I just want to ramble at length about League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Tempest without dancing around spoilers or worrying about taking up dashboard space too much, so I’ll put that under a cut. (Sorry if you slam into a wall of my nonsense on the mobile app– I’m not sure that the app does cuts…?)

I don’t really know how to be precise about any of this so this is going to be extra-ramble-y… Sorry about that.

If you’ve read earlier series, you know what it’s like to read one of those. The peculiar frustrations of it.

The “game” of the League (in the UCB sense of the term game)– let’s put all of “genre” heroic fiction, all at once, into one big tapestry– is pretty well established, including the downsides of that, which is … Not being familiar with *all of genre heroic fiction* makes swaths of the dialogue sort of impenetrable. Unless your idea of a fun read involves sitting with a window open in google.

But god, the pleasures of LOEG were really sharply present for me in The Tempest. Just getting to spend time with Moore and O’Neill.

I’m going to over-focus on Alan Moore’s contributions for a little while, but don’t worry– I’ll cram in one paragraph about Kevin O'Neill near the end in the Mighty Comics Criticism Tradition!

Customary Digression about the Comics Internet’s Toxic Relationship with Moore: The Internet’s crafted a character called “Alan Moore.” That character is a “no longer with it old man who gets off on writing about rape, doesn’t know he’s a Racist White Man, shaking his fists at clouds at people using his ideas even though he spent his whole career taking other people’s ideas, magical wizard.”

Some of that comes from real places– reading about sexual violence generally is a bummer so that being a thematic concern for Moore makes getting hyphey for a new Alan Moore comic tricky. (Serial comics kinda depend on “Looking forward to the next thing”, I guess.) His use of the Golliwog character is uninteresting and never feels worth it, and his defenses of it are unpersuasive, maybe embarrassing. I’d prefer hearing he’d made some peace with Steve Bissette or whoever, to let 1963 be collected for future audiences. Not Dave Gibbons cause his story there sounded pretty “past the point of no return”, but I never really grasped what happened with Bissette, though it’s not any of my business…

I’ve always found it sort of telling though that this portrait started getting painted after Alan Moore made it clear that he was uninterested in being comic fandom’s parasocial friend, though.

I can tell you, I have seen and experienced over and over, there are people who you can say whatever about in comics, and then there are other people where you will get folks upset and not listening to what you’re trying to say or giving you any benefit of the doubt as to what you’re trying to say and it’s very much not worth writing about them, because they wrote something at some point that makes people think they’re fans’ Secret Friend. Alan Moore didn’t want to be anyone’s Secret Friend – he was in Category A.



Anyone paying attention noticed how sharply Moore’s stock fell the more that respecting him would mean questioning an industry that mistreated him and questioning either your own work habits (for creators) or purchasing decisions within that industry. People want to hear about DC has some app now or some shit. The “Alan Moore: Bitter Old Crank” story lets people continue to be hyperconsumers without having to recognize the vacuum that you could theoretically fill with Ethics. “DC fired whole one guy after getting Me Too-ed– good enough!” People have to tell themselves something.

People need stories that they tell themselves, to justify doing what they were going to do anyways.

This has all been mentioned before but it feels worth noting all this again though because it’s so much a part of the Tempest itself. The comics’ final note– the final note for Moore’s career theoretically– is a “letter page gag” of Moore explicitly telling the comics audience that he’s retiring because he’s had enough of them and thinks they/we *fucking suck*. WHEEEEEEEEE!

Plus: mad artists. Editorials about dead artists, dead from suicide, disappeared, forgotten. The character causing the armageddon at the end gets referred to as an “Author.”

I like these two panels (which I’ve pushed next to one another) in particular– it’s a solid gag, but also I think you can read it as … I read at least a frustration into it, a frustration with the audience wanting to turn Moore into the main character while ignoring what he’s made, the substance of what he’s made.

How many reactions did you see to LOEG Century that were about “Is Alan Moore an old man yelling at Harry Potter?” Versus, how many reactions did you see that engaged with what Moore was trying to say about Harry Potter, Mary Poppins, fiction, etc.? (I think this is a good example of the latter, though in the drastic minority).

Does Alan Moore know that when it came time to review LOEG Century, the Comics Journal hired a TV recapper to do it and then called it a day?

The story of LOEG Tempest is that …

A centuries-long plot of The Faery Kingdom is realized and our heroes revealed to actually be agents of the apocalypse, as all the outlandish fantasy creatures that are being collected over the course of the series are unleashed to relentlessly destroy humanity.



