Nemo: Heart of Ice

Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill Nemo: Heart of Ice (2013)

On the positive side, this is a lovely thing to find within one's symbolic Christmas stocking - as I did - it being roughly the shape and size of the sort of book Santa would bring me in the days of my youth as a younger man back when everything was better than it is now - hardback, colourful cartoons, and the sort of endpapers I would stare at for what I recall as having been hours, but which were probably minutes at most; and much like the Hector's House annual and that Woody Woodpecker book bought for me by my grandmother, it seems kind of thin at just fifty-six pages, according to Amazon.

Of course, having sprung forth from the loins of Alan Moore it's all very readable and entertaining, and O'Neill's artwork is, as always, wonderful; but, having no clue as to the identity of the supporting characters revived this time - excepting himself from Citizen Kane, obviously - and it being pretty much a rewrite of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, it's difficult to find much to say about Heart of Ice except that it was enjoyable enough. I suppose to be picky I probably could have lived without yet another Lovecraft homage, because frankly it's getting so that one can hardly make it half way through any given book without it all turning out to be the work of the great old ones, yet again. Lord knows I loves me some of that H.P. sauce, but enough is surely enough. Simon Bucher-Jones and Mark Clapham did this much better in The Taking of Planet 5; as also did Grant Morrison in Zenith, and Lovecraft himself in At the Mountains of Madness, amongst others.

As I say, it was enjoyable enough but somehow a bit thin, both literally and figuratively.