A bit of Heart of Ice

[espanolbot]

Hey, it turns out that they released another League of Extraordinary Gentlemen book, this time a spin-off starring the best character from the post-volume two series: Janni Dakkar, aka Captain Nemo II.

Although I wouldn't say that it's as good as the final part of Century, it is itself an interesting return to the same style of story as the original two volumes, with the added bonus that, for once NO ONE GETS SEXUALLY ASSAULTED.

The plot? Janni and her now more gender neutral crew steal a bunch of stuff from Queen Ayesha, and decide to retrace her father's journey to the Mountains of Madness as a means of allviating her boredom. Ayesha doesn't take this lying down though, and the media mongul Kane hires some former Edisonade science adventurers track her down and retrieve her stuff.

Here is Janni and her pirate crew deciding to rob an immortal queen and the richest man in the world, in board daylight, in the middle of New York Harbour.









As an interesting side note, in the LoEGverse it seems that Janni was the one that sank the Titanic equivalent. Whether this was because it was a British ship and she had an... extremely unpleasant experience in London resulting in her engaging a fifteen year murder spree is up for debate.

And yes, I will get around to finishing that essay about how Century: 1910 made me finally loose patience with Moore, I just got distracted.

Comments

[filthysize]

"As an interesting side note, in the LoEGverse it seems that Janni was the one that sank the Titanic equivalent."

Where did you get that impression? The Titanic equivalent in their world is the ship Titan from the Morgan Robertson story, and it sank way before Janni's time. There was even a reference to its sinking in the first LoEG volume.

[espanolbot]

On the inside cover of the book it has a picture of them sinking an ocean liner with a double-cross flag, which I thought was a referene to White Star and thus the Titanic, but then I remembered that that flag belonged to the Nazi equivalent in this universe, the political party of the Great Dictator's Adenoid Hinkle.

...Meaning this place after Heart of Ice.

[mrstatham]

Well, despite the resolution of the story, we know that Janni hasn't exactly slowed down by the time that the Black Dossier takes place, which is set in the fifties, I think?

[espanolbot]

It's more a case of her mellowing out between the end of Heart of Ice and the Black Dossier, as the events of 1910 apparently caused her to spend the next fifteen years as an even worse pirate and mass murderer than her father was.

Heart of Ice basically shows the beginning of her realising that her reaction to what happened to her wasn't the most healthy, and that she needs to learn to appreciate the good things in life (such as love) instead of just robbing and killing people for her own amusement day after day.

The book kind of acts as a palate cleanser to 1910, the book had her start as an idealistic, self-determined young woman who didn't WANT to become her father (especially as her father viewed the fact that she was a girl was a major disappointment), only to end up accepting the role and becoming worse than him after the trauma of getting gangraped. Heart of Ice has her realising that she can't let that define her as a person, and she begins her emotional recovery, albeit some fifteen years after the event.

[mrstatham]

It does give her one of the more interesting arcs in the series, I think, being able to see how she progresses as a character - it's just a shame Moore used something so cliched and ugly as a motivator for her becoming more like her old man. But Heart of Ice is still solid as stories go, I think - there's a really nice bit of development and definition between Janni at the beginning of the book, where she wants her father's coat to fit, wants to be better than him, and to end up realising that she doesn't particularly want or need to by the story's end.

I still think that, for all Moore's faults, when he puts his mind to it he can still pull off a great story. I really want more stuff like this - like say, the Orlando story he's talked about - because stripping it down to one major character really makes it work, to me..

[mrstatham]

I actually really, really liked Heart of Ice. I thought it was pretty much a return to form after how Black Dossier got butchered into something the creators didn't entirely want and Century was more than a little self-indulgent. Don't get me wrong, I liked bits of Century - I liked where Moore placed Janni (despite not liking *how* he got her there) in the first chapter, and I thoroughly enjoyed the reveal of who 'God' was in the finale, but the middle piece was such a difficult slog; O'Neill's visuals saved it, but just barely.

But Heart of Ice was like, a return to form and what made the first volume work. As great as Black Dossier was, it was essentially a glorified version of the second volume's Almanac, really, little more than a slave to all the references Moore wanted to make. Heart of Ice worked a lot better to me because the references weren't overdone, the plot was simple but solid, and I actually found Janni really rather compelling; I can only think of a handful of instances where we have female legacy characters, and Moore's approach to her wanting to one-up her father was neat. I think my only complaint was that I could have generally read more of just Janni and the Nautilus crew looting famous literary characters in general rather than the story taking the turn it did; But if Moore insists on playing with Lovecraft, he's at least shown he can do it better than Neonomicon.

[espanolbot]

I think that it's oddly amusing that it's kind of a cosmic horror story with a happy ending for once... and I'm wondering whether that has something to do with how the protagonists are a unusually open minded and diverse lot for people in the 1920s, while the guys having the more common reaction to cosmic horror appear to have the same mindset as some of Lovecraft's protagonists (aka racist, sexist and closeminded).

[mrstatham]

Yeah - I mean, clearly Janni's still shaken after what goes on, but it's a distinct difference from what happens to CFK's crew, and what they say happened to Janni's father, from what I recall; It does seem to be saying something about the kind of person she is, and her crew.

[espanolbot]

Also says something about her dad, considering her ALSO went nuts but was the only one who survived the trip back from the Mountains. Though he was a guy who essentially went off to explore the South Pole in a sulk because his daughter wasn't a boy, so there is that.

[glprime]

That is a bitchin' uniform, Cap'n.