Revealed on Forbidden Planet UK’s website (with a hat tip to Robot 6 and Jacobo Carrena), we now have details on the follow-up to Moore and O’Neill’s last League of Extraordinary Gentlemen venture. Following up “Heart of Ice,” “The Roses of Berlin” finds Janni Nemo apparently involved with 1940’s Germany, with all the Nazis you can shake a stick at. Not only that, though, but we’ll apparently be meeting the “dark Teutonic counterpart” to the League in the form of Germany’s Twilight Heroes, all leading to something much bigger and much worse.
From The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen! Sixteen years ago, notorious science-brigand Janni Nemo journeyed into the frozen reaches of Antarctica to resolve her father’s weighty legacy in a storm of madness and loss, barely escaping with her Nautilus and her life. Now it is 1941, and with her daughter strategically married into the family of aerial warlord Jean Robur, Janni’s raiders have only limited contact with the military might of the clownish German-Tomanian dictator Adenoid Hynkel. But when the pirate queen learns that her loved ones are held hostage in the nightmarish Berlin, she has no choice save to intervene directly, travelling with her ageing lover Broad Arrow Jack into the belly of the beastly metropolis. Within that alienated city await monsters, criminals, and legends, including the remaining vestiges of Germany’s notorious ‘Twilight Heroes’, a dark Teutonic counterpart to Mina Murray’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And waiting at the far end of this gauntlet of alarming adversaries there is something much, much worse.
Continuing in the thrilling tradition of Heart of Ice, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill rampage through twentieth-century culture in a blazing new adventure, set in a city of totalitarian shadows and mechanical nightmares. Cultures clash and lives are lost in the explosive collision of four unforgettable women, lost in the black and bloody alleyways where thrive The Roses of Berlin.
It is currently scheduled for an April 2014 release from Top Shelf (US) and Knockabout (UK), the second of three books in a series chronicling Janni Nemo’s succession of the family name and business.
When “Heart of Ice” first came out and we reviewed it, I actually didn’t even realize it was the first in a series. In retrospect it makes a lot of sense, given how the story left off, but it’ll be interesting to see what Moore and O’Neill put the focus on with this installment. “Heart of Ice” revolved so heavily around Lovecraftian mythos, as has a lot of Moore’s current work, so I’d be interested to see if a 1940’s WWII story starring the new Nemo will still feature any of that, despite being in Berlin during the heart of the war.
It’ll also be interesting to see, given that Moore has no idea what will happen in the third volume, if there is a way all three are tied around together in the same fashion as “Century.”
But, either way, more League is good League.
