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.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 1910

1910

Although I read The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 1910 just a year ago, I am already fuzzy on the details. Alan Moore discarded the use of easy chronological volumes after vol. 2, and started jumping around in the time stream as well as jumping around in style, prose and the use of storytelling as a way of telling a story. Although some of the results are brilliant in my estimation, many of the faithful became disenchanted quickly. Looking up obscure fictional characters starts losing its charm when you've never heard of them and aren't convinced they were worthy of reincarnation. This particular book had almost 650 ratings on Goodreads, and nearly 100 reviews written, most of them bad. And, well, I gotta say I agree.

We do get to see some familiar characters, and the development of some pretty good new characters (namely Nemo's daughter "Pirate Jenny" and Orlando, an immortal multi-gender member of the League). There are a few other teasers of Oliver Haddo and storylines to be further developed in the ever-postponed conclusion to the Century trilogy. But mostly the story drags, the characters fail to elicit wonder or excitement and if Moore was going for a down-beat mid-chapter ala' The Two Towers or the Empire Strikes Back, he missed the mark- which would be having the reader give a crap.

If I had the time or resources, I would expand this blog entry to highlight some of my recurring characters and how they fit into this story. But the truth is - and it hurts me to say this about one of my favorite writers and one of my favorite series - this comic is weak and not worthy of taking time away from things in my real life like scrubbing toilets or packing a sack lunch for work tomorrow.

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.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

1898

One would think that this blog is subversively dedicated to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and in some ways I guess that's true. My posts, anyway, and my hand in creating and naming the blog.

I'm actually quite tempted to skip reviewing this comic book series altogether. Enough has been said about it in plenty of other blogs. Heck, Alan Moore probably would rather not discuss it himself. And nothing will ever, ever, ever wash away the vomit-burp taste of that movie adaptation. I could talk about how the League influenced my desire to read everything ever written in chronological order, but you can read that here.

I could use the crossover forum to talk about how I have always been a fan of friend crossover in real life. That is to say, I enjoy introducing people to each other. This helps explain why I was an early adopter of online social networking. I think I read an article on Friendster and was instantly fascinated. But in the real world I have long seen a parallel between my groups of friends and crossovers. Hear me out.

I have moved around a lot. Although in some ways I have suffered a lack of deep roots I have more than made up for it by meeting so many wonderful people all over the country and world. In some cases we have formed informal clubs or gangs, a trend I am usually spearheading. These groups are sometimes named and identified, other times we just know who we are in a more subversive and subconscious sort of way. I can trace it as far back as a Monty Python inspired middle school club called the Confused Morons. In it's current incarnation it would be PFAC, a 'Guy's Night Out' sort of group that exists in several different incarnations, or perhaps chapters would be a good way of putting it. This blog is one such sub-set. At times I realize that I have been a fringe member of other cliques, gangs, or general groups of friends.

What I really get a kick out of, though, is the rare occasions that I have been able to get a friend from one era of my life to come and "party" with another group of friends. Everyone loves to introduce old friends to new ones, stop looking at me so weird. It's just that I tend to see it more in the light of Wolverine dropping by the Justice League HQ to hang out with Batman.



And yes, I realize that this blog actually will not encourage anyone to hang out with me.

Back to the Extraordinary League of Gentlemen!!! Fans of comic books have grown quite bored with promotionalized crossovers like Marvel vs. DC, it's been quite overdone.

Alan Moore put a huge spin on things, though, when he used Victorian characters from unliscensed literature and dropped them in a steampunk world. He dusted off dudes that both we and our parents grew up with as the standard in fantasy and science-fiction, honored their true roots and origins at the same time as he revamped them to be much cooler.



Not everyone is as enraptured by crossover fiction and old English writing, but I find the depth of detail of each subsequent volume to be mind-blowing. By volume three I cease toting it's merits and simply advise lazy readers to stick the the NY Times list. Understanding the background, hints, easter eggs, characters and storylines of the ongoing series is so overwhelming that only those willing to treat the series as a homework assignment in the history of fantasy and fiction are prepared to enjoy it. Writers of comics that require annotations are to be honored... because that's AWESOME.

Unfortunately, the 1988 version of the League as assembled by "Doc" Brown is a fake.


Next Up: Memoirs of a Revolutionist.