The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1910

Alan Moore's most recent installment in his epic League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series is the first of three stories under the title 'Century', all of which are to be self contained narratives, but which will together slow burn towards telling a truly apocalyptic tale. As this title opens, it is 1910 and George V is about to be crowned king. Mina Murray now leads a revised team of agents to the crown: Allan Quartermain Jr. (in fact the original Quartermain grown younger after finding the secret to eternal life), the "gentleman thief" A.J Raffles, occultist and ghost hunter Thomas Carnacki and Virginia Woolf's Orlando, who has been part of several incarnations of the League before.

The conspiracy the team investigate this time around is uncovered through Carnacki's visions: he sees reknowned occultist Haddo preparing a "moonchild", chaos on the waterfront and danger to the King. The investigation brings the team into confrontation with the daughter of former League member Captain Nemo, a young woman who initially refuses her birth right, but later embraces it. The old themes of teamwork, corruption and destruction are all there and the dizzying array of references to all aspects of culture are maintained, in true steampunk fashion.

However, this is, on the merits of purely this first part, the least satisfying League volume to date. It seems to lack the depth of Volumes One and Two, as well as the larger than life characters (Raffles and Carnacki are relatively obscure literary figures) and a truly dastardly villain (in fact, the reader isn't given the satisfaction of knowing who the real villain is). One can only assume that the unanswered questions will be answered to an extent by July's release of 'Century: 1969'. The best part of this narrative relates to Nemo's daughter Janni, who not only indulges in a fine bit of naked swimming, but also turns out to be just as much of an anti establishment badass as her deceased father.

I wonder if maybe reading all four books one after the other meant that I had League fatigue when reading this one, because it didn't have the same impact on me as the others did. I may well re-read this edition of the series at a later date, as I may have missed something that would make it the equal of the earlier releases.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier (Alan Moore)

In many ways, this was the installment of Alan Moore's intriguing graphic novel series that I had been looking forward to most. A browse of Wikipedia back in May had told me that this stand alone source book was partly set in a reality following the era of Ingsoc from George Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty Four', and well, I needed no further information to be sold on the novel than that. 'Nineteen Eighty Four' is the book that changed everything for me as a teenager, and one that allowed me to access a whole new world of literature once I'd read it. Alan Moore takes the intertextuality to giddy new heights with 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier', not only weaving in multiple characters from fiction, mythology, history and folk tales, but also experimenting with multiple literary forms and making intertextual links between his already existing League texts.

The concept is incredibly clever: the traditional comic narrative follows Mina Murray and Allan Quartermain, both ageless following a bath in Ayesha's Eternal Flame in Uganda some decades previously, as they locate, steal and attempt to escape Britain with the eponymous Black Dossier, a collection of intelligence on all of the previous incarnations and members of the League, including their foreign counterparts from the 1910s, Les Hommes Mysterieux and Zweilicht-Helden. The narrative takes the form of the traditional chase between opposing intelligencers familiar from many spy films and stories, with Mina (now a blonde bombshell in a trenchcoat) and Allan (looking much sprightlier than last time we saw him) being pursued by Jimmy, a brutal, amoral spy (clearly a youthful and thinly veiled James Bond), Bulldog Drummond (of pulp magazine fame) and Miss Emma Night (a pre-marriage Emma Peel from 'The Avengers'). The story takes place in 1958, two years after the fall of the Ingsoc government (the in-universe explanation for this being that Orwell came up with the title of 'Nineteen Eighty Four' by reversing the year he wrote the book in 'Nineteen Forty Eight', thus the reader is led to assume that the Ingsoc regime lasted at least eight years), and within the pages of the dossier, evidence of conspiracy soon emerges, causing Mina to persuade Allan to investigate it with her before they escape into the ether. This narrative frames the contents of the dossier itself, with each comic book escapade ending with Mina and Allan sitting down to read the various items that make up the dossier.

