...Okay, haven't read the prose section yet but I finished the comic.
And...well, the references DO seem less overwhelming than last time, probably as much as anything because Moore and O'Neill know a lot more about 1969 pop culture than 2009 pop culture. There ARE still those irritating damn panels that are just, like, a shot of Mina and Orlando running away in the distance while we get a closeup of some damn group of people I don't recognize, but they seem like they're taking up less of the book.
And now and again a cameo actually serves a thematic purpose to the story -- Captain Jack and Doctors 1 and 10 in the corners of panels where Mina is asking Orlando how she deals with immortality.
Biggest gut punch, of course, is Platform 9 3/4 and Hogwarts. That's where this book manages to become genuinely fucking unsettling, and actually use our shared culture to DO it. I mean, LoEG is a book where we've seen Polyanna raped by the Invisible Man and Winnie-the-Pooh revealed as a horrifying creation of Dr. Moreau, but neither one of those packed the kind of power of comforting children's imagery corrupted that this sequence does. (Which is something, considering that I was in my late teens before I read any Harry Potter and my mid-twenties by the time the last book came out.)
Past that, it's all pretty much downhill; Zara, you nailed the point that everyone's pretty much going through the motions and not actually doing much of anything. But I think that's by design; Mina spells it out when she compares 1909 to 2009 and says that the people today don't have the same spirit. Mina, Lando, Allan, and the Moonchild all act out their roles because that's what they're supposed to do, but none of them really wants to be there and none of them really accomplishes much of anything. Welcome to the twenty-first century.
All in all, it's not very satisfying but it's thought-provoking, which probably applies to most of Moore's recent work.
And hey, did he go a whole issue without anybody getting raped? Or am I supposed to infer something horrifying from that panel where McGonagall's dress is torn?