I put off reading the final collaboration of Alan Moore and Kevin O"Neill on LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN in part because of the extraordinary un-evenness of CENTURY, which managed to shuttle from very bad to very good without any sense of transition. That said, a part of me wanted TEMPEST to be as good as the third part of CENTURY, if not BLACK DOSSIER.
However, this was also the project with which Moore and O'Neill purported to end their careers in comics (though O'Neill actually worked in the medium a little longer). I suspected that TEMPEST would wrap up the LOEG universe much the same way Moore concluded the PROMETHEA series, of which I wrote:
One of the myth-images that Moore invokes most frequently is that of the Biblical “Whore of Babylon,” though naturally the author turns the Christian connotations around, so the “whore” is just the other side of the “virgin” coin, and both are seen more as vehicles through which the energy of the Godhead manifests. Indeed, in some vague manner Promethea is also consubstantial with the Great Whore, in that both are supposed to bring the world to an end. Moore attempts to give his heroine this myth-status without delivering anything but an “apocalypse deferred,” which might seem fairly original if the author hadn’t used a similar trope at the end of his SWAMP THING run.
Given the above sentiments, one might think I'd welcome Moore committing to an actual apocalypse, in which he and O'Neill decisively "let it all come down" for not one but two fictional planets, Earth and Mars. But one would be wrong, for the simple reason that Alan Moore is much better at creating worlds than destroying them.
Since the final book is named TEMPEST, and since the Moore-O'Neill version of Prospero stands behind the scenes pulling various strings, it was to be expected that the writer would abjure all the "rough magic" he used to create his world. This too he also did after the conclusion of an apocalyptic SWAMP THING run, where Moore, after a major crossover of DC's magical heroes, then spent pages lecturing his readers about the importance of ordinary life. And that's what Moore does here as well. He's not infrequently expressed ambivalence about delving into the archetypes of popular fiction, even though one can't imagine him having made such a mark in American comics had he sought to emulate Harvey Pekar. So here once again, Moore follows his dive into the archetypal subconscious by a renunciation of his fictional powers. Prospero is Moore's self-insert, bringing about the destruction of Earth and Mars for ill-conceived reasons, just to provide closure. Such closure isn't technically necessary. Unlike both SWAMP THING and PROMETHEA, Moore and O'Neill could, even after their respective deaths, legally ban any further iterations of the LEAGUE property. So in my opinion the real motive was that of desiring an end to the franchise that would distinguish it from the many endlessly-proliferating serial concepts.
Earlier episodes discoursed on the 20th century's development of costumed superheroes, but in contrast to the artist's general fidelity to the many creations of prose literature, Moore and O'Neill offer nothing more than an aimless concatenation of superficial pastiches. Marsman? Electrogirl? Hard to believe we got such bland spoofs from the co-creator of WATCHMEN. All of the stuff with the superheroes is a waste of space, and because CENTURY ended with the death of Allen Quatermain, Mina Murray doesn't get a very good character arc, though a little better than that of Orlando. In compensation, Moore and O'Neill give us the resolution of BLACK DOSSIER's conflict between their versions of Emma Peel and James Bond, both of whom gain their youth in time to greet the space-age delights of 2010 and beyond. But even if I didn't dislike Moore's jaundiced take on Ian Fleming's creation, this wouldn't be enough to hold my attention.
So in the end, it's mostly about Moore and O'Neill using their loose plot as an excuse for as many crossovers and references as they can fit in. And no one can accuse them of skimping. Some characters are named outright, like the Thinking Machine and Stardust the Super Wizard, while Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty are worked into the continuity once more for this last hurrah. Many other characters just make unidentified cameos: the Beagle Boys, Tower Comics' Iron Maiden, a gorilla with a bandolier (probably Monsieur Mallah) and a house that seems to be "Usher II" from the Ray Bradbury story of that name. All of these O'Neill renders in his unique style, but I didn't get the sense that their parts contributed to a greater whole, as I did with BLACK DOSSIER.
The basic problem with TEMPEST is that it doesn't really depict the development of pop culture icons the way the first two volumes did. Possibly no one could manage to cope with the astounding proliferation of such icons not only in comic books and strips, but also in movies and television as well. Thus Moore and O'Neill just stuck in whatever characters caught their interest, be it a version of 1904 comic-strip obscurity Hugo Hercules or Grandpa Munster. There's some fun to be had with such freewheeling association, but they didn't manage to make a myth this time.
And I would be remiss not to comment that Alan Moore's tired anti-Stan Lee jeremiad is on display in a "funny" sequence riffing on a sequence from the Silver Age wedding of Reed Richards and Sue Storm. The tiresome joke didn't make me mad, and I might even examine its presumptions in a separate essay. But I will end by saying that it shows Moore's animus toward the very "century" in which he was born, toward his inability to make the world work the way he wants-- to which his fantasy-impulse is, of course, to blow it all away.
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