Second print status assured for miniseries that serves as not only “swan song” to award-winning LEAGUE series but also to creators’ careers.
The final story in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen magnum opus has already made some unprecedented waves, due to the nature of the comic itself. Not only will it be the final outing for the characters we have all grown to love, but will be a career defining final bow for the creators themselves, who have vowed this will be their final foray into the medium of comic book lore altogether. And so even before it went on sale in comic shops, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol IV: Tempest #1 has already sold out to distributors and is being put to printers for the second time to ensure demand is met.
IDW sales manager Joel Elad has confirmed the news, saying “We encourage fans to contact their favorite comic shop to see if they still have copies in stock,” “We’ll be going back to press so retailers can get the second printing of issue #1 in stores by the release of #2 on September 12th”
After an epic seventeen-year journey through the entirety of human culture – the biggest cross-continuity ‘universe’ that is conceivable, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill will 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, in a true swan song in all senses of the term.
Beginning in 1999 with America’s Best Comics publishing Volume 1, it started life as an iconic and altogether new idea at the time. Gathering the cream of literary characters and blending them together in one super sleuth team to rival any intelligence agency, it was presented in the format and style of periodicals of old, with strange and wonderful Victorian era advertising and tongue in cheek references to many literary greats such as Alice In Wonderland. The series went from strength to strength, spawning a stunning sequel in 2002, that saw the heroes fight HG Wells Martian invaders as well as visit the Island of Dr. Moreau….and a movie. But let’s not go into that. With the third volume coming under the heading The Black Dossier, it was basically a Who’s Who of the League including many members not actually accounted for in stories and sold in hardback in 2008. Then the title shipped over to Top Shelf Productions/IDW (US) and Knockabout (UK) to continue from 2009-2012 in its ‘Century’ format for three further volumes subtitled 1910, 1969 and 2009 respectively as well as spawning three Nemo hardback graphic novels from 2013-2015 titled Heart of Ice, Roses of Berlin and River of Ghosts, which told the escapades of three generations of the Nemo family aboard the Nautilus.
And now, we find our literary and real life heroes tying up the slenderest of plot threads and allusions from the three preceding volumes, The Black Dossier and the Nemotrilogy into a dazzling and ingenious bow, the world’s most accomplished and bad-tempered artist-writer team (Top Shelf’s words, not mine I swear Alan, to me you’re a peach) will 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 2996, 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 and sees Mina, Orlando and Emma Night continue their exploits from the last Century tale after utilising the Fire of Youth and going off in search of Nemo’s grandson Jack (last seen in the final Nemo exploit). All the while a new M has taken the reigns of M.I.5 and is bent on searching for them to reclaim the Leagues history. And tying into all of this will be the sperate but linked adventures of the Seven Stars, who are searching for former members of their team while discovering the identity of the invisible Vull, who has seemingly an unhealthy interest in them also their past exploits.
Commencing as a six-issue run of unfashionable, outmoded and flimsy children’s comics that will make you appear emotionally backward if you read them on the bus, this climactic magnum opus will also reprint 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 Vol IV: The Tempest.
6-issue mini-series, each issue 32 pages in (mostly) full color, saddle stitched, 6 5/8” x 10 1/8” (standard comic-book size), $4.99 (US). Issue #1 is scheduled for June 2018.
ISBN UPC 827714014280 00111 – Diamond: JUN188003
And also above a scene from issue #2 which will open with a 1919 deathmatch between two American superhumans in the ruins of Utopia, the second issue of Moore and O’Neill’s final comic series takes its readers on a breath-taking ride over a waterfall of storytelling styles, from a startling 21st century Lincoln Island and its current incarnation of the legendary Captain Nemo, through a New York coping with an ageing costume-hero population, to a London where a drastic escalation is commenced by the rejuvenated sociopath controlling MI5. All this, and a further reprinted adventure of 1960s super-team The Seven Stars awaits in issue two of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume IV: The Tempest Issue #2 in a 6-issue mini-series
THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN VOL IV: THE TEMPEST #1 (OF 6)
Written by Alan Moore
Art by Kevin O’Neill
Colors by Ben Dimagmaliw
Letters by Todd Klein
On Sale July 20th 2018.
Check out www.topshelfcomix.com for more and don’t miss out on this exciting grand finale next week and follow the link to look for the other titles discussed above on the TOP SHELF webpage.
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