3 out of 5

When Mike Baron and Steve Rude produce Nexus, it’s almost always a special kind of brew, with the writer still as wildly veering as ever, but allowing for – or embellished to have, by Rude – more gravitas in story, even while getting all his slapstick beats in there. But Nexus can exist without Rude, of course, and often has. Though I’m not sure the equation works the other way, with Rude’s Baron-less outing not necessarily reading like the Nexus we know. 

Whatever the current approach to the title will be – the two cocreators working on separate Nexus books / storylines – it’s good to know that Baron’s touch is still intact, even if this standalone hardcover is a pretty generic tale, leaning a bit more into Badger-style lunacy. 

In Nefarious, Nexus is cruising through space when a disruption sends him crashing to a planet which he finds to house members from some other recognizable races – Thune, Kreed – and a link to, surprise, some despotic politico who’s in need of some Hellpop justice. The specifics of the politician’s crimes are rather cookie cutter basic, lacking the more biting social swipes that Baron occasionally applied in years’ past. But the steps which Horatio has to take to enact vengeance require a lot of nonstop weirdness, fully seating this in the Nexus world… even if the details don’t always connect that well. A rather ridiculous final couple pages especially makes the journey “worth it;” no one but Baron writes dumb, goofy stuff like this at the end of a story about assassinating someone. 

Artist Richard Bonk has a clean, if unexciting style for the book, missing some visual cues here and there but using varied angles to keep the talking heads pacing moving along. 

Includes some sketch / inked pages from Bonk.