Author: Alan Moore | Illustrator: Kevin O'Neill | Page Count: 56
"It was the piranhas mostly. They can be spiteful if they're in yer trousers..."
Eighty-year-old Janni gathers together a crew (one of whom would've certainly been worthy of League membership in an earlier time) for one last sailing of the Nautilus into the heart of darkness; i.e. up the Amazon. Her ultimate goal is to put to rest someone who ought to have been dead years before, someone we've met before and for whom death was initially a long time coming.
She’s wizened and determined, with a face that looks like it’s been carved out of wood. Many of the crew think her mad, but she’s knows the truth.
It’s not usually until my second read-through that I'm able to appreciate the intricacies of the League books. I'm too busy trying to spot extraneous references and getting lost in the backgrounds during the first read. But I enjoyed River of Ghosts on the first pass. Either Moore has finally found a suitable level of outside influences being pitched inside, or I simply overlooked a ton of them. Either way, it was a more fluid experience, enabling me to get caught up in the yarn easily.
The aforementioned crew member is Janni’s bodyguard. He's an amalgamation of more than one fictional/legendary character, and more than once he steals the show with his actions; at one point he even does it while having lunch.
The ending is abrupt, but the entire thing had been leading organically up to it, so in the overall scheme it’s simply punctuation that serves a dual purpose. If you've followed the journey up until now then there’s no reason not to step aboard for the conclusion to the trilogy. If you've been hesitant because of how it was split over time, as was the case with Century it'll likely get a collected edition sometime in the future with new O'Neill cover art; an option is to wait for that.
3 broken lady parts out of 5
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