And you can admire it on the “Game” level– because ultimately, if you’re going to cram all heroic genre fiction into one big tapestry…. what about all the stories about the end of the world? You have to do those stories or else you’ve not played the game!

I hadn’t really thought that through before Tempest, not having given the series the level of consideration where I’d come to that conclusion.

But now that it’s completed, and you can see the shape of it, the game level satisfies me.

You’d see people for years online going “Oh do League 1980– where it’s Jack Burton and Alf teamed up.” But people didn’t …. People didn’t take it to the logical conclusion– that at at some point, where do you put Mad Max? Where do you put the Planet of the Apes? Where do you put the end of the world?

You put it at the end.

I really admire the simplicity of that.

But that’s just the surface game…

The story of LOEG Tempest is that …



Grubby misogynist James Bond gets restored to youth/power and him & his lesser variations try to bomb the Faery Kingdom, rather than letting women be in control, thereby triggering the apocalypse. The heroines of the League and their gender-fluid pal Orlando fight back.

Moore’s had his career-long fascination with gender, even if he’s somehow now been portrayed as somehow being unaware of or callous to those issues, even though that’s *all he’s ever wanted to talk about* more than any other topic. What kind of fucking monkey’s paw he made a wish on to end up in that place, I don’t know, but…

(Point of interest: the bad guys of course harken to the original Casino Royale movie… written by Woody Allen. So there’s an added layer of meaning there perhaps, that’s pretty visible to the naked eye).

What’s fascinating to me more than anything about the Tempest at the moment though is the final page of the series…!

The series ends with a wedding, in what I took in my “I went to public school and don’t read a lot” way to be a nod to Shakespeare. But that’s not the Happy Ending of the series.

The Happy Ending of the series is after the apocalypse, the fictions that Moore deemed worthy of surviving have created a sort of anarcho-commune in outer space where they’ll live happily ever after…

But then in what feels for me like the end of Doctor Strangelove, you see that they’ve resurrected (with very little foreshadowing) Mr. Hyde, angry, ultra-masculine, rape-y Mr. Hyde, long dead in the series, and he & the lead heroine of the series are reunited to slow-dance for the rest of eternity to a song written by Alan Moore called Immortal Love which you can hear HERE…

I have just a BILLION questions about this page!!!!

I think the answer that satisfies me though is…

This is Moore putting things away. This is Moore thinking he’s retiring.

The issues begins with a Sherlock Holmes character contemplating whether all the serialized heroic fiction is good for people. And ultimately just saying no, it hurts people. This is a point that gets made THROUGHOUT the Tempest over and over.

I think this is just Alan Moore looking back on his career and saying that he regrets it all. And then as sort of underlining it… I think he’s saying that you just can’t take the violent boy fantasies that he’s been railing against his whole career (almost as if the rape scenes had a point!) out of it. That these things have that grubbiness to them, eternally, and there’s no extracting yourself from it. They are an immortal part of the appeal…

All the LOEG’s female heroes, the genderfluid rebellious characters, all of it, and at the end, they can’t get away from Mr. Hyde…

Is Moore just saying it’s all been futile? Is this Moore’s ultimate expression of regret? Is it something more nuanced than that? I don’t… I don’t know entirely what the last page should mean for me. I couldn’t even be a TV recapper, I’m not that smart– I don’t know… I just know that I love it…?

But that’s just sort one part of it too, though because I feel like the exciting thing about this series has been how layered it could be, the amount of information Moore and O’Neill can put into every panel and how it can work in multiples levels… Like…

The story of LOEG Tempest is that …



Grubby misogynist James Bond gets rebooted again– now more dour and unloving and charmless than ever, in the mighty Daniel Craig tradition– and him and his undying franchise of schlubby immature-boy violence fictions try to bomb the human imagination, rather than letting women be in control, thereby triggering the apocalypse– an apocalypse where humanity is overwhelmed by their fictions.

So there’s the political reading. What’s the apocalypse in Moore’s series?

“Grubby girl-hating boys won’t let go of their stupid fictions” is the story of Gamersgate, it’s the story of those pathetic Comicsgate shit-people, it’s the story of so much of our politics. Fascism rising up. People becoming more cruel, more obsessed with conspiracy theories. An incoherent pile-up of fictions that drown out humanity.

