After the explosive and emotional climax of the third volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, creators Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill might have been expected to take a break from the elaborate work of crossover fiction they’ve been weaving for the last fourteen years. But it seems that continuing to explore the storytelling possibilities of a world where every fictional character from the last few centuries can co-exist has proven too much of a draw, and it wasn’t long before Moore and O’Neill had announced their plan to produce a series of stand-alone graphic novels that will further flesh out the world of The League, beginning with the newly-released Orson Welles/H.P. Lovecraft crossover, Nemo: Heart of Ice.
Taking place in 1925, between the first and second parts of the The League‘s third volume, Nemo chronicles the further adventures of Janni Dakkar, daughter of the notorious Captain Nemo, as she leads the crew of the Nautilus submarine on a doomed quest across the frozen tundra of the antarctic. Unfortunately for Janni, her piracy has made her an enemy of ruthless tycoon Charles Foster Kane and the white goddess Ayesha, who dispatch a group of bickering scientists to track down and destroy the crew of the Nautilus before they can reach their goal. But neither Janni nor her pursuers are prepared for what they will discover in the cold darkness of uncharted territory, and the eldritch horror that awaits them beneath the Mountains of Madness.
Moore draws upon the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne and of course H.P. Lovecraft to populate his fictional Antarctica with bizarre locations and monstrous adversaries. Though Lovecraft’s creations have appeared several times in the supplementary prose pieces which accompanied previous volumes of The League (the P.G. Wodehouse crossover What ho, Gods of the Abyss from The Black Dossier being particularly memorable), this is the first time that his monsters have been rendered in all their grotesque glory by the talents of Kevin O’Neill. With previous installments of the series requiring him to combine Victorian squalor with steampunk gleam, and ’60s psychedelia with astral horror, The League has seen O’Neill produce some of the finest work of his long career, and his art for Nemo: Heart of Ice is no exception. O’Neill’s greatest strength is his ability to craft images that are at once beautiful and hideous, and there’s ample opportunity for him to do just that as the book’s heroes explore the ruined temples of alien gods. Perhaps the best example of his illustrative talents, though, is his rendering of Ayesha for the few panels in which she actually appears. Much like Lovecraft’s monstrous deities, H. Rider Haggard’s white goddess makes her first ‘on-screen’ appearance in Nemo: Heart of Ice, despite being a character who has loomed large in the mythology of The League for some time. While ostensibly resembling nothing more than a tall, pale woman, O’Neill draws her in such a way that menace and unease practically radiate from the page whenever she is in view. This capacity for evoking the essence of characters without resorting to crude visual distortion is what marks Kevin O’Neill out as a truly extraordinary comic book artist.
It is hard not to compare Nemo: Heart of Ice with Alan Moore’s other recent foray into Lovecraft’s fiction, namely the 2010 miniseries Neonomicon. But while the latter provided an interesting twist on the Cthulhu Mythos, it lacked relatable characters and a satisfying emotional core. This is not the case with Nemo, centred as it is on the personal transformation of Janni Dakkar as her confrontation with cosmic evil causes the thawing of her own heart of ice. Left a raging, brutalised victim after the events of 1910 (recounted in the first part of The League‘s third volume), Janni begins to regain her humanity only when she comes face-to-face with something fundamentally inhuman, something to which the concept of love is utterly alien. Light, Moore suggests, is found even in the blackest darkness, and it is this emotional depth which elevates Nemo: Heart of Ice beyond mere Lovecraft pastiche, beyond mere horror story, to ultimately become a poignant story about the healing power of love. While never reaching the dizzy heights of classics like Watchmen and From Hell, Moore’s writing on the League series and its various spin-offs remains his best for years.
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