Nemo: Heart of Ice, Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill

Nemo: Heart of Ice
Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill
ISBN: 978-0861661831
Graphic Novel

This was a weird one.  I've flipped aimlessly through the previous League graphics, and enjoyed them enough as a diversion.  Not a rabid fan.  This tho, this was odd.

First off, we're not dealing with the "real" Captain Nemo from the book - it's his daughter Janni.  Second, the entire story is a bizarre literary seek-and-find pastiche of just about every major figure and literary creation from the time and related genres they could cram in there.

A totally not exhaustive run-down because it's based on the ones I recognized offhand:
The villianess?  HR Haggard's SHE-who-must-be-obeyed.
The henchman?  Citizen Kane
The hired guns?  Tom Swift (Swyfte here), Jack Wright and Frank Reade Jr (yes, the steam man was mentioned)
The locale?  Lovecraft's Mountains of Madness

King Kong gets a shout-out in the epilogue.  His Girl Friday (Hildy Johnson) is the author of that epilogue, by the bye.  

So, ok, moving past the shout-outs and nudge-nudge-wink-wink "did you see what we did there" bits, what was it like? 

It was odd.  The overall story pits two strong-willed and psychopathic women with toadying henchmen against each other, and as far as I could tell, the idea was that Janni comes out on top for two reasons: because she's really only ambitious and ruthless, rather than sociopathic, and because she's willing to head out and get her hands dirty rather than sit in a bower and kill doves while your henchmen bumble about.

The plot seemed to be a little unsure of itself - the theft was the most obvious McGuffin I've seen recently, and the henchmen were made out to be as nasty and petty and racist and misogynistic as possible, which is odd to me, considering that Tom Swift at least is a fairly well-known and beloved character.  Finally, the decision to head for the Antartic was a spur of the moment lark - "I can do whatever my dad can do" out of nowhere on Janni's part.  None of that seems necessary to the central point of the story (or at least the focus based on page-count and really lush spreads and vistas): the journey/chase through Mountains of Madness.  So - I'm a bit perplexed there.  My best guess is that the oddities of plotting are either hooks from previous or to upcoming installments.

Verdict?  Weird.  However, I very much like the Mountains of Madness section, especially the "space and time" plateau - I would think that would be a difficult concept to render artistically, and it was clear and confusing at the same time (in a good way).  I could see hitting this one up again for that, and for the epilogue, which was frankly hysterical.