Nemo: Heart of Ice

SPOILERS AHOY!

I’ve written here before about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and presented my overall view of the series, so I need not repeat myself here.  Nemo: Heart of Ice marks a somewhat different approach for the series, though the fundamental idea, that all fictional characters exist in the same world, remains at its bedrock.  This is not a tale of the League, whose members are entirely absent here – there is no Allan Quartermain and no Mina Murray, previously the two constants in the stories.  Of course, the character who is at the centre here, Janni Dakkar, is the daughter of one of the 1890s League, Captain Nemo, and commands an updated version of her submarine.  So she’s pretty significant. But the story perforce has a sense of being a bit of an aside to the main League narrative.

Perhaps that’s part of why this story seems rather inconsequential.  It shouldn’t.  It tells of how Janni grew from the psychotic of 1910 to the more relaxed person seen at the beginning of 1969.  But in the story’s 48 pages we never quite get to know Nemo’s daughter.

The basic plot is a typical League one – Nemo goes to the Antarctic, when she encounters H.P. Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness.  This allows Kevin O’Neill to draw Lovecraftian monstrosities, his skill at which has been on display since Nemesis the Warlock.  O’Neill’s work, expressive yet stylized, has never looked better than it does here.  Further on the plus side, setting the story in 1925 moves it closer to the late Victorian/Edwardian milieu in which the League works best, rather than post-war era, which can be problematic.  And the background character references, which in Century threatened to overwhelm the story, are cut back.

But Heart of Ice  is far from perfect.  There’s a section in the middle where time and memories are distorted.  Moore has done this sort of thing in the past, and very cleverly.  Here, however, it confuses.

And one wonders about the point of the exercise.  In the first two volumes, there was a clear story that Moore wanted to tell, and his choice of characters seemed to arise naturally out of that story.  Clever innovations, like Doctor Moreau’s involvement in the death of the Martians, surprised the reader.  There are no equivalent surprises here.  And it feels almost as if, rather than starting with a story, Moore has brought together the two main elements, Lovecraft and Nemo’s Daughter, and hoped that a story would arise from there.  Janni doesn’t need to go to the Mountains of Madness to have her revelation.  The three characters that pursue her are sufficiently unfamiliar that there’s no frisson from the fact that they are chasing  our point of view character, unlike when James Bond and the future Mrs Emma Peel were after Mina and Allan,

Nemo: Heart of Ice is still an Alan Moore comic, and that’s still pretty good.  But it’s not Moore at the absolute top of his game – I’d say it was Killing Joke Moore rather than V For Vendetta Moore, if I thought everyone else shared my opinion of Killing Joke.  Still worth reading, though. And we shall see if this marks the way forward for LOEG stories – no more Mina and Allan, but filling in the spaces around them.