Moore reiterates a lesson he last pushed in Watchmen and Marvelman, that superheroes and fantastical people are a terrible idea. They just cause massive chaos and carnage on the world and the universe. The climaxes of those comics bore this out. LOEG: The Tempest reiterates this idea, but this time as farce and ridiculous comedy. The added nuance Moore adds here is that superheroes and fantastical people belong in stories, not as models for real life. They are unfiltered expressions of the subconscious and release valves for our culture’s craziest impulses, and should stay on the page where the chaos is controlled.
This comic isn’t just Moore and O’Neill’s last hurrah as comics creators, but a love letter and a lost hurrah for the lost, forgotten British comics of decades past. These are the weird, haphazardly created characters from the Fifties and Sixties that Moore and O’Neill read as children. They were silly, bizarre, creaky, even conceptually broken, but they were expressions of a wild, unfiltered creativity by their creators. Every issue begins with an introductory essay paying tribute to a late, lost British comic artist on the verge of becoming forgotten. Moore lauds their eccentric, individual style or consummate skills for their uniqueness unseen in this age of corporate ownership and increasing blandness.
