon-sorcerer-knight thing.
• Opportunistic Bastard: Nemesis seizes on any opportunity to undermine Torquemada's power, but always stops short of killing him, which inevitably allows the Grand Master of Termight a chance to regroup and rebuild his forces. On more than one occasion this has led to Nemesis requiring his allies to get him out of a sticky situation. This is because Nemesis is the avatar of chaos, and also a Blood Knight who doesn't want to stop battling Torquemada.
• Rebel Leader: Nemesis is the leader of Credo, which encompasses both the alliance of alien planets united against the Termight Empire, as well as the human resistance on Earth. Nemesis often engages in raiding parties on Termight itself against Torquemada and his forces, which incenses the Grand Master so much that he has dubbed Nemesis the "Arch-Deviant".
• Took a Level in Jerkass: The deaths of Chira and Thoth did a number on his mental health, and made him intensely misanthropic for a while.
• Took a Level in Kindness: He became less selfish about fighting Torquemada's regime thanks to Purity Brown.
• Troll: Nemesis wars against and seeks to piss off Torquemada for his own amusement.
• Voluntary Shapeshifter: His magic allows him to change his size, appearance and body composition at will. He often used it to infiltrate Termight with ease.
• Widowed at the Wedding: A rare case in that the groom widowed himself. He killed Magna at their wedding when he read her mind and found out what she did to Chira and Thoth.
• Would Hurt a Child: Nemesis blows up a bus full of kids containing Torquemada's children. He just dismisses it as collateral damage afterwards.

Purity Brown

Nemesis' chief ally, she's a human girl raised under Torquemada's regime before she joined the resistance.

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• Broken Pedestal: She becomes disillusioned with Nemesis after discovering he is fighting against Torquemada's regime for sport rather than any noble reasons.
• Meaningful Name: She's a much better human being than Torquemada, who actually feels her name is an insult to his own notions of 'purity'.
• Ms. Fanservice: As a Token Human Action Girl, she's the character most likely to appear in Stripperiffic or body-hugging outfits.
• Ship Tease: It's occasionally hinted that she and Nemesis might regard each other as more than just allies.
• Token Human: She's usually the only human on Nemesis' teams, which tend to be comprised mostly of other aliens and robots.
• Unwitting Pawn: She's not pleased when she discovers that she was a pawn in Nemesis' schemes against Torquemada all along, who had subsequently wiped her memory to make her believe that Nemesis was good.

Ragnar

A member of Credo and an alien who is an ally of Nemesis. He appears in the first and final issues of the series where in the end, he becomes one of Purity Brown’s advisors.

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• Bizarre Alien Biology: Ragnar has a mouth filled with teeth that goes all the way down to near his crotch, and his left arm apparently has a mind of its own.
• Token Good Teammate: He is the nicest member of Credo, alongside Purity.

Termight Empire

Tomas de Torquemada

The main antagonist of the series. He is the tyrannical ruler of Termight who is obsessed with wiping out all alien life in the universe and is is the Arch-Enemy of Nemesis.