You have to give props to Alan Moore and his illustrator Kevin O'Neill for the sheer ambition and cheek of the series of parodies they attempt (the storyline explanation is that these materials were collected for Big Brother by "Gerry O'Brien", a presence based on the terrifying Inner Party member who entraps and tortures Winston Smith in 'Nineteen Eighty Four). Through these works of literature and "field reports" we learn more about the history of the League than ever. The first item in the dossier is an account of the history of the occult in Britain, with the metafictional world of Moore asserting that Queen Elizabeth I (here known as "Gloriana") was in fact a fairy and a patron of fairies and the magical (this aspect of her character being taken from 'The Faerie Queen' by  Edmund Spenser), while her successor, King James I (here known as "King Jacob") was puritanical and pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing against those with fairy blood. It was Gloriana who allegedly set up the first league, led by Prospero from Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' and aided by Virginia Woolf's gender switching and ageless Orlando. The following section is a spoof state porn booklet re-telling the story of Winston and Julia from 'Nineteen Eighty Four', which is amusingly done, and that is followd by the real jewel in the crown of this dossier, an extract from a folio of a "lost" Shakespeare play 'Faerie's Fortune's Founded', featuring Prospero, Orlando and the ancestor of Campion Bond (from the first volume of 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen') and presumably Jimmy also. Everything about this play parody is authentic, from the alliterative title to the iambic pentameter the characters speak in. Alan Moore clearly has a great deal of fun here, naming the two comic characters "Shyte" and "Pysse" and following it with a scholarly note on the text. The section after that raises temperatures still further, being a "sequel" to the Eighteenth Century erotic novel 'Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure' starring Fanny Hill, whose further erotic adventures upon joining the League are written in the same style of the orginal novel. If that doesn't get you hot under the collar, O'Neill's incredible illustrations, featuring heaving bosoms, tiny waists and well turned ankles galore, will.

The second tranche of dossier materials includes Campion Bond's memoirs about the first Murray group (Mina Murray, Allan Quartermain, Edward Hyde/Henry Jekyll,  Captain Nemo, Hawley Griffin) as well as a collection of correspondence between members of the group and a run down of the French and German attempts to form similar groups out of individuals with unusual abilities. An attempt at a new P.G Wodehouse Jeeves and Wooster story falls rather flat for me, as does the first full blown entry in the third dip into the dossier, a parodic stab at a beat novel featuring Quartermain and Murray as involved characters. The final entry of the dossier is a report by the Head of British Intelligence to O'Brien, following O'Brien's supposed promotion to Party Leader, implying that O'Brien himself is in danger of removal.

The conclusion to the comic strip story is interesting, with the Extraordinary pair taking a ship piloted by toys back to the "Blazing World", a "Fourth Dimension" outside of time and reality inhabited by many of the "gifted" individuals we have met along the way as well as a plethora of fairy folk. All in all, this is an incredibly satisfying book that not only ties up a whole bunch of loose ends but also leaves many open for Moore to explore later on. The Cold War paranoia and general sense of tension is very real, and the lack of morality shown by British Intelligence is consistent with previous outings. The thing I enjoy most of all, however, is the title of the Graphic Novel. With this entry being published in 2007, four years after the "dodgy dossier" that justified war in Iraq, I can only assume that Alan Moore was quietly mocking that entire enterprise. This collection of materials and sources is a fantastic read, especially if you are savvy enough to pick up the references, satires, parodies and homages. Now I'm looking forward to the most recently published entry in the series, following Mina Murray's adventures in 1910...

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Volume Two (Alan Moore)

Having bought the entire canon of League titles from Amazon just over a week ago, I am now at the half way mark in my reading. Volume Two of the saga picks up barely twelve months after the end of the first adventure, in 1898. In a homage to science fiction novels by C.S Lewis and Edwin Lester Linden Arnold, mankind have walked the surface of Mars and have assembled a coalition to help native Martians drive away an alien threat. These aliens learn about Earth by spying on the heroic earthlings fighting on Mars and launch themselves to Earth, where they may find less well prepared defenders. From this point, the story morphs into a retelling of H.G Wells' 'The War of the Worlds' (the aliens expelled from Mars are indeed the same pod bound hostiles Wells describes) with the League forming the first line of Britain's defence.

Once again, Alan Moore manages to stitch together multiple works of fiction to form the metaworld that frames the action. The story barrels along at a cracking pace, and one thing I particularly enjoyed about this edition was the way the tensions of wartime are rendered; the lack of certainty and the desperation of the characters really comes through, most memorably in a loving, passionate but awkward sex scene between Quartermain and Harker. The characters develop further from their positions in Volume One: Griffin's untrustworthy nature grows to untenable levels, Hyde's affection for Mina is his motivation for some brutal revenge on the man who rapes her, Mina reflects on her experiences at the hands of Dracula and Nemo's ironic sense of justice and honour leads him to not only serve the Empire he hates to the best of his abilities but also to leave the League at the end of the Volume. There are multiple modern motifs of wartime morality- germ warfare, ethnic cleansing, lions being led by donkeys- and through these motifs Moore interrogates the validity of war itself.

The additional material at the end of the Volume is a 'Traveller's Almanac' which gives the most comprehensive overview yet of the alternate historical reality Moore has created from the literature and legends of the world. It is written in the pedantic and verbose style of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries and as such is actually rather a chore to read, though one of course admires greatly the scholarship and vision behind it. What become clear from this document is that there have been many different incarnations of the League, all of whom contributed to the knowledge gathered together in the almanac. This revelation foreshadows the events of the next entry in the series 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier', but more on that very soon...