Because it's about time someone did!
Dr. Nemesis was always ready to conduct science in the laboratory of violence
Entry 025 - Dr. Nemesis
Name: James Nicola Bradley Code Names: Dr. Nemesis, Dr. Death First Appearance: Lightning Comics #6 (1941) Powers: Hyperevolved Intellect Teams Affiliation: Battle-Axis, X-Club, X-Force There is something about science that appeals to me and I think it is the sense of discovery. Finding something new is an experience I have always yearned for.
xavierfiles.com
So I write these character profiles every week and this week is one of my favorites yet. Dr. Nemesis is the most constantly enjoyable addition to the X-Men in the last decade but he has engaging roots long before that.
What do you think about Dr. Nemesis?




Oh, man, JNB is my very favorite Marvel science weirdo. I ended up rooting through a lot of his older appearances for the Dr. Nemesis valentines I made a few years back, and he is a persistently odd and splendid duck.
I'm so glad he got brought into the X-Men, they needed his unique brand of super science to shake things up.
Fraction had a way with playing with deep cuts of the Marvel Universe. The Japanese radioactivity expect that was also in the X-Club was a scientist in the Marvel Godzilla series. He brought a ton of forgotten guys to Utopia and tried to use weird villians like the Collective Man from Austin's adjectiveless X-Men.
His run wasn't perfect but he loved the obscure and that really clicked with me
I would be really suprised if Dr. Nemesis won't appear in any of the Uncanny books that are comming out right now somtime in the future, I think he has a place in any one of them. Plus seeing him go up against the Red Skull in Uncanny Avengers would be a dream come true. :)
Doctor Nemesis is fantastic, and I enjoyed the profile.
That reminds me, I would like to read those X-Force books in which he appears. Anyone know if they've been collected into any editions?
Yup there are 4 trades for Cable and the X-Force and 3 for Si's X-Force
Such a fantastic book, I wish it was still going.
Wow! I had no idea that he was such an old character! So, is he still technically considered a public domain character? Could DC or another publisher still use an incarnation of that character for a book?
Yes but any distinctly Marvel elements like the crazy science Nazi hunting couldn't be used
That a little crazy to think that DC could take the character and all it's public-domain background and make a book with him. It makes me wonder if eventually all these Marvel/DC owned characters will end up in the public domain.
They should have, long ago. But copyright laws keep getting changed to protect the profits of giant companies like Disney. The laws will no doubt keep getting changed indefinitely.
It seems quite reasonable to me that the companies that own Marvel and DC should continue to own the rights to their comics characters, when they continue putting out comics every month with those characters in them. Why is that a problem?
Imagine if nobody but the Stoker family could do anything with Dracula. Imagine no new takes on Sherlock Holmes. Imagine even in an extreme example if you weren't allowed to use Hercules or Thor. Copyright law was created to allow creators to see a fair financial return on their efforts, before the properties became common property. DC didn't create Superman, two dead guys did. If anyone was allowed to use Superman, imagine the stories, the comics, novels, art and movies that might exist now. Superman, more than any other superhero, has joined the public consciousness, but only Tome Warner is allowed to do anything with him. Not due to any moral right, but because they bought a company that once paid someone who had an idea of a serious version of Popeye. We only think this is normal because it is commonplace, but it's nuts.
TLDR version: If anyone could write a story about Wolverine, maybe someone other than Marvel would write a version that was better, would sell more. That's healthy competition, that's the free market at work. Sure the original company should get compensated for first making a popular character, as should the creators, but that doesn't mean they should own it for ever and ever.
If anyone could write (and not just write, but publish and sell) stories about Wolverine and every other Marvel character, then I'm pretty sure the Marvel Universe as we know it just wouldn't exist any more. Instead, for better or worse, there'd be stories featuring Batman fighting Doctor Doom, and Iron Man teaming up with Harry Potter, and Squirrel Girl helping Frodo get to Mordor, and so on and so forth. And these stories would be of wildly varying quality, and would constantly contradict each other. You'd have one story where Logan is dead, and one where he's alive and married to Storm, and one where he's married to Jean Grey, and one where he's taken over the mantle of Batman...
Your mileage may vary, and I'm sure some of the stories would be good, but I would much rather have the Marvel we have now, where someone actually owns these characters and thus can decide what happens to them in the comics and on screen. So that we can say that Tony Stark is this type of person, and Kamala Khan is that type of person, and they are not just what every writer on the internet decides to turn them into.
To look at it another way: if I'm not mistaken, copyright law traditionally protected books, characters, etc, until some number of years after the creator's death, after which those things went into the public domain. But what should the law be when a character was basically created by a corporation, not an individual, and that corporation is continuing to put out new books about the character? For many comics characters, you can give a lot of credit to individual creators, but you can't really say one person created them. Take Kamala Khan. She couldn't have come into existence if various creators hadn't already been writing and drawing Carol Danvers for decades. And Kamala herself was jointly created by G Willow Wilson and Sana Amanat; and surely Adrian Alphona, the first artist to draw her, gets some credit too. My point is that Kamala Khan was created by Marvel, not by any one individual, and it seems quite reasonable to me that she should continue to be owned by Marvel for at least as long as Marvel continues to publish comics with her in them.
Intellectual property law is immensely complicated and there have been many versions in many countries, too complicated for me to type on a little phone keyboard even if I had all the answers. When IP was first introduced I believe it was only so many years after publication. The Tarzan character and book series is a mess of legality because of when various volumes were published. On the case of conflicting stories, Dracula is an excellent example. Any serial setting with a vaguely supernatural theme has most likely featured Dracula at least once, and his character, appearance, motivations and abilities rarely match up between franchises. But Dracula still works just fine. And look at it this way. If Marvel couldn't have sole use of a character for more than, say, 20 years, they would be forced to keep making new characters to stay viable. That's more innovation, more potential hits, instead of seven Wolverine titles in a month. There's a lot to be said about a stable "universe" of characters, but there's also a lot of potential missed.