THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN
by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill
America’s Best Comics
reviewed by Sam Gafford
I hate Alan Moore.
He’s just too damn good. It’s not bad enough that he wrote the mind-blowing “American Gothic” run on SWAMP THING. Or that he created WATCHMEN which went on to influence the entire comic industry (lately, Moore has stated that he regrets starting the whole ‘dark’ concept in comics). To make it worse, he and Eddie Campbell produced THE illustrated version of the Jack The Ripper case in FROM HELL. Now, he’s doing it again with THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN. damn him.
What makes it so bad is that this series is so good! There are a few writers who I will follow from project to project because their work is that good. Because when I pick up one of their books, I know that I’m guaranteed a good story. Neil Gaiman is one of these writers. Grant Morrison and James Robinson are on the list too. But Alan Moore is at the top. As the years have passed, Moore’s writing gets better and better and it’s astonishing to see how a writer who was already incredible has grown with time. LoEG continues in the tradition Moore set with FROM HELL by weaving a story that has an incredible amount of texture and reference. LoEG is deceptively basic. A group of people is brought together in turn of the century London to fight a threat to world peace. Sounds simple. Handled by any other writer, it would be. But Moore manages to make LoEG one of those titles where you find something new every time you read it.
The group of people brought together to fight this threat contain some of the most famous (or infamous) characters in English literature. In the first issue, Miss Mina Murray (from DRACULA) is recruited by Campion Bond (said to be an ancestor of James Bond) to bring together a most unusual team that includes Captain Nemo, the Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll (and Mr. Hyde), and former adventurer Allan Quartermain. The formation of this team takes up the majority of the first two issues and sets the tone for the rest of the series. Mina and Captain Nemo (who is finally portrayed as the character was written by Jules Verne and not in an imitation of James Mason) track down Quartermain who is lying in an opium den in Cairo. The only difficulty I have with the series is in the way that Quartermain is initially portrayed. He bears little resemblance to the legendary character in the H. Rider Haggard novels but Moore is able to show that the man has been fighting his own inner demons (and losing) and with each issue Quartermain becomes more of the man he used to be. Jekyll is shown to be a weak man, struggling with his own addiction in the same way that Quartermain is struggling with his. He can no longer control the change that brings about Hyde (and here Moore makes the parallel between Jekyll/Hyde and Marvel’s Incredible Hulk a little too obvious but, after all, Jekyll/Hyde did come first) and has to fight to maintain his composure or Hyde will bust loose. Strangest of all is the madman, Hawley Griffin, known as the Invisible Man. Revealed to have faked his death, he has been hiding in an all-girls boarding school, using his invisibility to do the types of things most people would imagine an invisible man would be doing in an all-girls school.
In the second issue, the plot moves along and we learn that the LoEG has been brought together to fight a specific threat. An unknown man has stolen the secret anti-gravity material, Cavorite, and it is up to the League to get it back before it is used by some rival nation or madman to destroy England. The third issue takes the team into the wretched London slum known as Limehouse in search of the mastermind behind the threat. Although it has yet to be confirmed, I don’t think it’s much of a risk for me to say that the main villain is likely to be the infamous Dr. Fu Manchu. The third issue ends with the team discovering the enemies stronghold where he is building machines to use the cavorite. It is a stupendous cliff hanger, which (after all) is the way in which this series is constructed.
Moore has done something unique in that the series is both reminiscent of a pulp thriller and yet appeals to a 90's sensibility. Moore has long understood that the format and packaging of a comic is nearly as important as the story within it. (Witness his 1963 series at Image.) To that end, he has included in each issue a text story about Quartermain and several pages of fake-period ads that add to the feeling that one is reading an old story. It helps transport the reader back to the time period of the story. Nowhere is there any evidence that this is a magazine that was published nearly 100 years after the story takes place. It shares the tone and feeling that many of the stories the characters originally came from had and expands it by weaving them back and forth. The reader shares in the characters feelings of being manipulated as they proceed from event to event and is left to wonder who is doing the manipulating? Is it the Mysterious ‘M’? Campion Bond himself? Or the sinister ‘Doctor’ who hides in the shadows of Limehouse?
Part of the delight in the series is picking up all the clues that Moore leaves lying about. Where did a particular character come from? What do certain things mean? At one point, Mina is looking at a picture in the League’s secret headquarters in the British Museum and we join her in trying to decipher who the people were and what their connection could have been. Is this not the first time a League has been created? Then there are all the little touches. Quartermain staring at an exhibit of the Cult of Ayesha; the skull of an adult male Yahoo; the inn whose name disturbs Mina so. Then of course, there is the episode in the Miss Rosa Coote’s Correctional Academy for Wayward Gentlewomen. Who would have thought that such an obscure and *ahem* ‘extreme’ Victorian novel like THE PEARL would have ended up in a comic book? The reader is as stunned as Mina, Nemo, and Quartermain as we are led through this most unprovincial woman’s school.
The artwork by Kevin O’Neill is nothing short of spectacular. It is strange, weird, quirky and suits the story perfectly. Moore has shown himself to be an astute judge of talent. He knows which artist should be on which book and uses their strengths to reinforce the story. I can no more imagine Chris Sprouse drawing LoEG as I could see Kevin O’Neill illustrating PROMETHEA. O’Neill’s work is vaguely nostalgic, evoking the period, while also having a freshness to it that is not often seen today. The patience and work he has put into this shows through in the amount of detail and reference in everything from backgrounds to character design to costuming. The several splash pages in the first issue are magnificent and the first appearance of the Nautilus is particularly spectacular.
This is primarily a series for adults. Not because of any mature themes present (although there is that sequence in the girls school with it’s hints of rape and s/m that are glossed over) but because it is doubtful that kids today would get the same kick out of seeing these characters. In today’s media soaked culture, I have a hard time believing that today’s youth would recognize characters like Mina Murray, Captain Nemo, or Allan Quartermain. Would they even know Hawley Griffin or would they simply think of the Invisible Man as being connected with some terribly embarrassing Chevy Chase movie? (But then most Chevy Chase movies are terribly embarrassing.) Some might know Jekyll and Hyde as they have become something of a cultural icon but I doubt that they would recognize these characters as they originally appeared and that is one of the strengths of this series. All of the characters are true to their original appearances. Moore has stripped away all of the cultural flotsam that has attached themselves to these characters and taken them back to their original focus. So doing, he has reintroduced the characters to a new audience in the way they should be.
Now I’m anxiously awaiting the remainder of the series and the other surprises Moore has in store for us.
damn him.