Welcome to the story to end all stories. Two decades of literary
League lunacy have all been building to this, the most ambitious
meta-comic imaginable.
After an epic twenty-year journey through the entirety of human
culture - the biggest cross-continuity 'universe' that is conceivable -
Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill conclude both their legendary
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and their equally legendary
comic-book careers with the series' spectacular fourth and final volume,
The Tempest. 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 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 2,996, 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. Originally published as a six-issue run of unfashionable,
outmoded and flimsy children's comics that would make you appear
emotionally backward if you read them on the bus, this climactic magnum
opus also reprints 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.
Co-Published by Top Shelf Productions (US) and Knockabout (UK).
