Daily Journal Of A Slacker

Moriarty appears in Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Recruited from university by British Intelligence, he supposedly set up his criminal empire as part of an undercover operation to monitor crime in London which got out of hand, to the point where the ‘cover’ became more real to Moriarty than his role in British Intelligence. Having survived the encounter with Sherlock Holmes, he went on to become the head of British Intelligence under the code-name “M” (a nod to the James Bond novels and films), but still maintained his criminal interests. He instigated the creation of the League as a covert ops unit with plausible deniability and used them to recover an anti-gravity mineral called Cavorite which had been stolen by his crime lord rival The Doctor. He then used the Cavorite to bomb the East End of London in an attempt to destroy The Doctor but was thwarted by the League which had uncovered the double-cross. Following his supposed death (indicated, but not clearly portrayed, as he “falls” into the sky while clutching the Cavorite), he was ironically succeeded as “M” by Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s older brother. In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, it is suggested that Jack Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty (from On the Road) is his great-grandson, and the rivalry between the two criminals is continued by the fact that The Doctor’s great-grandson is Kerouac’s other creation, Doctor Sax. In the third volume of the series, set over 60 years later, Mina Murray comes across his carcass, still holding onto the cavorite inside a block of ice floating through space.