It seems clear from Greg Pak's work at Marvel so far that the guy has a penchant for science-fiction. Warlock, Phoenix: Endsong and Marvel Nemesis may all feature recognizable superheroes, but they all have a science-fiction flavor to them. Nemesis is handicapped in my eyes by being a videogame tie-in and featuring only Marvel's most over-exposed cash cow characters, and the story is at best a mild step up from the old Questprobe tales, but Pak has some clever bits of dialogue and an interesting enough take on the premise. As a comic, Nemesis is mediocre at best, but it's an effective demonstration of Pak's storytelling potential that he can take such a lame concept and provide some neat moments and interesting ideas.
The premise of Marvel Nemesis: The Imperfects is based on that old chestnut, the mad scientist experiment gone wrong. Somewhere in an alien galaxy, a scientist has turned a race of aliens into monsters and his technology isn't working to create defenders against them. So of course, he needs to kidnap superheroes from Earth. Mix a little bit of Secret Wars with Aliens and maybe a touch of Flowers for Algernon, and you've got the basic concept. It's cliched, and the fact that the alien scientist nabs The Thing, Wolverine, Elektra and Spider-Man speaks to the videogame roots of the concept as well as providing a pretty boring and overplayed cast of characters, but it's not a DOA concept or anything... just a tired one.
Pak breathes a little life into the concept with his writing, including an effective bit of horror at the beginning as the scientist sacrifices one of his assistants to turn back the latest wave of aliens. There's also a really clever funny bit about the Thing being forgotten by Reed Richards mid-project that shows a pretty good understanding of those two characters. It's clear in the way he writes these characters that Pak "gets" them, even if there's nothing shockingly new or different about their use here, due partly to the cliched nature of the plot.
The art by Renato Arlem also isn't really perfectly suited to this project. Oh, it's definitely solid work, in the vein of the work of Michael Gaydos or Alex Maleev, and he is very much suited to the alien setting and attack in the opening pages, but a story about superheroes fighting it out seems to call for a more realistic style ala Paul Pelletier, Patrick Zircher or Mike McKone, to name three off the top of my head. Arlem does a good job here, and I'll be very surprised if he doesn't wind up working with Bendis on something, as he seems to have that style that Bendis seems to love in his artists, but this strange, gritty style seems an odd fit for what is basically a tie-in to a fighting game.
In the end, The Imperfects is another in a long line of licensed miniseries destined for obscurity. When your storyline comes from an outside source like a videogame, there's only so much room to do anything with it, and once the videogame or whatever source fades into obscurity, the videogame tie-in comic will fade with it. Within this context, Pak and Arlem serve up a perfectly professional comic book with a couple of memorable moments. You'll find better Wolverine and Elektra in the pages of Millar's Wolverine, the same Spider-Man in Amazing or New Avengers and better Thing stories in Fantastic Four, but if you've got some strange hankering to see these characters put together, given an alien makeover and forced to fight, then Marvel Nemesis: The Imperfects is for you. In other words, this one's for the completists only. 3/10
