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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

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history79

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laughing_tree

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laughing_tree

We will also, in our highly diverse presentation, be paying tribute to all of the genuinely marvellous things that attracted us to the comic medium in the first place, while at the same time, in our story’s content and implications we will hopefully be explaining – in an entertaining fashion – exactly why we cannot bear to remain involved in the comic field for a moment longer. - Alan Moore

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laughing_tree

Like something from an unbelievable parallel world where there were once comic publications exclusively for girls, this third jaw-dropping installment of Moore and O’Neill’s astonishing swan-song takes us from a boarding school in Big Brother-dominated England to a civic ball with a Frankenstein monster in Toyland, pausing for some 1960s pop-art espionage and a breath-taking musical interlude along the way. Concluding with a demonstration of an unusual nuclear defense system (for which the reader will require 4-D spectacles, thoughtfully provided) and containing Seven Stars classic “Showdown in Space,” you dare not miss issue three of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. IV: The Tempest. -- Issue's solicitation

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laughing_tree

I haven't read any superhero comics since I finished with Watchmen. I hate superheroes. I think they're abominations. They don't mean what they used to mean. They were originally in the hands of writers who would actively expand the imagination of their nine- to 13-year-old audience. That was completely what they were meant to do and they were doing it excellently. These days, superhero comics think the audience is certainly not nine to 13, it's nothing to do with them. It's an audience largely of 30-, 40-, 50-, 60-year old men, usually men. Someone came up with the term graphic novel. These readers latched on to it; they were simply interested in a way that could validate their continued love of Green Lantern or Spider-Man without appearing in some way emotionally subnormal. This is a significant rump of the superhero-addicted, mainstream-addicted audience. I don't think the superhero stands for anything good. I think it's a rather alarming sign if we've got audiences of adults going to see the Avengers movie and delighting in concepts and characters meant to entertain the 12-year-old boys of the 1950s. -- Alan Moore

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laughing_tree

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 will 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 analyse, 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.

Commencing as a six-issue run of unfashionable, outmoded and flimsy children’s comics that will make you appear emotionally backward if you read them on the bus, this climactic magnum opus will also reprint classic English super-team publication The Seven Stars from the murky black-and-white reaches 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.

-- Publisher's press release

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superboyprime

"It’s funny – when me and Kevin O’Neill first got our complimentary copies, we both looked through it, skimmed through it, independently, and when we were talking on the phone later I was – he was saying that he’d been – he’d felt that his art really, it was a bit tired-looking, and I was saying, ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I thought your art was great,’ I said, ‘but I don’t know with my script – I’m not sure that the ending’s not rushed, or something.’ Like, all these little things. And then, after that, I was still a bit despondent, but I sat down, and picked up the copy again, and started reading it. And I got to the end, and I went and phoned Kevin and left an answer phone message saying, ‘Actually, Kevin, I should go back and having another look at River of Ghosts, I think that it might be about the best run of the League since the first couple of volumes.’ And I got a phone call back from Kevin about ten minutes later, saying ‘Actually, I was going to call you and say the same thing!’" - Alan Moore

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superboyprime

"I remember a review of the Black Dossier which was saying ‘oh, this is all so – there’s all this writing in it, and what’s worse is they’ve even written about the French and German groups as a text story, the foreign counterparts of the League, when Alan Moore must have known that all of his fans, they’d much rather see that as a comic strip than read about it in a text piece,’ which is rather missing the point. We included – there’s no point in doing – we’ve done Les Hommes Mystérieux, we know the details of the story as a text piece. Yes, you could have the League against their evil counterparts, which has been done in every superhero team book since Sgt Fury, included. The thing is the League actually isn’t a superhero team book. I know that for some people, old conventions die hard, and it’s difficult for them to see anything beyond that, but that’s not what we’re doing. It’s a much more literary thing than that, a much more cultural thing, and we’ll continue to tell it in the way that we feel that it should be told." - Alan Moore

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superboyprime

"Moving from DC to Top Shelf has been a surprisingly invigorating experience. It’s something that you don’t actually realize while you are within the confines of the regular superhero comic book industry. But you are absorbing from your very first day’s work in that industry a number of precepts and ideas that just seem to suit the industry or at least seem to suit the industry at the time when you entered it. We kind of absorbed very early on that this is an adventure medium for young people, and the story, even if you did want to add some flourishes or some depth to it, should be kept moving at a fairly fast pace, which is something that you just accept unquestioningly. You tend to make even books that are aimed at an older audience like 'The League' follow those same guidelines. I mean, those first two books were straightforward rip-roaring adventures." - Alan Moore

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superboyprime

"A great number of the literary figures which we’ve appropriated or re-imagined in the course of the book, have been to my mind every bit as problematic as the Galley-Wag. They just haven’t been black. As an example I remain somewhat unsure, in light of these current issues, as to why our use of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu in volume one seemed to have passed by without a murmur, given that here we have a character who was actually intended by his original author as a crude racial caricature of the most negative and xenophobic strain, and for whom our only act of rehabilitation was to suggest that Rohmer’s ‘Devil Doctor’ may have been motivated by a hatred of the British justifiably inculcated during his childhood in the years of the bestial and shameful Opium Wars. And yet, hardly a word said, as I recall. I would have thought that an attempt to, say, revive the Fu Manchu movie franchise, unreconstructed, would have been at least as unwelcome as a revival of the post-Upton Golliwog, but there may be something that I am missing or which I have failed to examine here. The nature of The League is that almost all of the interesting characters from fiction – or at least, all of those characters interesting to us – can be seen as problematic from a contemporary viewpoint. In our attempts to reinterpret these characters and to make them viable for a modern narrative, we have arrived at some solutions which, inevitably, some individuals are almost certain to find offensive. And while such individuals are of course entitled to their opinion, I don’t see that this should necessarily influence decisions made by a work’s authors who are likely to have thought about the matter at length and to have come to different conclusions. would cite the minor internet controversy that was apparently generated by our use of the ‘Jimmy’ character in The Black Dossier. Apparently, while it was our explicit intention to reinvest the character with all of the unexamined misogyny and sadism of Ian Fleming’s still-popular original, there was a certain degree of outcry from persons presumably only acquainted with the character from his screen appearances, who felt that we had desecrated a beloved icon of their adolescence by implying unpleasant characteristics of which their hero was entirely innocent. As I say, these people were all entitled to their opinion, but from the perspective of what we were attempting to achieve – the prompting of a re-examination of this murderous, womanising and very popular masculine role-model – that opinion was completely useless and I feel that we were right to ignore it." - Alan Moore

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