The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier

1958



We return to another installment of the series sure to pop up in the hundreds of Google and Bing searches for the Quorum of Gentlemen due to the number of times I can add the word gentlemen to a blog with the word gentlemen in the title. Gentlemen, start your engines.

Critic and fan reviews of this installment of Alan Moore's crossover fiction series were mixed (and that doesn't count the folks who conspired to ban it from libraries). Rather than a straightforward story told in a series of comic book installments, the Black Dossier is a coffee-table style book full of a mixed-media pastiche of things to look at and read. There is a linear comic story featuring the primary protagonists of the league, Mina Murray and Allan Quatermain, in which they largely spoof James Bond in the setting of Orwells' Big Brother London (who came to power in 48, not 84... Orwell had it wrong, you see). Other sections, however, are frequently comprised of text and prose, and jump over several decades hinting at larger adventures of the League and expanding on other fictional characters with little to no relevance to the League, other than Moore squeezing them into the LoEG world. Which suits me just fine. Yes, I am tantilized by pictures and stories about Fanny Hill. Sue me.

The bad: It's just so much. Where the League stories traditionally hint and tease at a world full of fictional characters, it is generally not necessary to research the characters and the 200 references in the background. But the Dossier is purely a vehicle for Alan Moore to flex his literary and cultural muscles and indulge in crossover self-pleasuring. Unfortunately, softer fans of crossover fiction who had hoped for a Watchmen style epic found themselves confused and longing for a more normal story. Yeah, Alan, you're just too smart.

The good: It's just so well done. Moore mimics a variety of writing styles, in addition to the core storyline which retains his own writing voice. And many of the included characters suprise- we expected HP Lovecraft, but we didn't know that the Unknown Ones would have to contend with Jeeves & Wooster! Kerouac gets in on the action, and 100 other folks which even I had a hard time getting through without using Google. The main story culminates in a transdimensional journey crafted in 3-D by an expert in the field, Ray Zone. I'm the first to agree that 3-D often isn't so great, but I contend that the 3-D artwork here is one of the finest things I have ever viewed while wearing stupid looking glasses. Granted, it would have probably been better on drugs, mostly because the story would have made more sense.

In conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, the Black Dossier is a clumsy and overwhelming mess guaranteed to make anyone except Alan Moore feel like a moron. But it is a crossover fiction fan's wet dream and I loved it, loved it, loved it. I highly recommend that anyone who is a fan of comic book art at least get it from your local library in order to check out the 3-D section.

Deities & Demigods

Knowing that I have some sort of copy of the old D&D handbook 'Deities & Demigods', I had hoped to scan a picture of the Cthuhlu pages into my last HP Lovecraft blog post. But while searching D&D online today for other unnamed and unspeakable reasons, I came across this chestnut from an old favorite blog page, Something Awful. I think these guys cover the topic well enough as is!

Dungeons & Dragons: Deities & Demigods (Cthulhu Edition)

Enjoy!

Cthulhu Mythos (or How I Learned To Love the Yuggoth)

1920's

HP Lovecraft: Tales

H.P. Lovecraft! YES! I had no familiarity with this man's writings beyond knowing that he was an under-appreciated horror writer, friend of the guy who created Conan, and had a primary monster, Cthulhu, which I was hard pressed to get much information about online.

And there's the beauty of Lovecraft. To learn about the forbidden mysteries of his universe will leave you a wrecked, insane man. Turns out our world is teeming with all sorts of alien, inter-dimensional, ancient magical monsters and under-world gods who are biding their time to take our brains into outer space, turn our children into giant retards, subjugate mankind into subservience and just generally creep us out. But you rarely get to see these guys! Mostly you just hear their names in ancient forbidden texts, hear some scraping sounds, have the eerie feeling that you're being watched in your sleep, and then you find out your professor friend who had been studying the Necronomicon has disappeared leaving nothing behind but some spongy green footprints on his rug. It's the fact that Lovecraft leaves the best parts of his creations to the imagination which has helped fuel both his popularity, as well as the popular conceit that his wild and ficticious tales are, in fact, a way of covering up very real events and creatures.

The sad part of Lovecraft's legacy is the lack of movie adaptations- a lack both in quantity and quality. I recently tried watching the movie In Search of Lovecraft and was horribly bored and disinterested by the home-movie quality of it; I'm sure it was just about to get interesting, too. To be honest, I haven't checked out everything there is on DVD, I think there is a documentary that ought to be worthwhile. The stiff writing style, heavy focus on scientific pondering over action, and overall trend toward UNHAPPY ENDINGS makes Lovecraft very hard to adapt. In a suprising twist of timeliness, the recent big budget adaptation of Lovecraft's 'At the Mountains of Madness' by Guillermo del Toro has just been cancelled, or at least put on hold. Why? Because del Toro wants an R rating. I guess I understand the concept that adult movies bring in less money than Toy Story, but would anyone question making a Saw movie or Stephen King movie R rated? It's HORROR, people. Making a Lovecraft film family-friendly would assure low profits- because it would SUCK. Sure, the bulk of the movie may be scientists struggling to survive in the artic and then exploring a deserted alien city... but it wouldn't be Lovecraft if they didn't eventually stumble upon something that would make the audience scream and then throw up all that popcorn they ate.