The apocalypse in LOEG is our current moment. Streaming puts everything ever filmed in front of us. The internet puts everything every written in front of us. Everything can be googled– a point Moore even makes on the last page of his series.

And no one knows what’s true anymore. And nothing feels like it sticks– nothing gets taken very seriously. And none of it feels worth much.

Stories becoming “franchises” and content– what do they mean? And what does it mean for the fiction around it? What does Watchmen mean now that it’s just the thing that spawned sequels, TV shows, videogames, cartoons? Some people say “no no it’s still on my shelf” but I think those people are delusional. For me, at least, it means less. How can you say the context doesn’t change the meaning? That’s what the word CONTEXT fucking means!

(When you see comics being advertised, sometimes I just feel like “oh good luck being the source material for one season of a low-watched TV show on the TV Guide channel.” Do people have less to say now or do I not care about what they’re saying more because I’m a mean-spirited middle-aged fuck? I don’t know. A lot of people in comics think they have stuff to say about minorities or whatever, being woke, but for me, it always just feels like Albert Brooks in Lost in America going “we’re going to go touch Native Americans.” Probably it’s me being a fuck… But like… if the context for all comics right now is they’re potential vehicles for some larger entertainment industrial complex to batter in your head with cliched, apolitical sentiments… how do you get invested in ANY of them? I struggle to, when there aren’t Primo Weirdos involved– like games are dreck but Kojima’s a horny extremely-problematic weirdo so I’m looking forward to Death Stranding… I’ve gotten off track, I’m sorry…)

Look: just on a supply-demand curve, the more fictions you have, the less they’re worth. I wrote about that once online and the reaction I got from someone I respect a lot actually was no, it still matters, but now critics and gatekeepers and influencers matter more too.

…Do you believe that?

It would be awfully nice to. But I don’t. I don’t, at all. I probably should because the person who said it was smarter about this stuff than me, and kinder, but…

But set aside what’s happening to fiction itself… The idea that Moore’s somehow floating above society that the “Cranky Old Man Doing Wizarding” internet version of Moore ignores is that Moore’s always been pretty politically interested (even if his actual political beliefs are, for me at least pretty disagreeable– I don’t think his actual prescriptive ideas hold much water for me… I find them pretty ludicrous, but you know, different strokes).

But… but yeah: Do you see Putin there in panel 1? I think I do.

People want their fictions. The UK wanted to believe if they did Brexit, they’d have more money for health care funding or some shit. Liberals in the US told themselves Hillary Clinton was their Abuelita who only lost because scary Russians are coming for them – and they continue to tell themselves that if they defeat Donald Trump, the rest won’t matter– it won’t matter that there’s a Republican Senate, Republican state legislatures, a massive part of our population that’s totally okay with concentration camps, etc., they just have to beat this one guy who’s uniquely awful (more awful than the rest of America! an aberration! ) and things go back to some “normal” that once existed. And I mean, Conservatives in the US– I mean, jesus fucking christ, the fictions everywhere are getting worse. They’re chanting “Send her home”. Her home is Minnesota– they have large, giantess-blonde women in that state– SEND ME TO HER HOME!

Tempest is coming out as we’re all just watching this whole fucking “civilization” thing we thought we had slide into a post-climate-change fascistic feudalism, if we’re lucky and we’re not just staring down an extinction event… Slow slow slow and then FAST LOUD AAAAAAAH.

I think it’s very much Moore reacting to Brexit, to ‘16, to all that stuff, but it all fits within a project dating back to 1999! Back when the world was supposed to end in Y2K!

Unlike Alan Moore who famously and incorrectly hated it, I loved Twin Peaks Season 3. I think about it all the time. I’m still thinking about it. Anytime I’m talking about whatever, I’m like “What about Twin Peaks Season 3″ tho, which makes dirty talk very awkward.

One reason I loved that season of Twin Peak was because of how it didn’t give a shit about the audience’s wants or desires. The audience went to it wanting to hear about Agent Cooper fighting the Black Lodge. And Twin Peaks told them episode after episode instead that America right now is cruel and horrifying and randomly violent and a grinder horror-movie for its children, and will continue to be that forever unless they change their hearts.

Twin Peaks told them that genre stories disintegrate and become meaningless when the bigger stories we are all telling ourselves stop making sense…

I love The Tempest for the same reason, because I feel like… I feel like for me, it’s just Moore there at the end going, “Okay. Okay. You love your fictions. Fucking choke on them.”

