The Tempest begins at once in the recent past and the distant future. Since then, with Murray the only constant, they’ve battled martians, “Jimmy” Bond and a boy-wizard antichrist, while Nemo’s descendants have encountered Lovecraftian creatures in the Antarctic and dictators in Berlin. Volume I saw Bram Stoker’s Mina Murray, Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain, Jules Verne’s Nemo, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and HG Wells’s Invisible Man face Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Moriarty. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which Moore has produced with artist Kevin O’Neill (who has also announced his retirement) since 1999, presents a world in which fictions coexist. ‘There is a giddiness to these grumpy old men that spills from The Tempest’s pages.’ But Moore has spent his career muddying heroic waters, and the caped crusaders of The Tempest are not the bantering big-screen heroes of Marvel or their glowering DC counterparts. That might seem a strange remark from a man whose work has included Batman, Superman and the Swamp Thing – and whose latest project is jam-packed with superheroes. He rarely does press, but scraps are seized on, such as his claim in one interview with a Brazilian newspaper that the impact of superheroes on culture is “both tremendously embarrassing and not a little worrying”. HBO’s reimagining of his Watchmen series is a TV blockbuster, and the masks from V for Vendetta are a symbol of modern protest. For a man stepping back from the spotlight, his influence is as strong as ever. Alan Moore says that this wild and playful volume, the conclusion to the acclaimed League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, will be his last major work in comics.
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