This was my introduction to Steve “The Dude” Rude, who remains one of my favorite illustrators—someone who I wish got more work today. The elegance of the bodies—the way they seemed to move with such exquisite life, the expressions on the faces, the complexity of the layouts, the sheer variety of alien plant-life and creatures, the perfect compliment to George Freeman’s vibrant coloring. I could go on forever.

Then I stumbled into a moment where Mezz bops Tyrone on the dome, mistaking his head-fin for a shark fin. This rare touch really wowed me—a calm moment that stepped back from the main narrative and showed the world as a snapshot of blissful simplicity. This was a world where people actually lived. This was a soapy world of spy games and space mystery and sci-fi fusion-casting explosions, but in spite of it all, this was also a world where banal things happened. And Baron and Rude made the banal ooze with charm.

And then I turned the page. Judah was returning from what was supposed to have been a cakewalk mission. My jaw dropped. In a single panel, the undefeatable hero was shown exiting his spaceship with his arms outstretched and a Tesla coil where his head used to be. My eye followed the scene sprawled out strikingly below: Dave fainting at the sight of his decapitated son and Nexus terrifyingly reacting. Like the gorgeous cover of an old EC horror book, it still gives me chills today.

Before Nexus, it had been a while since I had found a new title that struck me as being worthy of being added to my personal canon. Nexus was like finding a hidden gold mine. It’s hard to imagine returning to the Philly Con someday as one of those angry balding table-jockeys fighting for a buck. Did they once have the same gusto I had upon discovering something so great? Surely their introductions into the world of comicdom must have been happy, right? I guarantee my passion will never fade into a frowning countenance and furrowed brow caged-in by original art and towers of cardboard.

What’s that, you say? You haven’t forgotten about my rather large collection of comics in storage? And you haven’t forgotten that I stopped collecting? I see. You’re thinking that this is the classic origin of the “older angry comic guy” that wakes up at age 55, opens the vault, and realizes he’s saddled with a bunch of undervalued crap that he’s determined to flip into big bucks. Well, that’s an astute observation and fair prediction. But for me, Nexus serves as a reminder of why that won’t happen.

Back in the Ramada days, I was an adventurer, digging through long boxes to build the ultimate collection that other nerds would be jealous of. Now, I’m 30 and that era is behind me, but I’m still an adventurer. However, rather than making purchases merely for the sake of ownership, I pick up books with the idea that passion means cultivating richness from the stories inside them. For example, only in superhero comics do we get complex serialized narratives connected together by a seemingly infinite web built by hundreds of creators. While Nexus only had a few creators over its long run, it blew my mind with its own seemingly infinite web of plots, characters, and worlds.

I no longer treat comic books as objects.

Instead, I view them as complicated stories worthy of our admiration from a personal, scholarly, and analytical point of view. I’m more passionate about comics than ever, but I’m no longer lost in the “collecting game.” It’s funny. When you aren’t collecting, you can actually take the time to sit back, relax, and enjoy the very things you’ve been stockpiling.

Buying and selling will always be an important part of comic book culture, but when I think of Nexus, despite my introduction to the title amidst a “bag-and-board collecting atmosphere,” I’ll always think of love—how a love of comic books became a love of great stories.





Collin Colsher is a film scholar, writer, and teacher. He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY and is the creator of The Real Batman Chronology Project.