Nemo: the Roses of Berlin Solicit

[espanolbot]

“From The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen! Sixteen years ago, notorious science-brigand Janni Nemo journeyed into the frozen reaches of Antarctica to resolve her father’s weighty legacy in a storm of madness and loss, barely escaping with her Nautilus and her life. Now it is 1941, and with her daughter strategically married into the family of aerial warlord Jean Robur, Janni’s raiders have only limited contact with the military might of the clownish German-Tomanian dictator Adenoid Hynkel. But when the pirate queen learns that her loved ones are held hostage in the nightmarish Berlin, she has no choice save to intervene directly, traveling with her aging lover Broad Arrow Jack into the belly of the beastly metropolis. Within that alienated city await monsters, criminals, and legends, including the remaining vestiges of Germany’s notorious ‘Twilight Heroes’, a dark Teutonic counterpart to Mina Murray’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And waiting at the far end of this gauntlet of alarming adversaries there is something much, much worse.”

“Continuing in the thrilling tradition of Heart of Ice, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill rampage through twentieth-century culture in a blazing new adventure, set in a city of totalitarian shadows and mechanical nightmares. Cultures clash and lives are lost in the explosive collision of four unforgettable women, lost in the black and bloody alleyways where thrive The Roses of Berlin.”

The new volume will be released in April from Top Shelf.

Looking forward to this, if only because I find Janni to be a lot more interesting a character than Mina and Allen became after Volume 2. I am looking forward to the Twilight Heroes appearances, particularly as they seem to be mainly characters from German silent cinema (like Dr Rotwang and Maria/Futura from Metropolis) that were only mentioned in passing in the other volumes.

And the cool thing about Adenoid Hynkel being the stand-in for Hitler in the LoEG-verse is that that means that this speech actually has Important Historical Significance there.

"Greatest Speech Ever Made Charlie Chaplin The Great Dictator W/Time Inception Full HD Best Version" (Watch on YouTube)

And for the context, the speech is from the Great Dictator, where the Hitler stand-in has been accidentally replaced by a Jewish barber who is his exact double.

Comments

[arilou_skiff]

Heh. A double cross.

[mrstatham]

Hell yes. As much as I can't put the unfortunate origin aside, the last Nemo hardcover was easily more interesting than Century in general - which, to me, only really got going with the final chapter. Heart of Ice was essentially what Black Dossier promised, in my eyes; stories that worked by overlapping ideas from authors and seeing how they fit together, rather than the main League itself which - as much as it shed the 'Justice League' image rather quickly in the second volume, still held on to the very superheroey concept of having it's main cast survive for over a century.

And we're finally getting more with the anti-Leagues, too, which were one of the most fascinating concepts laid down in the Almanac and Black Dossier. So.. Heck yes. I'm also interested about the note regarding Janni's daughter, which suggests entirely the opposite of what Janni's father would have preferred, in some ways.

[espanolbot]

With Janni, although she's a lot more liberal in some respects than her father, she's still not above using arranged marriages to secure her family's legacy (marrying her daughter to Robur or his son, and her grandson to someone so he'd have the tech to become a space pirate).

Pretty much agree with everything you said, 1910 was really the point where I lost patience with Moore's writing and it only really got better with Heart of Ice and the last part of Century.

The Anti-Leagues are interesting in a lot of ways. As the original 19th century League was inspired by characters from Victorian adventure fiction (the exception being Nemo, what with him being a character from French adventure fiction), the other teams seem to come from specific eras of fiction to.

The French team comes from turn of the century French pulp novel characters like Fantomas (who seems to be implied to be Nyarlhotep or something), while the German team are from early German cinema.

Oddly there doesn't seem to be an American team, as such, beyond the unofficial group gathered by Charles Foster Kane made up of grown-up Edisonade adventurers. Not sure who would make up a Russian team though, as although I am aware that there was a lot of science fiction and the like in the USSR, no examples of characters spring to mind (except for a character deliberately created in response to the popularity of James Bond, who then kills or defeats 007 when they met via ignored licensing laws).

[mrstatham]

Yeah.. I thought the finale of 1910 was, frankly, pretty amazing in terms of it making a defining statement of just how bad Janni could be when provoked - and I especially liked the part with Ishmael and Jack gleefully remarking that she was worse than her father - but I just didn't see how it was necessary to have a rape lead to that. Moore had already done a good enough job of establishing that her life in London stank without that.

And again, I thought some of the stuff brought up in the Almanac or the sections of the Dossier were, in their own way, more interesting than the lead stories of their respective books. And I think that part of the problem with the idea of an American team is perhaps those of licensing or copyright problems, in some ways - He had enough trouble getting around James Bond and Mary Poppins, from what I could see. Plus, I think he's realised that there was something of a positive response to the Anti-Leagues he'd already established, and rather than establishing more, he's going back and exploring those. I'm fairly certain he's said he wants to do something with Les Hommes Mysterieux, but that, given we know they popped up when Mina had her Second League running (I think?) would be a step back in the timeline.

It'd be interesting to see what would be on an American team or a Russian team, though. There's still a bit of room to explore that, too, given the Black Dossier only covered up to a certain point in the fifties, from what I recall.

[espanolbot]

Hm, really with the American team it would depend what era it was set in. For example, if it was in the 1930s/40s, it might be a somewhat cliched team comprising of the Shadow, Doc Savage, the Green Hornet, Flash Gordon and the like. In the 1950s, maybe a weird combination of things like Dragnet and Commander Cody.

A Japanese team might be interesting, if only due to the wide range to genres that opened up after WW2. And considering the Doctor is canon in LoEG, it might be interesting to see if UNIT has any jurisdiction when it comes to things like Kaiju, giant robots and psychic bikers (as the LoEGverse goes by the logic that most of the fiction takes place in the era it's published unless explicitly stated otherwise, Akira might actually have happened in the 1980s... which makes a degree of sense, what with it being a comment on the youth culture at the time).

[mrstatham]

With the Japanese aspect, it depends on the decade you'd be going for, given you could easily slot any number of characters in there. And the interlocking nature of the League universe could mean stuff like Akira and say, Ghost in the Shell actually slot together rather well. I guess one of the only problems in invoking Kaiju would, again, be the copyrights, especially to feature the Big G himself, for instance, along with the fact that in films like, say, Destroy All Monsters, the aliens actually force the monsters to attack cities worldwide, which could be difficult to reference. But then Moore has proven to be selective with certain elements of the characters and franchises, and could just go with the canon of Godzilla and then Godzilla Raids Again, the latter of which leaves a second monster free to roam, and leave it open-ended from there.

[thosefew]

I do hope that if Chaplin's speech is in the LoEGverse, then Rocky Balboa's 'everyone can change' speech from Rocky IV ended the equivalent of the Cold War.

[rainspirit]

Hell yes! I was hoping to read about the German League ever since I read about them in... was it 1910? I really wanted to see that duel with Orlando on top of the opera house. Even if I don't get that, though...

Haven't checked out Heart of Ice, on the other hand... should probably get around to that.

[mrstatham]

Given the timeline, I'd definitely get HOI before reading this one. It's certainly smaller and less ambitious than the usual League volumes in some respects, but it's much, much better than Century was, IMO, where the real highlights were Janni and Mary Poppins.

[glprime]

Any more Moore in the League's verse is a-okay by me :)