Captain Nemo

Few literary figures make the leap to comics with quite the gravitas of Captain Nemo, who surfaced in the landmark first issue of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in 1999. This DC series reimagined the great Victorian adventurer as a brooding, formidable presence among a remarkable gathering of fictional legends — sharing pages with the likes of Allan Quatermain, Wilhelmina Murray, the invisible Hawley Griffin, and the monstrous Mr. Edward Hyde. Moore and O'Neill's celebrated run, compact but enormously influential, treated Nemo not as a relic but as a figure of genuine menace and mystique, and that debut issue carries real key-issue weight for collectors of the Modern Age. Six catalog appearances may be a modest count, but in this company and under these creators, every one of them counts.