‘MOORE OF THE SAME’ GN Review – Nemo, River Of Ghosts: Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill

To kick off the month of April, we’ll be doing a graphic novel review a day. First up is Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s Nemo: River of Ghosts, the third spin-off from the Legaue of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Janni Dakar, pirate queen and head of the Nemo family, aged eighty years old, finds herself on a journey up the Amazon in an attempt to banish old ghosts. When League of Extraordinary Gentlemen started back in 1999, it was a gloriously entertaining and diverting series. Its followup, set on Mars, was equally enjoyable.

But as the years have passed, each LOEG comic has become less and less accessible and more and more about Moore waving his erudition in the readers’ faces. Nemo: River of Ghosts still looks visually interesting thanks to O’Neill’s inventive art but Moore’s script is dull and rather lacklustre with a story that just doesn’t really engage at all. What was once fun now feels parochial and rather repetitive.

The three most recent League stories have also suffered from an uninteresting setting and story. It is not enough to be an intelligent writer if you can’t engage with the audience and so Nemo: River of Ghosts is a pretty but ultimately empty affair…