The end of the world is every fiction all at once, in a meaningless screaming sound, because our narratives that bind us to one another have collapsed.

The story of LOEG Tempest is that …



Alan Moore is dying– he’s 65. Kevin O’Neill is dying– he’s 66.

It hopefully won’t be soon– heck, they could have another 30+ years, if they get lucky. Or it could be tomorrow. Same thing for everybody. But they’re both at an age where the thought has to occur more than it does for someone in their 20′s, 30′s, 40′s…

So in the Tempest, the end of the world approaches.

(For them– not for us– never for us– we’re going to live forever, you and I *wink*).

This is my favorite piece of writing about Twin Peaks Season 3. Here’s a taste:

The notion of “late style” was first formulated by the philosopher Theodor Adorno to characterize the odd traits he observed in Beethoven’s late quartets. For Adorno, these works lack the same rigorous formal harmony of the composer’s mature music. In these pieces, Adorno says, “one finds formulas and phrases of convention scattered about,” musical tropes and clichés that appear “in a form that is bald, undisguised, untransformed.” Beethoven’s late music is tasteless in places, less fully integrated than it had been in the composer’s mature period, but it is also more open to formal discord: it is a music of “caesuras and sudden discontinuities,” a “catching fire between extremes” that militates against formal harmony. We might suppose that this destructive spirit stems from the fact that the aging artist, closer to death, no longer cares what the public thinks and is free to express a more personal, uncompromising vision. Adorno finds this notion overly sentimental. For him, late works are born from the awareness that our subjective relationship to death can never enter artworks, which survive too long to record this mortifying knowledge. For this reason, late style is the result of an artist who has abandoned the very conceit of expression itself.

There’s a wedding at the end of LOEG Tempest. One of the “bad guys” is murdered. But none of these moments are very dramatic! None of these moments are given any more “emotional significance” as Frankenstein expressing sorrowing that people would rather call him “Frankenstein’s Monster.” Talking about the “story” of LOEG feels insufficient because it’s… It’s just so besides what it feels like to read it, which is just a flurry of information but walking away from that flurry just feeling…. Like you’re watching something being mourned but in an *ANGRY*-but-mournful “it was all pretty dumb, though– time to grow up” childhood’s end kind of way…

When League first came out, I remember the feeling being that it was just Moore writing blockbuster comics. “You just take some fancy idea you want to do and make it enough of a superhero comic that it can be commercial” – that kind of sentiment, by the Future Blockbuster Comics Writers of America on places like the Warren Ellis forum or wherever. Here’s Matt Fraction describing the League for Artbomb: “…a high-concept to die for, and Moore knows it. A practical Who’s Who of the Victorian era’s pulp literature, illustrated expertly by Kevin O'Neill in a style equally vibrantly delicate and luridly grotesque, LOEG is a rollicking adventure yarn jam-packed with big set pieces and pitch-perfect characterizations - most of all, though, it’s unapologetic fun for fun’s sake.”

And that was the correct reaction after the first series perhaps– but there’s something so delightful that LOEG ended up being Moore’s late style work.

Executives took it, made it into unwatchable Hollywood nonsense that ENDED SEAN CONNERY’S CAREER. And yet somehow, that’s the series that he ended up retiring on, on this just super-angry “choke on it, you pringle-covered goons” note, with a work that I would describe as his late style…???

Am I nuts or isn’t that fucking delightful? I mean, goddamn, that’s some fun! Fucking a….

And I’m worried like I’m making it sound like a puzzle box or some multi-layered treatise you have to sniff around at with a magnifying glass…

It’s funny. It’s got sex scenes. Violent stuff happens. A guy with no pants on and an erection like jumps out like a Jack Kirby character at the reader yelling nonsense. It’s a good time.

Moore and O’Neill do every kind of visual comic style they can possibly get in there– that’s the chief pleasure of The Tempest, is them Voltron-ing as a team, and O’Neill delivering EVERY kind of comics page possible– fumetti! 3-d comics. Visual panels with text at the bottom of the page narrating outside of the panel borders.

There’s joyfully more ideas of how to approach the comic page in one issue of The Tempest than you see in, like, the entirety of that dopey-fuck Peter Cannon comic that people were like jerking themselves off to because a character was like “I do formalism good” in it. Oooooooh, do you formalism, brah? Cool story!

