NEMESIS

JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED (MATTEL)

Beginning as the star of a back-up feature running in Brave and the Bold (which was then serving as DC’s equivalent to Marvel’s Marvel Team-Up), Thomas Tresser aka Nemesis has never been a particularly high profile DC character, but he’s had a few notable moments over the years.  He’s certainly a different sort of character, especially for his era, being more of an espionage type of character who nevertheless still regularly interacts with the main DC heroes.  He’s kind of like a Black Widow type almost.  In this day and age of media, it’s honestly downright baffling that his only appearance outside of the comics is as a couple of cameos in Justice League Unlimited.  He did at least get a toy out of it, though.

THE FIGURE ITSELF

Nemesis was released in 2007, under the third iteration of Mattel’s Justice League Unlimited line.  He was in the fifth series following the line’s move to the purple “DC Universe” branded packaging, and was available only in a three-pack alongside Lightray and a winged variant of Amazo.  The figure stands about 4 1/2 inches tall and he has 5 points of articulation.  Nemesis was built on the medium male body, which was reworked from the basic Green Lantern.  It’s a good, balanced build, and was very definitely the line’s best base body.  He got the new fancy-booted legs from the prior year’s Lex Luthor, as well as that figure’s shoulder harness add-on.  Those pieces, coupled with a brand-new head sculpt, made for a really solid recreation of Nemesis’s design as seen on the show.  The head sculpt is honestly one of the line’s best, and is just a great recreation of Nemesis not only from the show, but from the comics as well.  The paint work on this guy is very basic.  Largely, he’s just molded in black.  There’s a little bit of painted add-on work, and it does what needs to, and does it pretty well.  Nemesis was *technically* not packed with any accessories, but he’s a master of disguise and the other two figures in the pack were both built on the same base body, so maybe they’re just disguises?  Yeah, let’s spin it that way.

THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION

My knowledge of Nemesis really came from his stint as a supporting player in Wonder Woman.  I really dug the character there, and liked how they worked him into the overall story, fitting him loosely into that Steve Trevor role.  Beyond that, I’ve always thought he had a pretty cool look.  JLU was still very hard to find at retail when this set hit, but Cosmic Comix happened to get one in back when they were still relatively new, and I was enough of a fan of all the figures included to pick it up.  Nemesis is a great example of the line’s parts re-use really working well to give us characters we wouldn’t otherwise get.