Alan Moore Is Preparing a Six-Part Finale for Extraordinary Gentlemen

Watchmen was serialized from 1986 to 1987 and became a perennial best seller as a collected edition. But the series soured his relationship with DC Comics, who retained control over the characters, and who in 2012 rolled out a companion series, Before Watchmen. Mr. Moore did not support of the idea and thought Watchmen should stand on its own.

“There weren’t that many prequels or sequels to ‘Moby-Dick,’ he said in an interview about the project.

Things are less contentious with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which unites characters from across literature. The first iteration of the adventurers included Mina Murray, a victim of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”; the Invisible Man from H.G. Wells’s work of that name; Dr. Jekyll (and Mr. Hyde) from Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”; and Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo from “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.” In 2011, The Guardian described the comics as “a blazing world of the imagination and one of the triumphs of recent British fiction.”

Photo

The series also inspired a 2003 film starring Sean Connery as Allan Quatermain (from H. Rider Haggard’s “King Solomon’s Mines”) and was less beloved. A review in The New York Times described the movie as listless and “neither gentle nor extraordinary.” The film earned $66 million domestically and $179 million worldwide. Plans for a reboot were announced in 2015.

“I’ve always been glad that the collected editions probably made far more than the movie ever did,” Mr. O’Neill said, with some exaggeration. “It has been very good to us.” (Mr. Moore declined a request for comment.)

“The Tempest,” which is published by Top Shelf Productions and by Knockabout, will tie up loose ends from the previous volumes.

Mr. O’Neill was reluctant to reveal any details in order to reserve surprises for readers. “When I was a kid, I could remember the delight of seeing Spider-Man for the first time,” he said. “Now everything is explored in great detail before it happens.”

Continue reading the main story