The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Tempest

by Alan Moore

Other authorsKevin O'Neill (Illustrator), Kevin O'Neill (Cover artist)
Hardcover, 2019

Series

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Volume 4)
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Tempest (1-6)

Genres

Tags

Description

After an epic twenty-year journey through the entirety of human culture-the biggest cross-continuity "universe" that is conceivable-Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill conclude both their legendary League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen and their equally legendary comic book careers with the series' spectacular fourth and final volume, The Tempest. Tying up the slenderest of plot threads and allusions from the three preceding volumes, The Black Dossier, and the Nemo trilogy into a dazzling and ingenious bow, the world's most accomplished and bad-tempered artist-writer team use their most stylistically adventurous outing yet to display the glories of the medium they are leaving; to demonstrate the excitement that attracted them to the field in the first place; and to analyze, critically and entertainingly, the reasons for their departure. Opening simultaneously in the panic-stricken headquarters of British Military Intelligence, the fabled Ayesha's lost African city of Kor, and the domed citadel of "We" on the devastated Earth of the year 2996, the dense and yet furiously paced narrative hurtles like an express locomotive across the fictional globe from Lincoln Island to modern America to the Blazing World; from the Jacobean antiquity of Prospero's Men to the superhero-inundated pastures of the present to the unimaginable reaches of a shimmering science-fiction future. With a cast list that includes many of the most iconic figures from literature and pop culture, and a tempo that conveys the terrible momentum of inevitable events, this is literally and literarily the story to end all stories. Originally published as a six-issue run of unfashionable, outmoded and flimsy children's comics that would make you appear emotionally backward if you read them on the bus, this climactic magnum opus also reprints classic English super-team publication The Seven Stars from the murky black-and-white reachers of 1964. A magnificent celebration of everything comics were, are, and could be, any appreciator or student of the medium would be unwise to miss The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume Iv: The Tempest.… (more)

Subjects

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Fictitious characters) Comic books, strips, etc. Fiction

Language

English

Original language

English

Physical description

25 cm

Publication

London : Knockabout, 2019.

ISBN

9780861662821

Local notes

Set immediately following "Century: 2009", this book concludes the entire "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" narrative, making reference to all the short stories, prose texts and Black Dossier files as well as to the preceding comic volumes and the Nemo spin-offs.

Library's rating

½

Library's review

This could have been a lot worse. Once the series became the sewing together of the entirety of all fiction into one continuity, this is probably as good an ending as one could have hoped for. It builds on, references and utilises an impressive amount of the earlier story -- not just the preceding
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 comic volumes, but also the short stories, the non-story prose contents, the Black Dossier files and the Nemo spin-offs. It is in itself a rather engrossing story, which admittedly peters out a bit at the end.

Where it goes wrong is in wanting to be parody as well as homage. If that had been the intent from the get-go, sure, but the first two volumes never once felt like they were making _fun_ of its characters, tropes and stories. Here, the storytelling style is frequently and explicitly switched to mimick the genres and formats of bygone eras. This worked fine for the in-universe files of the Black Dossier, but completely undermines the investment in the story and characters when done on the actual comic frame story here. And while the many comic glimpses at scenes previously only rendered in prose (Les Hommes Mystérieux, Sherlock Holmes' retirement, Mina's superhero career as Vull, the Amazons on the Moon, etc.) are very welcome, the decision to spend several pages at the end of each chapter on dated superhero parodies has me flummoxed. Its relevance to the main narrative could have been over and done with in a fifth the page count, and the joke of the parody wears thin already after the first installment.

