League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’s Century series was originally released in three volumes between 2010 and 2012 (wrapping up a year later than originally planned thanks to delays that now seem to be standard for any League title). They’re set, unsurprisingly, across a one hundred year span with each instalment offering something self-contained while at the same time contributing to a larger arc also detailed in the other two.

My feeling is that Century is where the League series began to show signs of flagging. I still feel that it’s the best thing Moore’s worked on, but this third volume does nothing to contribute to that. Rather it simply avoids being bad enough to ruin what I enjoyed about previous entries.

If you’re not familiar with the concept the idea is that Alan Moore (likely with some input from series artist Kevin O’Neill) has fashioned a universe that incorporates every fictional character ever created, in place of prominent real life figures. That idea is alive and well and is still at the centre of things as the series kicks off with Century: What Keeps Mankind Alive?, set in 1910. Sadly by the time the final part, Century: Let it Come Down, rolls around it feels as if things have gone off the rails a bit and the title has definitely lost a lot of its lustre.

The first chapter teases that it’s going to take the book back to its roots. It’s set just a decade after the climax of the second volume, which showed a failed Martian invasion of Earth. In the intervening years the surviving members of the original line-up have disbanded and a new gang, operating under the same name has formed.

Moore seems to go out of his way to emphasise that this group is not as effective, or indeed charming, as the original. Which is in one way fine and in another ay quite irritating. The author’s point seems to be that this is a second string group both within the confines of the fictional League universe as well as for him as a writer. He doesn’t seem to want them to be viewed as the equals of their predecessors because they’re not as well-known to readers and because within the narrative they are not as powerful. It’s a nice idea but he does such a hatchet job on the new League that the book becomes difficult to enjoy.

Paint it Black moves things forward to 1969. We get hints at unseen line-ups but they amount to nothing substantial (which is in character for Moore, but as a reader I’d like to know more about these groups). Instead Moore focuses his efforts even more on the plot that threads the three chapters together. It involves Oliver Haddo, an interpretation of Aleister Crowley so metafictional I’m surprised the world didn’t implode when Moore wrote it, jumping around some bodies and attempting to summon forth a Moonchild who will end the world. For all he rails against generic superhero book-style plots he seems to enjoy writing them.

The 1969 instalment comes complete with the obligatory drug-induced dream sequences which are frankly a little lazy. They’re impressively realised by O’Neill but you’d think that someone with Alan Moore’s reputation and alleged inventiveness would be keen to buck trends and stereotypes. To see him writing exactly the sort of thing everyone would expect him to write for scenes set in 1969, and worse, exactly the sort of thing everyone else writes, is disappointing.

The final chapter wraps everything up about as well as can be expected. The Moonchild finally gets summoned and is revealed, to the surprise of nobody familiar with the book’s internal logic, to be a Harry Potter character. Of far more interest in the final volume is seeing the bleed of television into the League world turn into an unstoppable flood. This includes Moore writing The Thick Of It’s Malcolm Tucker. If you’re into unexpected writer-character mash-ups you’ll probably find something to enjoy about that.

The Century trilogy is where Moore seemed to stop writing the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to ensure there was a fun comic on shelves and instead turns it into one of the many books he writes to show us his theories and views on the world. It’s telling that the most enjoyable thing about the entire two hundred page plus story is a short sequence which sees Allan Quartermain spending some time as John Constatine at the end of the 1980s. That could have supported an entire issue in itself. That it was relegated to a throwaway scene tells you all you need to know about where Moore’s priorities lay when writing the series.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier

Black Dossier was the first true sign that Alan Moore was going to do more with the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen than just make them a Victorian era Justice League. It’s set decades after the original two books in the series, with the League having become a thing of the past and its two remaining heroes, along with series newcomer Orlando, off having adventures of their own.

For a while Black Dossier was hard to come by in Britain. The concept of plucking fictional characters from their original works and dropping them into a shared universe was fine for Victorian creations because their rights are all public domain, available for anyone to use. Doing the same thing for creations of the thirties, forties and later is trickier because of copyright laws. In particular there were some issues regarding the appearance of James Bond.

I’m unaware of exactly how the issue was sorted out. I find it hard to believe that either party backed down. Clearly something happened though, because Black Dossier is now as readily available through the usual comic book channels as anything else.