It’s two guys after looooong careers with all this experience just pushing the pedal down all the way, on the way out the door… If you’re into that kinda thing, it’s so goddamn fun! It’s them having a laugh, more than anything– Moore throws in a “fuck Stan Lee“ gag at the very very end that’s so brutal and out of nowhere… There’s no way he wasn’t cackling. CACKLING when he wrote it. That guy was having fun until he pulled the plug on the entire career…

The rarest thing in comics if you read the opening comic bios: an honorable ending.

It’s Kevin O’Neill’s retirement from comics, too, if I’m not mistaken. One last chance to admire what he brings. Just a career long bezerker.

That was sort of the thing about LOEG to begin with, but that grew as the books got closer to the present, just how much of O’Neill’s skills with caricature and filling a page with a derangement were utilized. Impossible to imagine the book working without him! Impossible.

I mean, and imagine the scripts he was working with on this one. JESUS imagine the scripts Moore was sending him, parachuted in a big crate down onto his lawn, in a Operation Dumbo Drop style arrangement. They just had to be monster fucking long…

And then the results are just O’Neill having to draw ALL OF FICTION.

Imagine going up to a comic artist and being like “Brah. Brah, I need you to draw ALL OF FICTION for a comic I’m working on. No page rate, but you’ll get exposure, brah. Do it. Do it for the exposure.”

Here’s O’Neill talking about Marshal Law from an interview he did with the great and honorable Douglas Wolk:

There’s only one other example in [Marshal] Law I can think of which was censored, one of the Dark Horse books — I think it’s the Mask crossover. We often refer back to the red light district in San Futuro, and on my original I had in the background, one of the shop fronts with “Pussy Palace” on it. But someone in the office changed it to “Pushy Palace.”



That really doesn’t have anything to do with anything, but I just like that story and don’t have enough gas to go find a better or more apropos quote…

The thing that fascinates with O’Neill is how he ended up a co-storyteller on two of the more notable satirical “fiction will fuck you up, it’s not good for you” stories in comics. Because that’s fucking Marshal Law, too! (I really like Marshal Law in all its unsubtle shout-iness, though I know reasonable minds differ there). But I just…

Was that a story he was attracted to? Is that a story he himself pushed League towards? Is he even more of a co-author of the comic than given credit for because of Moore’s prominence? How did he end up doing that twice? Plus: Nemesis, which I haven’t read much of but understand to be its own subversion of things.

What an interesting goddamn career, for it to have a thematic heft or thematic … I don’t know if coherence is too strong a word, but “glue”… glue? To have a glue like that. How many comic artists have that? Jesus, how many have that when they’re NOT WRITER-ARTISTS???

AAAAH I’M GETTING ALL WORKED UP. Goddamn, it’s a shame that the comics industry doesn’t really want people writing about comics (if it were ever honest, which it is NOT when it pretends that it does) or deserve having people write about comics, and that writing about comics is the very worst thing for the children to do, because it’s so fucking fun to write about this shit, I’d recommend if it if it weren’t a *terrible idea*. I’m having a good time this morning, but I gotta shower and do my day.

I’m forgetting stuff I wanted to talk about… Anyways, I just wanted to write all this out because the reaction to Century was just so fucking numb-skulled (with exceptions! yay exceptions!) that I just wanted to get this written down before I accidentally read num-nums opine about The Tempest…



But yeah, I don’t think I got half of the shit in that Tempest book too probably because I’m dumb and shallow and just busy being good at sex (ladies), so I don’t know if I’m “right” about any of this to the extent I’m saying anything which I don’t think I am or I don’t know, I just sort of vomited this. In particular, I don’t think I contemplated the Shakespeare Prospero and Shakespeare Tempest nearly enough when thinking about this series (I read that as a kid but don’t remember it well enough to think on it seriously). Or if I got 10% of the allusions I’d be surprised because none of them were to low-grade Japanese porno or whatever it is I entertain myself with anymore…

But I just had nothing to do this morning. Anyways, this is where my head’s at a couple days later though…



And more important than anything: please let’s find a way to stop comic people from interviewing Alan Moore about comics– ask him about literally anything else because comic people are all scummy and I don’t want see him keep getting bothered by questions about this shit. LEAVE HIM ALONE, COMIC PEOPLE.

I’m going to have some leftover fried rice for lunch…

TLDR: Damon Lindelof can go fuck himself, and you can too! Wheeeee!