So what started as a gripping shared universe in volumes 1 and 2 was with "Century" turned into a meta-narrative about fiction and reality, which slowly but surely warped the story into a parody rather than an homage. That's just not what I (nor, I suspect, many other) readers wanted from this. But, it being what we got, it's not too shabby. The central twist, rendering the deus ex machina of "Century" and miraculous shadowy benefactor of the various prose stories suddenly cast in an entirely new light, is very effective and rather rewarding. The characters are wrapped up neatly (this of course lampshaded by the creators' own in-narrative cameos towards the end, when the fourth wall has virtually ceased to be), and the in hindsight inevitable total destruction of familiar reality in favour of the limitless variations of fiction is as close to a full stop as a concept like this could be expected to reach. And -- tiring superhero parody pages aside -- I was fairly entertained getting there.
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Rating

(35 ratings; 4.1)

User reviews

LibraryThing member iansales
Whenever I mention the League of Extraordinary Gentleman I receive a blank look, and then I explain there was a movie adaptation with Sean Connery and there’s some glimmer of recognition. But, really, the film is awful and shouldn’t be considered in the same breath as the graphic novels from
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 which it was adapted. By my count, there’ve been six previous volumes, and three spin-off volumes (the Nemo books). The last three books were actually one split into three, Century: 1910, Century: 1969 and Century: 2009, which is why The Tempest, the seventh graphic novel, is number four. For those who have never encountered this particular League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, they’re a group of fictional characters with, well, extraordinary abilities from Victorian/Edwardian literature. The original members were Mina Harker (from Dracula), Captain Nemo, Dr Jekyll, the Invisible Man and Allan Quatermain (from H Rider Haggard’s novels), but also featured Professor Cavor, Fu Manchu, Sherlock Holmes, Moriarty and HG Wells’s Martians. Subsequent volumes continued to mine and mashup proto-genre stories in many and clever ways. The Tempest, despite the ten-year gap, follows on directly from Century. As the title suggests, it centres around Prospero, and other fantastical Shakespearean characters, although it’s not unashamed to incorporate characters and institutions from other science fiction properties, such as TV21 – both Spectrum and World Aquanaut Security Patrol make an appearance. There are other dimensions to the pastiche – MI5, for example, operates a group of “J-series” secret agents, each of whom are modelled on the actors who played James Bond in the 007 movies, including Woody Allen. Some of the art is also clearly an homage to Jack Kirby’s. And it’s not all art – the book is split into six “issues” (was it published as a mini-series? I don’t know), each of which have cover art that spoofs well-known comics, and include an introduction and a letters page (written and collated by “Al and Kev”). The introductions are mini-essays on renowned British comic artists, such as Leo Baxendale and Frank Bellamy, and the letters pages are Viz-like spoofs in which it’s made clear the letter-writers are as fictional as the comic’s characters (or are they?). The story itself is told through a series of strips, echoing British comics’ anthology nature, some of which are colour, some black and white, and some 3D (glasses are included). This is a graphic novel that not only celebrates the works from which its characters were taken but also the British comics industry and its output. It is not just a graphic novel about the Blazing World – named for Margaret Cavendish’s 1666 proto-sf novel, and a sort of sanctuary for the series’s many characters – and the threat to its existence, but also a celebration of British comic history, told in a voice familiar likely only to those who have read British comics. I loved it. It wasn’t just the “spot the mashup”, or the somewhat convoluted story and its cast, but the fact it echoed my own experience of comics, British comics, although not entirely as, since I’m more than a decade younger than Alan Moore, it doesn’t quite map onto my comic-reading, which was Beano/Dandy to war comics such as Warlord, Victor and the Commando Library, to 2000 AD and Star Lord and Tornado… to books without pictures. Ah well. The Tempest is a great piece of work, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is an excellent series from start to finish. I find Alan Moore’s work stretches from the sublime to the indulgent, but this series is definitely the former. Recommended. But start from the beginning.
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LibraryThing member Jazz1987
To me this was a good farewell to Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill in the comic book industry. I loved The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen from the beginning and this was basically a thank-you to the readers to stuck with all four volumes. Moore was a fantastic writer and O'Neill showed his range of
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 style in art. It was cool to see the 3-D pages back along with a two pages photos with actors as Mina and Jack. Also, James Bonds last panels were perfection, he had it coming.
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