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• Absolute Xenophobe: Despises all alien life, and would've destroyed it all if the chance presented itself. However, later on when he considers humanity a failure, he decides to take over an alien empire to rule, making it unclear if he ever believed the rhetoric he was espousing.
• An Arm and a Leg: He once lost a hand to Nemesis when the latter shapeshifted his teeth into a meatgrinder.
• And I Must Scream: His ultimate fate after Nemesis has his Blitzspear Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence in the Distant Finale: crucified and in pain, hurtling across the cosmos accompanied by a fleet of Blitzspear souls for the rest of eternity. Trapping him in such a Fate Worse than Death also keeps him from reincarnating, saving humanity as a whole from his evil.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: Torquemada often takes part in his own campaigns as a Frontline General. Of course, he rose to power in the first place by being the most ruthless bastard to blight Termight.
• Bald of Evil: He's actually bald underneath the traffic cone helmet.
• Big Bad: In the comic, since he is Nemesis' greatest enemy.
• Body Horror: After his first death, he became a demonic spirit with a Lean and Mean body, and his helmet merged with his head, becoming an Expressive Mask that could copy his gestures.
• Cain and Abel: He usurped power from his brother Nostradamus and had him locked up in an insane asylum. Downplayed in that Nostradamus is pretty Ax-Crazy himself, just A Lighter Shade of Black compared to Torquemada.
• Catchphrase: "Be Pure. Be Vigilant. Behave."
• Cool Helmet: Torquemada's helmet resembles a capirote, a religious hood worn by Catholic penitents, most widely recognised for its use by the Spanish Inquisition and the Ku Klux Klan - both of whom Torquemada is ideologically connected to. As a bonus, it makes it look like the "Captain of the Tube Police" is wearing a traffic cone.
• Demonic Possession: After his first death, he could possess and take over the bodies of others, including aliens, like he did with Zelotes.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
  • Subverted with Candida, his first wife. While he did love her once, his problem was that he's terrible at expressing that love in non-evil ways, which eventually leads to her going insane and then leaving him after Nemesis cures her. He abandons his love for her after that. He also had two children with her, Pandora and Barbarossa, who were later killed by Nemesis.
  • He also cared for his parents and his sister, doing a ceremony to consecrate their remains every few years. The only relative of his he didn't love was his older brother Nostradamus, who tried to steal Candida from him in a few occasions.
• Evil Overlord: He rules as the supreme leader of the Termight Empire. Of course, the Earth is not enough for him...
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: It's a general problem for him, but it's especially bad when he's having to deal with his first wife. He wants to be a good and caring husband, but can only express it through acts of brutal supervillainy.
• Freudian Excuse: Torquemada was revealed to have been betrayed as a teenager and enslaved by a group of Naga and Manticore pirates for five years, which intensified his hatred towards aliens. Although, he was a bigot towards aliens even before this.
• God-Emperor: He starts to internalize his cult of personality and considers himself "Torquemada the God". At one point he did have some legitimate claim to this, since he possessed actual supernatural powers while he was a disembodied spirit.
• Hypocrite: Torquemada considers aliens to be profane and unclean but he possesses alien bodies to use temporarily and has used an alien to murder people, including some of his own soldiers to frame Nemesis for the crimes and intense Termight's hatred of aliens. At the very end, when he considers humanity itself to have failed him, he decides he'll simply find an alien empire to rule over.
• It's All About Me: Torquemada is so selfish that he demands that he be worshipped as a god and that happens after the accident in which he turned into a spirit that possessed corpses. He even interrupted a time of peace between humans and alien and waged war on aliens again all so he could continue to indulge in his selfish and genocidal desires towards the aliens and have an excuse for it.
• Jerkass: Torquemada is a very arrogant and selfish tyrant who has murdered a lot of innocent people both human and alien.
• Joker Immunity: He escapes death or punishment for his crimes a dizzying number of times, even though Nemesis is much stronger than him. Even after he dies he comes Back from the Dead at least twice (first as a ghost, then through time travel).
• Knight Templar: With a crusader meets Nazi mindset, he fully believes that his tyrannical rule and endless warfare is for the greater good.
• Made of Evil: His soul is so monstrously evil that most incarnations of him were a horrible monster in human form, like Hitler. Ironically, his namesake and one of his incarnations, the original Tomás de Torquemada, was actually horrified when he met him and saw how messed up he was. There's a good reason why Nemesis sealed him off inside Seth before he could fully die, because if he hadn't, Torquemada's soul would've reincarnated and wreaked havoc across the stars once more.
• Named After Somebody Famous: He shares the same name with the notorious Spanish Inquisitor that made living torches out of people. That is because he literally used to be him in another life.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: He is an absolute xenophobe who wants nothing more than to erase aliens and regards humans as superior. Turns out he was actually Adolf Hitler in a previous life.
• Sealed Evil in a Duel: After Nemesis defused his final trump card, he fused both of them with Seth, where they fought each other for a billion years (A million of millions of years, or a trillion if you're from the US).
• Tin Tyrant: Most often, he's dressed in some type of armor emblazoned with skulls and a Cool Helmet.
• Torture Technician: Torquemada is considered the greatest torturer on all of Termight, and takes a particular relish in drawing out the pain of his victims. He's experienced enough that he's also Too Kinky to Torture.
• Villainous Breakdown: Seeing Purity fraternize with Manticores and Nagas, the same races the pirates who enslaved him in his youth belonged to were the final straw for him, and what drove him to unleash the Final Solution against his own world.
• Villainous Underdog: While Torquemada is a Badass Normal with an army at his beck and call, he is still regularly fighting a nearly-invincible alien Magic Knight.
• Would Hurt a Child: Blatantly shown when he murders Thoth. It’s also heavily implied that he tortures and murders innocent children in Termight as well.
• You Have Failed Me: At the end, he decides that humanity itself has failed him by overthrowing him, and will ensure that most humans and all aliens on the planet will be exterminated by his Doomsday Device, then use the Blitzspear to travel to a distant alien empire and take it over.