As with the original two volumes of the series one of the best things about Black Dossier is the world building. Much of this takes place, rather cleverly, during lulls in the plot that see Mina and-or Allan settling down to read the titular Dossier. It’s essentially a collection of stories, propaganda pieces, documents, diaries, and even postcards that flesh out the world of the League into a thoroughly believable fictional setting.

This level of detail regarding the background and backdrop is far more impressive than the plot itself. The story is basically a lengthy series of captures and escapes, interspersed with the lulls and bouts of action. It holds together very well, but without the world being so interesting I have a feeling Black Dossier would be a frightfully dull affair.

The number of ideas on display is staggering. We discover that the literary golden age of sci-fi that we experienced resulted in rocket travel, hover cars, and robots being commonplace in the League world; there was a Orwellian dictatorship government that sprang up in 1948 (the year Nineteen Eighty Four was published); William Shakespeare was a favoured playwright of the first faerie queen of Britain; and there were other attempts at forming a League following the incarnation seen in the original series. These are my personal highlights. There are plenty more in what was a very inventive book. Of course there are the less obvious visual references too and probably plenty I’ve missed, but that’s part of the fun.

Black Dossier’s format difference is largely due to the fact that it wasn’t originally intended as a follow-up to the first two volumes. Moore originally intended to write out the information in a more conventional manner, strictly for his own use. He decided to turn it into a published work when he became overcome with guilt (or something to that effect) at putting Kevin O’Neill out of work. This is an actual statement made by Moore. He didn’t touch on O’Neill’s ability to work elsewhere. Perhaps it didn’t occur to him.

Black Dossier doesn’t quite hit the same heights as the first two entries in the series but that’s not the worst thing in the world. The standard was set incredibly high and a slip was going to happen sooner or later. While the plot isn’t quite as rich this book is a triumph when it comes to fleshing out the incredibly dense history and nature of the League of the Extraordinary Gentlemen universe. That’s Alan Moore’s greatest strength as a writer, and this is a shining example.

Nemesis the Warlock

In the grim darkness of the far future one man wages a war on the oppressive Termite Empire (humanity). That man is Nemesis the Warlock, and he's not actually a man. He's an alien. That's actually the reason he's waging his war. Humanity, you see, is going to become a rather xenophobic bunch once we start encountering alien species. They're going to be outlawed and humans are going to have a rather bad reputation.

Well that's the story here at any rate, as told in the grim darkness of the pages of 2000 AD. The premise may suggest a serious tone that looks at the nature of segregation and oppression. To an extent that's true. This is one of the more political characters from the anthology magazines back catalogue, and those themes are explored.

It's not the sole focus of Nemesis though. That would have made for a dull, one note read with little chance of anything particularly interesting happening. There's a sense of grotesque humour present throughout Nemesis the Warlock and while the focus of it and the way it manifests shifts over the course of the books it never goes away. Whether it's backwater yokels being fearful of alien scum without comprehending how far they've drifted from the human gene pool or the stream of failures suffered by Torquemada, the head of the Inquisition, there's always something to stop things getting too serious.

This isn’t to imply that Nemesis is pure comedy. It has a sense of humour but it was written in part to give author Pat Mills a vehicle to express his displeasure and concern at the choices Margaret Thatcher was making as Prime Minister. The majority of storylines are influenced in some way by her premiership and Mills’ opposition to it.

The plot is simple enough. The idea started out as a handful of one-shots scripted by Mills and drawn by Kevin O'Neil (with later artistic contributions coming from a variety of other names, including a young Bryan Talbot). In these we didn't see Nemesis and only got a glimpse of his mission (the aforementioned war of attrition with the oppressive portion of humanity). They had a much smaller scale, with Nemesis seemingly only concerned with transport systems on Earth. When those proved popular lengthier storylines were planned, Nemesis had his backstory fleshed out, and we were introduced to the galaxy at large. It grew quickly into a book that allowed its creators to target religious zealots, dictatorships, Thatcherism, and the previously mentioned segregation and opression.

That's where Torquemada came in. In many ways Torquemada is a far more interesting character than Nemesis. I often find that to be the case with bad guys, although it’s usually due to the hero being poorly written and having no clear reason for being good beyond it being necessary for the plot. That's not true with Nemesis, we're shown that he has a family that he's fighting for and beyond that his motivations are kept blurred and vague. Which helps his appeal and believability a great deal. He clearly has something he believes in but it can’t be encapsulated in a handful of speech bubbles.

