3 out of 5

Alan Moore knitted an expansive and expanding world for his League between volume 1, 2, and the Black Dossier… and then seemed at a loss for what else to do with it.  So much had been nodded at or alluded to within those writings, as well as affecting immortality upon some characters so as to possibly allow things to continue, it’s agreed that the universe would seem rich in further tales, but then again, the 1800s / 1900s setting of the League seemed rather tied to how these things were told; moving it into the present day – as we saw with Century – shifts the type of references made into becoming more of a who’s who than a background to a core story, which, coupled with Alan having already told or hinted at so many stories in some of the text pieces and the Dossier, made the narrative floundering.  An attempt to bind it to an operatic structure fell kinda flat.  Century has its moments, and is important for taking Mina and Allan’s stories to a conclusion, but it didn’t quite feel as fun or inspiring as what came before.

And the Nemo trilogy does trigger some of those same feelings.  Still, it’s overall better than Century in a couple of key ways: functioning more as a set of pulp yarns (spanning Lovecraft, Nazi robots, and land of the lost-explorations in its three volumes), it reads as more in the spirit of the original League stuff, and between Moore and artist Kevin O’Neill, they cool it on the litany of spot-the-celeb stuff.  There are still plenty of references, for sure, but it’s much less in your face, and thus doesn’t feel like it overtakes the story so much.

Although the story – or somewhat lack of it – prevents Nemo from becoming another key read in the series.  That’s where it’s aligned with Century: volume 3 belonged to Allan to an extent, to Mina moreso; Nemo belongs to Nemo’s daughter, Janni, whose story actually began in the best part of Century with her first in-her-father’s-footsteps mass slaughtering.  We pick up with an aged Janni in Heart of Ice, mimicking Century’s structure as well in that the opening volume contains the best bits, as Ms. Dakkar seeks to find a way to make her own legacy, pledging to complete a journey at which her pops failed.  There’s some great, frightening stuff in Heart of Ice, digging into the Lovecraft that Alan knows so well, and it suggests we might get a trio of giant adventures.  Unfortunately, The Rose of Berlin and River of Ghosts don’t quite make it there for whatever reason, getting stuck on Janni pursuing the seemingly immortal Queen Ayesha, and the rivalry just isn’t sold to us in an interesting enough fashion to make the subsequent hijinks more than some mildly entertaining sound and fury.  This is, again, in sync with the way Century propped up a distracting villain while we follow our lead/s to their eventual end.  Ayesha at least allows for – as mentioned – more pulpiness than Century, but nothing feels quite on par with the intensity of Volume 1, or the grandioseness suggested by the Dossier.

The hardcovers make for a nice presentation.  O’Neill offers up some killer splash pages, and a man punches a dinosaur, so that works.  And though I’m bemoaning extending the League beyond what may have been a ‘natural’ ending at some earlier point, I did enjoy the feeling of reading books dedicated to one character.  It would have been interesting to see the series approached in that fashion for the other characters.