Candida de Torquemada

The ex wife of Tomas De Torquemada and mother of Barbarossa and Pandora. She eventually become insane and is committed to a mental institution after repeated exposure to Torquemada’s possession of corpses. However she does recover and goes on to humiliate her husband on television in a fake remarriage to him.

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• Heel–Face Turn: Undergoes one after being healed of her insanity by Nemesis.
• Morality Pet: Occasionally played straight, mostly subverted. Tomás sincerely loves her and wants to make their relationship work, but he's almost always incapable of doing so in a non-evil way. The Gothic Empire arc, for instance, involves him causing thousands of deaths so he can get his body back, because he's aware that being a hideous incorporeal ghost is putting a strain on his marriage.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: delivers a scathing and well deserved one towards Torquemada on national television in her fake remarriage with him.

Others

Thoth

The son of Nemesis and Chira. He witnessed his mother’s horrific murder at the hand of Torquemadas minions and swore revenge on the Torquemada regime. He blames Nemesis for contributing to his mother’s death because he was not there to defend her.

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• Ax-Crazy: He goes super crazy and vengeful with his powers after witnessing his mother’s death and is willing to cut down anyone who gets in his way, especially his own father.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Getting impaled with a chainsword through the back is not a good way to go, especially if you're just a child.
• Dead Guy Junior: He shares his name with Nemesis' father, who was also called Thoth.
• It Amused Me: His reason for summoning the Cursed Earth's Satanus into modern times, and giving him the ability to breathe fire? He wanted a pet.
• Killed Off for Real: At the hands of Torquemada.
• Reality Warper: His massive magical powers, combined with those of Chira made him the most powerful Warlock in existence, capable of manipulating time and space like they were toys.
• Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum: When cornered by his father, he tried to smash Termight's black and white holes with each other, which would've destroyed the planet and everyone in it.
• Stable Time Loop: He can put people in those, as he did with Torquemada, trapping him at his own execution, burned at the stake over, and over, and over again for impersonating himself.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Due to the fact that he witnessed his mother’s murder, combined with being forced to fend for himself the day after he was born and inheriting his mother’s godlike powers, this results in Thoth behaving in ways that are not like a typical 10 year old boy such as opening up a black hole to try to consume Termight and going on rampages with his pet dinosaur, the fire-breathing black Tyrannosaur Satanus.

Magna

Chira's rival and briefly Nemesis' second wife. She was very lustful towards Nemesis and is jealous of Chira for her powers and marriage to Nemesis. She sells Chira and Thoth out to the terminators and marries Nemesis but her scheme is exposed and Nemesis kills her after finding out what she did.

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• Hate Sink: There are no redeeming qualities in this woman as Magna has has an insatiable lust towards Nemesis and is willing to shed blood to get him. She is despised for selling Chira and Thoth out to Torquemada so she could have Nemesis all to herself.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: How she died to the Sword Sinister, at the hands of a disgusted and enraged Nemesis.
• It's All About Me: Magna only cares about herself and behaves as such for most of her screentime. She acts like a spoiled diva around her father, Ashtar, and sold out Chira and Thoth to Torquemada for the selfish reason of getting Nemesis to marry her.
  Nemesis: MURDERESS!
  Magna: Chira was old. She was no good for you. I did it for our future together, Nemesis!
  Nemesis You have no future! [Nemesis stabs Magna with Excessus, mortally injuring her.]
  Magna: BUT I LOVE YOOOOOOHHHH!
• Killed Off for Real: In 2000AD #436. At her own wedding, no less.
• Murder the Hypotenuse: She revealed the location of Chira and Thoth to Torquemada, who sent the Terminator squad that killed her.
• Our Centaurs Are Different: Female Warlocks have four legs, instead of the two legs the males have. They also have hairy tails.
• Psychic Block Defense: She could create mental barriers to block others from reading her mind. She needed constant focus to maintain it, so when Purity distracted her and made her lower her guard, she sealed Magna's fate.

Chira

The wife of Nemesis, mother of Thoth, and rival to Magna. She is betrayed by Magma and then murdered by Torquemada and his minions. She is said to be one of the most powerful female warlocks in existence.

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• Heroic Sacrifice: She gave her powers to Thoth so he could survive before she goes into her final fight against the Terminators. She would have survived if she didn’t do this.
• Our Centaurs Are Different: Female Warlocks have four legs, instead of the two legs the males have. They also have hairy tails.

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