The Captain of the Nautilus was always one of the more interesting characters in Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, with his intriguing amoral stance, positioned somewhere between pirate and hero. Here his daughter carries the mantle into a new series of adventures, starting in the 1920s with her plundering the wreckage of fictional Titanic (Morgan Robertson’s Titan, which sank in a spookily similar way to the Titanic despite being a fictional ship in a story published 14 years before it set sail), and robbing H. Rider Haggard’s African queen Ayesha and Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane.
Soon, however, we’re into the main meat of this first encounter with Janni Dakkar, as she heads to Antarctica, to follow in her father’s footsteps and uncover the secrets behind a failed expedition he lead down there. Trouble is, it turns out that the expedition was unwittingly to Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness, beyond which lie the ruins of a dormant ancient civilisation controlling a gateway to the nameless horrors for which the author was so famous.
Needless to say the new expedition also goes pear-shaped, not helped by the fact that Janni is also being chased by assassins sponsored by Kane. Moore makes the journey intentionally confused and confusing, in a stunning time-shattering sequence that is wonderfully broken and pieced together again.
By the end of this book, Nemo junior is nursing a bloody nose and a newfound understanding of her father’s difficulties with sanity in his later life, making this a fantastic adaptation of and enhacement to Lovecraft’s work.
All the books in this series:
