Alan Moore says that this wild and playful volume, the conclusion to the acclaimed League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, will be his last major work in comics. For a man stepping back from the spotlight, his influence is as strong as ever. HBO’s reimagining of his Watchmen series is a TV blockbuster, and the masks from V for Vendetta are a symbol of modern protest. He rarely does press, but scraps are seized on, such as his claim in one interview with a Brazilian newspaper that the impact of superheroes on culture is “both tremendously embarrassing and not a little worrying”.
That might seem a strange remark from a man whose work has included Batman, Superman and the Swamp Thing – and whose latest project is jam-packed with superheroes. But Moore has spent his career muddying heroic waters, and the caped crusaders of The Tempest are not the bantering big-screen heroes of Marvel or their glowering DC counterparts. These are British superheroes. And they’re not going to save the world.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which Moore has produced with artist Kevin O’Neill (who has also announced his retirement) since 1999, presents a world in which fictions coexist. Volume I saw Bram Stoker’s Mina Murray, Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain, Jules Verne’s Nemo, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and HG Wells’s Invisible Man face Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Moriarty. Since then, with Murray the only constant, they’ve battled martians, “Jimmy” Bond and a boy-wizard antichrist, while Nemo’s descendants have encountered Lovecraftian creatures in the Antarctic and dictators in Berlin.
The Tempest begins at once in the recent past and the distant future. In 2009, a villainous James Bond tracks the surviving members to the city of Kôr (from Rider Haggard’s She and Allan); in 2996, two rebels seek a time machine to escape the One State created by Yevgeny Zamyatin in We. Before long, Murray is racing through the South Atlantic with Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and the (British) Avengers’ Emma Peel, an assortment of British superheroes are up against an all-consuming blob inspired by the Quatermass films, and Shakespeare’s Prospero is calling up beasts from the shadows. If that sounds like a lot of references, it’s just the start. Rosa Klebb, Minnie the Minx, Malcolm Lowry, Oor Wullie and Warren Zevon’s werewolves also pack The Tempest’s pages. Moore and O’Neill explore the connections between Superman and Cuchulain, and mingle the worlds of The Terminator and Planet of the Apes.
This can be great fun, but as the series has continued it has felt increasingly as though the nods and winks are running the show, and that this great bulging mess of a multiverse is best navigated – like a pulpy Ulysses – with a primer in hand (there are several online) for the many niche references. The Tempest flicks from a black-and-white tale of superhero team the Seven Stars (“Blighty’s boldest super-chums”) to a 3D vision (the glasses come with the book) of Elizabethan plotting, from Beano and 2000 AD pastiches to a photo comic set on the Nemo family’s island hideout.
Yet, despite its dense style and dizzying cast of extras, this is a thoroughly satisfying end to the series. There’s the apocalyptic plot, and the fun of seeing where longstanding characters like Murray and Bond end up, but there’s also the obvious passion that Moore and O’Neill have for this volume’s main frame of reference – the British comic scene the pair (both born in 1953) cut their teeth on. Moore throws in essays celebrating the likes of Roger the Dodger creator Ken Reid, and he’s in his element writing about these everyday heroes and their jubilant creations, and casting rocks at the publishing houses he feels gave them little recompense and their characters little respect.
Moore has had his own struggles with publishers over intellectual property rights, and has disowned the limp film adaptations of classics such as From Hell. He will not be watching HBO’s Watchmen. Power is often a sham in The Tempest, and many of its superheroes are amateur copies of American originals, who themselves are built on a lie; those behind the scenes are not to be trusted. Moore and O’Neill, of course, are also using the creations of others. But they make something new from them. For all the silliness, there’s a reverence here, and a giddiness to these grumpy old men that spills from The Tempest’s pages in joyful hat-tips and preposterous set pieces. As a reader, you feel like a visitor at a party with a bewildering guest list, two hosts who won’t shut up and a new wonder around every corner. It’s been a blast.
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume 4: The Tempest, by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill, is published by Knockabout Comics ( £24.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.
