New Volume of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Announced

At SDCC on Thursday, IDW announced two bits of surprising news. The first announcement was that Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill have finished the fourth and final volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The second bit of news is that the new volume, called "The Tempest," is intended to be Alan Moore's final work in comics.

Alan Moore is considered to be one of the most important comics creators of the modern era. The co-creator of books like Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and Batman: The Killing Joke helped bring a wider recognition of comics as a literary and artistic medium during the mid-1980s. Moore also helped kickstart the "British Invasion" of American comics, in which DC and Marvel hired a slew of talent from across the Atlantic.

Last year, Moore announced his planned retirement, but mentioned that he had one more project left to finish, which appears to be this new volume of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a series starring a cast of characters from various literary and fictional work. The first two volumes starred Mina Murray from Dracula, Mr. Hyde, Captain Nemo from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and the British pulp adventurer Allan Quartermain, and explored a rich blended literary world filled with characters from various Victorian novels.

Later volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen featured characters from television and movies, including James Bond, an evil Harry Potter, and even Mary Poppins.

Originally, Wildstorm published League of Extraordinary Gentlemen under their "America's Best Comics" imprint. When DC purchased Wildstorm, Moore and O'Neill eventually pulled the book after a series of disagreements over the movie adaptation of some of Moore's other work. Moore moved the series to Top Shelf, which was then bought by IDW in 2015.

Although League of Extraordinary Gentlemen had supposedly ended with the publication of Vol. 3 back in 2012, Moore and Neill recently returned to the world in a series of spinoff comics featuring the daughter of Captain Nemo and the crew of the Nautilus.

Few details about the new volume were available at the time of publication, although a cover posted by IDW on Twitter hints that the new volume of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen will explore the world of Golden Age superheroes.

Moore's most recent comics work was the recently concluded Lovecraftian horror series Providence. He also published a 1,200 page novel titled Jerusalem last year.