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The Tempest – Alan Moore And Kevin O'Neill's Final League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen Announced

Thanks to an old friend Hannah-Means Shannon over at Comicon.com for being in on the IDW/Top Shelf Panel at San Diego Comic-Con today, and grabbing this little scoop. As well as reporting on many of the projects new, and already announced from Top Shelf, there was one that may have taken the cherry.

One surprise announcement is that Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill will be teaming up for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol 4 called The Tempest, a six issue series in full color, and drawn from pop culture throughout time and space. This will be their "retirement project", their last in comics, according to Top Shelf.

This will also be published in the UK by Knockabout. And may be Alan and Kevin's final statement on comics before they retire from the medium altogether.

The Tempest is the Shakespeare play thought to be his last written alone. It is set on a remote island, where the sorcerer Prospero, rightful Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place using illusion and skilful manipulation. He conjures up a storm, the eponymous tempest, to cause his usurping brother Antonio and the complicit King Alonso of Naples to believe they are shipwrecked and marooned on the island. There, his machinations bring about the revelation of Antonio's lowly nature, the redemption of the King, and the marriage of Miranda to Alonso's son, Ferdinand.

Prospero was the leader of the very first League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, formed in 1610, an exiled Duke of Milan, who served as the Court Astrologer of Queen Gloriana I of England and who works as a literary analogue to John Dee, astrologer to Queen Elizabeth.

The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, created by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill was a comic first published by Wildstorm and DC, then Top Shelf and Knockabout, telling literary game stories by initially taking famous Victorian pulp figures and making a superhero team from them, set in the 19th century. Since then, the stories have expanded backwards and forwards through the centuries to the present day.

More, much more, will come… here's how Prospero looked last we saw him.

UPDATE: Here's the PR…

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.

Tying up the slenderest of plot threads and allusions from the three preceding volumes, The Black Dossier, and the Nemo trilogy into a dazzling and ingenious bow, the world's most accomplished and bad-tempered artist-writer team 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.

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, Volume IV: THE TEMPEST.

— a 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.

Co-Published by Top Shelf Productions (US) and Knockabout (UK).

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