The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Tempest #6 - "Then, the Immortal Blue..." [series finale]

[laughing_tree]

I would also observe that it is, potentially, culturally catastrophic to have the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times. -- Alan Moore

Comments

[tcampbell1000]

I'll second everything Alice has to say here. Moore's brilliance and passion are beyond question, and even when he has failed, he has failed while daring greatly.

As I said elsewhere, this series finished up solidly in Alan's middle range. A concluding work on the level of Watchmen or From Hell would've been far too much to hope for, but it avoids as well as it can the problems that weighed down LoEG 3, to say nothing of the excesses of Jerusalem and Lost Girls. The concluding arc has real emotion behind it, real wonder and pain and anger that the reader can readily share even if they don't know all the names being dropped. And in the end, what endures is love.

The comics-format work, which I admit I thought derivative of his other work at first, turned out to be a delight. The commentary, well, at least it's got a sense of humor about itself. But I do have to focus on that quotation at the top of the webpage.

Alan has always been better at dramatizing his cultural ideas than presenting them as criticism, because criticism requires one clear voice whereas fiction is often driven by conflicting ones, and Moore is a creature of conflicts. I know I'm not the first to say this, but it's a rather strange look for someone to rail against our obsesion with "the cultural ephemera of earlier centuries" while writing Mina Murray/Edward Hyde slashfic. If the point is to make way for a new century and its new ideas, shouldn't Mina and the Nemo dynasty have died, recognizing that they had outlived their time?

The ominous musings of Holmes, which are closest to Moore's quote above, don't really seem to go anywhere, unless we're meant to read Hyde's clone as a sign of cultural decadence: even ideas thought dead are dragged back into existence to squat in the places that should be occupied by something new. Maybe that was even Alan's intent... but if so, it hardly reads that way. Mina doesn't come off as a cultural tyrant; she doesn't even come off as morally ambiguous like Miracleman or Ozymandias. She just comes off as a woman who's living life to the fullest despite the terrors and tragedy she's known, getting for herself and giving to others the happiest endings possible.

Ultimately, we give the world what we're most qualified to give it, and it's up to others to decide whether it was worth it. LoEG may have little to say about unboxing videos, No Man's Sky and other truly modern forms of entertainment, but it's all right to be a little old-fashioned sometimes. Let the new be new and the old be old, and the net result will be a richer cultural landscape.