After an epic journey through the entirety of human culture – the biggest cross-continuity ‘universe’ that is conceivable – Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill will conclude both their legendary and award-winning series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and their equally legendary comic-book careers with the release of the final issue of the series’ spectacular fourth volume, The Tempest.
Tying up the slenderest of plot threads and allusions from the three preceding volumes published between 1999 and 2012, the 2007 graphic novel The Black Dossier, and spin-off series The Nemo Trilogy published betwen 2013 between 2015 into a dazzling and ingenious bow, the series so far has seen world’s most accomplished and bad-tempered artist-writer team create their most stylistically adventurous outing yet, displaying the glories of the medium they are leaving; demonstrating the excitement that attracted them to the field in the first place; and analysing, critically and entertainingly, the reasons for their departure.
In short, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume IV: The Tempest is a magnificent celebration of everything comics were, are and could be. 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, The Tempest is literally and literarily the story to end all stories.
The first issue of this six-issue volume was released July last year, 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. From there the dense and yet furiously-paced narrative hurtled 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.
In Moore and O’Neill’s final comic-book, masquerading as a certain British science-fiction weekly, the plot-strands are tied in an ingenious starry bow, as Mina Murray and her legendary confederates transition from the world of fiction past and present to the world of fiction future. Planets end in visual spectacle, lovers are united in the matrimonial event of the millennium, and deadly enemies draw close in the conclusion of their fatal dances…
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Volume IV – The Tempest #6 is due out 17th July 2019, published by Knockabout.
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