By d. emerson eddy — During the early halcyon days of America's Best Comics, there were two brilliant adventure minis for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, by Alan Moore, Kevin O'Neill, Ben Dimagmaliw, and Bill Oakley, that served as a kind of Justice League composed of roughly Victorian era British literary characters/monsters. They were relatively straight-forward yarns that drew from pulp hero, detective, adventure, and sci-fi tales, treating them all as existing in a shared world like something like Philip José Farmer's Riverworld.

Then things got weird.

Both in terms of Alan Moore's relationship with the wider DC Comics, which had always been strained at best during these years, and in the direction that the League took. Possibly because of its rather adventurous format and content (I still wish the edition with the vinyl record had have been released), The Black Dossier would serve as a capstone to the series at DC and a sign of stranger things that would come in the subsequent volumes Century and The Tempest. This adventurousness, though, would also lead to a series of graphic album spin-offs of Captain Nemo's daughter, starting with Nemo: Heart of Ice from Alan Moore, Kevin O'Neill, Ben Dimagmaliw, and Todd Klein.

Heart of Ice drops us into a Lovecraftian adventure as Nemo's daughter, Janni, finds herself disaffected by the life of a pirate and seeks out greater challenge. Scouring her father's journals, she sets on an expedition to Antarctica that left her father raving. It mixes straight-up exploration of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness with the broader League remit of every literary character existing in the same world as the story visits various other Antarctic fabulous locations and Janni and her team run afoul of Charles Foster Kane, Queen Ayesha (of She and others), and his hired team of scientist thugs, including a fairly racist, sexist, and demented version of Tom Swift.

Kevin O'Neill's lanky, angular style really lends itself to creation of weird and off-putting alien creatures, making the strange Lovecraftian creatures all the more terrifying when they appear. With the added tones of blue and white from Ben Dimagmaliw's colors, there's a wonderfully eerie atmosphere for much of the story. I also really quite like the approach to double-page spreads that I think begin here with the Nemo series and become a bit more frequent as it progresses, with one large image with numerous inset in a column on the right-hand side. Visually, I think the layout enhances the pulp adventure feel to the story, enhanced even further when Todd Klein breaks out the cursive script for Janni's later narration.

Though I believe that The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is worth investigating and reading as a whole, I think that Nemo: Heart of Ice from Moore, O'Neill, Dimagmaliw, and Klein serves as a damn good encapsulation of the spirit and theme of a shared literary world. It tells a wonderful self-contained Lovecraftian adventure, playing with the wider sandbox that the League setting has provided.

Nemo - Heart of Ice by Alan Moore and team

Nemo: Heart of Ice
Writer: Alan Moore
Artist: Kevin O'Neill
Colorist: Ben Dimagmaliw
Letterer: Todd Klein
Publishers: Top Shelf & Knockabout
In the grim cold of February surfaces a thrilling new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen book: NEMO: HEART OF ICE, a full-color 56-page adventure in the classic pulp tradition by the inestimable Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill.
It's 1925, fifteen long years since Janni Dakkar first tried to escape the legacy of her dying science-pirate father, only to accept her destiny as the new Nemo, captain of the legendary Nautilus. Now, tired of her unending spree of plunder and destruction, Janni launches a grand expedition to surpass her father's greatest failure: the exploration of Antarctica. Hot on her frozen trail are a trio of genius inventors, hired by an influential publishing tycoon to retrieve the plundered valuables of an African queen. It's a deadly race to the bottom of the world -- an uncharted land of wonder and horror where time is broken and the mountains bring madness. Jules Verne meets H.P. Lovecraft in the unforgettable final showdown, lost in the living, beating and appallingly inhuman HEART OF ICE.
Release Date: February 27, 2013
Price: $9.99
More Info: Nemo - Heart of Ice

Check out all our recent reviews!

d. emerson eddy is a student and writer of things. He fell in love with comics during Moore, Bissette, & Totleben's run on Swamp Thing and it has been a torrid affair ever since. His madness typically manifests itself on Twitter @93418.