| Product: |
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - Alan Moore |
| Date: |
31.03.03 (480 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: British Summer Time - lighter evenings! Yay!
Disadvantages: Lost a whole hour of precious sleep when the clocks went forward
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a comic, or graphic novel if you prefer. You probably don't like comics; they're only for children, after all. Your loss, frankly. While it's true that most English-language comics are indeed aimed at children, and also that many that claim to be aimed at adults are in fact infantile drivel, there is a surprisingly large number of comics for grown-ups that are actually very good. I've been reading them for years, and have occasionally attempted to persuade you, the readers of dooyoo, to sample them too. Which I'm going to assume you haven't done, but that's OK.
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (or LOEG, because I'm damned if I'm going to type out its full name every time I mention it) is a comic that's OK for grown-ups to read (I doubt that children would enjoy it much, and there are bits of it that I don't think kids should read anyway). It is, admittedly, a superhero comic, but with enough novelty and inventiveness that it doesn't really come across as such. Comics in which a gang of already-popular superheroes gang up together to fight crime have always been popular, the prototype being the Justice League of America, starring Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and an assortment of B-list supporting characters. That idea is the basis of LOEG, except that instead of using comic book superheroes it uses characters from Victorian fiction.
The year is 1898. Miss Mina Murray (from Dracula) has been recruited by the British secret service (which is run by an enigmatic figure known only as 'M', although everyone knows that he's really Mycroft Holmes, brother of Sherlock). Mina, a bit of a cold fish who has just divorced her husband, is sent out to recruit other extraordinary characters, and they form a League to fight against threats to the safety of the Empire. She finds Captain Nemo, a terrifying Sikh with an astonishing submarine. Alan Quartermain (from
King Solomon's Mines) is recruited in an opium den in Arabia, a drug-addled wreck. Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde is discovered murdering prostitutes in Paris (on the Rue Morgue, no less). And Griffin, the Invisible Man is hiding out in a girls' boarding school, doing what most men would probably do if they were invisible and hiding in a girls' boarding school. Although the characters are united for the common good, they don't really like each other very much (and of course two of them are out and out villains), and their antagonism provides much of the entertainment.
The story is set after the various appearances of the characters in their original settings, so strictly speaking Mina should have had a baby, and Hyde and Griffin and possibly Nemo should be dead, but that's a minor quibble. The government's stocks of 'Cavorite' (an anti-gravitational element as seen in HG Wells' First Men in the Moon) have been stolen by a mysterious, diabolical Chinaman based in Limehouse (obviously Fu Manchu, although never named for copyright reasons). The League have to recover the Cavorite before the devil doctor can put his fiendish plans into operation, although there are some other nasty surprises along the way.
It was written by Alan Moore, the most consistently interesting comic writer. He's best known for writing rather grim epic stories like the end-of-the-world superhero conspiracy story Watchmen and the mystical time-travelling Jack-the-Ripper tale From Hell. Great comics, but not a lot of humour on display. LOEG, on the other hand, is very funny from beginning to end (Moore can do comedy as well as anyone; he wrote the funniest comic I've ever seen, DR & Quinch for 2000 AD). The humour derives mostly from the various styles of Victorian melodrama that he parodies throughout the series, although there's some very funny interplay between the main characters, too, especially Hyde and Griffin. The story is chock full of
cameos by other famous 19th century literary characters (Poe's Dupin, Zola's Nana, Sherlock Holmes and the Artful Dodger, among others). While this could have been a bit tiresome, and come across as Alan Moore having a bit too much fun with his own cleverness, it works surprisingly well. And although I haven't read the specific work of Victorian pornography from which the girls' school is taken, I think I get enough of the idea that I can still appreciate the joke.
The series does have some vaguely shocking moments of violence and sex (although I don't think there's even so much as a female nipple on display anywhere). It has been accused of misogyny and racism, what with its rather casual attitude to Griffin sexually molesting adolescent girls and the depictions of the yellow-peril-style Chinese. These are entirely appropriate given the specific styles of Victorian narrative that Moore pastiches, although whether you think that's justification enough will probably determine how you react to the comic. I don't have a problem with it, but then I tend to find olden-days attitudes hysterically funny rather than offensive.
The art is by Kevin O'Neill, who, like Moore, is an alumnus of the English science fiction comic 2000 AD. His art style is uniquely stylised and suits the story perfectly. I can't really find a way to describe it - try Aubrey Beardsley meets old Victorian newspaper illustrations if you like, although that doesn't really quite nail it. Unfortunately, good though O'Neill is, he's also incredibly slow. The first series was originally published in monthly installments, as most comics are. Except that they weren't monthly. The gaps between some of the issues lasted for anything up to four months, which got a bit frustrating if you wanted to know how the story ended. They got there in the end. (And to be fair not all the delays were due to the artist.) Volume two is currently being
published (dealing with the invasion of the Martians, from War of the Worlds, and the League's attempts to fight them - rather less light-hearted than the first series, but still great). Unfortunately only four of the six issues have been published, and with three months having already elapsed since the appearance of the most recent issue, and no new one in sight, I begin to despair of the series ever being completed. Which is annoying, as I really want to know how it all works out.
Anyway, the first series is collected in a one-volume edition. The individual issues were rather better than the collection, as they were full of fake adverts and had the funniest letters page I've ever seen, but they're not available to buy unless you're willing to fork out around £10 for each issue. The second series, when it finally limps to its conclusion, will doubtless also be collected. There may be a third series (Moore has hinted that there will be) - I do hope so.
There's a film of LOEG coming out soon, in the summer I think. They've completely changed the story and the relationships of the characters (Mina is the leader of the League in the comic, Sean Connery, presumably playing Quartermain, is the leader in the film). But the trailers look fairly entertaining, so I hope that it will be worth a look (unlike the film version of Moore's From Hell, which was dire). If the film does well then hopefully the comic will sell better. In the meantime, if you like sensational Victorian fiction then you could do a lot worse than check this out.
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