Torquemada is the driving force of the comic, the personification of what's wrong with the society we're presented with (and the one in which Nemesis was written by Mills and O’Neill). His manipulation of an entire race is an important tool in letting us know what the horrors of the world are, and he becomes more powerful once he's a ghost. Sounds a spoiler? It is, but not a huge one: Torquemada doesn’t stay alive for long.

Like much of the 2000 AD of its time Nemesis the Warlock can be hard to get into. It can help to take a break after the completion of a storyline. It's a pretty dense series to try ploughing through in a day but it can be done. As long as you read it at your own pace I think you'll enjoy it. It's well written and has something to say. Not enough comics (or books, TV shows or films for that matter) can make that boast.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

 

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen famously came about after Alan Moore had asked himself, over a morning snake-spell, what a Victorian Era Justice League would have been like. Superman, Batman and the Green Lantern were emphatically not the characters he had in mind when asking this. Moore was more interested in how fictional creations of the time would have interacted had they all existed within one metafictional universe (or story) and come together to form a group.

Plucked from the 19^th century are Wilhelmina Murray (of Dracula fame), aged explorer Allan Quatermain, the Invisible Man Hawley Griffin, scientist Dr Jekyll (along with the other fella you get one using him), and isolationist submariner Captain Nemo. Murray fashions them into an ill-functioning team to combat two threats to Britain, and the world, across two six issue series. The first series details a plot by Fu Manchu to attack Britain from the skies. The second sees an invasion by the Martians from HG Wells’ War of the Worlds.

Going off of these first paragraphs League of Extraordinary Gentlemen could sound like a simple reworking of various plots and characters. It’s not. Moore remains true to the spirit of the original material he calls upon and blends the characters seamlessly into a story that is wholly his own. League (as it is routinely shortened to) is an original work inspired by literature.

One crucial thing to note about the series is that it’s not necessary to have read or even be familiar with any of the characters Moore uses. To this day I’ve not read Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde but it didn’t spoil my enjoyment of their comic book appearance here. I wasn’t even aware of the heroine’s name in Dracula. That didn’t spoil my enjoyment either.

Yet there’s enough substance in Moore’s writing to be able to tell that the characters are being portrayed in a true fashion. Occasionally a sentence will crop up that seems incongruous, such as a reference to Dr Jekyll’s transformations originally making him smaller (included because that’s what happened in Stevenson’s novel). There are plenty of references of this kind, and there’s always a deal of satisfaction in understanding on, a knack I have more with later volumes set in periods I’m more familiar with. But as I say, it doesn’t spoil things for the rest of us.

The books are famed for being populated with bit part characters plucked from works of the period. Not knowing their origins doesn’t detract from the read. You’ll feel proud at spotting something but if you don’t notice a particular reference the book still stands up and makes sense in its own right.

Artist Kevin O’Neill is just as responsible for the series’ success as Moore. His artistic style is not something that lends itself to lengthy action sequences or broad shouldered heroes but is a perfect fit for a series that demands dozens of hidden details crammed onto each page. The almost sketch-like quality of O’Neill’s work (harsh, jagged lines are the order of the day) coupled with the subject matter gives the book a feel that no other comic has ever had.

It should also be noted that it’s Sullivan who includes most of the fictional figures who appear in crowd scenes. This is something that grows more prevalent in later volumes as the creators find their feet with the series. This is understandable. Moore is known for many things but an intimate knowledge of pop culture isn’t among them.

The first and second volumes are also notable for the extra material included in them. The first book includes a newly spun tale of Quatermain and paintings based on The Picture of Dorian Gray. The second volume features my favourite extra of the series: detailed accounts of Moore’s metafictional world, continent by continent. The amount of research, planning and thought that must have gone into these pages alone is staggering. It’s written in the style of a guide and is one of the series’ greatest triumphs.

The world of the League is such a simple idea it’s surprising nobody else had really done it before. It’s good that they didn’t though: Moore packs so much into his books, undertaking hefty amounts of research in order to make his work as accurate and authentic as possible, that it’s likely nobody else could have done the series justice in quite the same way. The level of detail speaks to the author’s love and enjoyment of literature. He is astonishingly well read, and it’s allowed him to construct what I believe is his greatest work.