Book review-wise, it's hard to recommend Lovecraft even when you love him. Aside from a stiff 1920's writing style, a lot of his stories involve some doctor-type finding an old dusty journal that belonged to some old doctor-type who has written detailed notes on his research. After reading that type of turn of the century prose long enough to nearly fall asleep ten times, someone gets their brain removed or turns into a monster and you're wondering WTF. So the truth is it's a lot of work to read, and the overall theme that the protagonists generally wish themselves dead after gaining knowledge of the universe around them makes Lovecraft hard to feel warm and fuzzy about. But nonetheless, it is awesome.

Given Lovecraft's moderate success, he would probably have not imagined the inspiration most modern horror writers attribute to him now. For a guy like me who gets off on esoteric references and crossover, Lovecraft's world is a playland of multidimensional and magical possibilities. Some of his creations were featured in the first two editions of the D&D Dieties and Demigods handbooks. There is a Call of Cthulhu Lovecraft RPG game where the only way to win is to gain knowledge of the unknown, and consequently all player characters go insane upon winning the game. I could go on and on. But as far as crossovers go, let's just say that it's no coincidence that Batman's local asylum is named after a town in Lovecraft's books that hosts quite a few bizarre inhabitants. And if memory serves, Lovecraft was fond of inserting sly references to the Hyborian Age of Conan, as much as Howard slyly inserted dark gods from the netherworld into his writings, and actually wrote a few Cthulhu stories himself.
The book series I am currently reading, The Illuminatis! Trilogy, contains heavy Lovecraft referencing, as well as references to a lot of my other blog content as part of- well, I'll save that for another post.

In conclusion- while HP Lovecraft may not fit the fancy of readers of contemporary pop horror, or fans of slasher flicks and torture-porn, true devotees of the occult and things that go bump in the middle of the night need to get schooled on the master.

The Magician

1908

The Magician

I had to read this book online. I couldn't find a hard copy anywhere for a reasonable price. Since I didn't own a Kindle or IPad or laptop or anything cool like that at the time, and being that I'm too cheap to print it out (and thought that would be a lame way to read it, anyway) I was forced to sit in front of a desktop computer like a savage and read this book on the internet, where it exists in it's entirety. So being that I couldn't read it on a plane, in the bathroom, at bedtime or while eating cereal, it took me forever to actually get through the damn thing. And like a lot of old Victorian fiction I wondered more than once if it was going to be worth it.

Turns out it was.

The villian, Oliver Haddo, is a thinly disguised Aleister Crowley, and both the real dark-arts magician as well as this fictional alter-ego reoccur as an influence in a lot of the stuff I read. Haddo himself appears occasionally in other literature (including, unsuprisingly, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). Maugham, who is better known for his book Of Human Bondage, allegedly met Crowley once and found him to be unlikable. So he wrote a book demonizing the guy to the nth degree. I mean, Haddo is vile. So Crowley wrote an editorial criticising both the book and his treatment in it. But he wrote the editorial under the psuedonym Oliver Haddo. I imagine he did so as an ironic jab at Maugham, but in the long run I think he only solidified the relationship between the two identities.

The foil to Haddo is his old collegiate acquantance, Dr. Porhoet. Porhoet ties the story together through his friendship with the younger main characters, whose names I can't recall because it's really not that important. Dr. Porhoet is essentially a Van Helsing stand-in, and a poor one at that. He does nothing to protect the main characters, chooses to give no advice rather than risk giving bad advice, and basically exposes the innocent young lovers of the story to Haddo. Where Van Helsing was a knowledgable hero, Porhoet waits until it is truly too late to do anything practical and attempt to atone for his passive inaction throughout the novel. What a lame-ass.

The nameless main characters are nonetheless likable and carry on a love triangle type of story that almost holds a good deal of interest in itself. Well, almost. Their run-ins with the loathsome and despicable Oliver Haddo are exciting, vulgar, mysterious and full of arcane Satanic esoterica that proves the amount of time Maugham spent in libraries doing his homework on black magic. But the long periods of time where the characters do nothing much but anguishing over their passive aggressive relationships and doing too little too late to resolve any but the simplest of problems drags the story down.

I strongly recommend this book to fans of the occult. Where casual readers will lose interest quickly due to the slow pace and narrow theme, dark magic affectionados will savor every mention of historical and mythological esoteric-a. The ending will touch the heart of HP Lovecraft fans as the work of Haddo is exposed for a gruesome abomination that must have sickened readers at the turn of the century. Overall I didn't give this book a super awesome rating, but it still earned it's loving place in my crossover universe timeline.

SPECIAL BONUS:
Rex Ingram made a 1926 movie adaptation of the book, and I have served up a slice of yummy silent black and white film footage video clip for you. Try to figure out who are the young lovers (Arthur and Maggie, I think are their names!) and who is the evil Oliver Haddo. If you can't figure it out, the captions will surely clear everything up.



Although I do remember a snake charmer scene in the novel, I can't testify that there was a sailor, balloon hat guy or that the story took place in Germany.