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The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (pt. 2): The Black Dossier

2007

I expected the follow-up to the second League mini-series to be more of the same. And I was somewhat disappointed that it wasn't. Instead of the further adventures of the League, The Black Dossier was a strange beast indeed: part-comic book, part-written word. I concentrated at first on the comic, depicting the misadventures of Mina Murray and Allan Quatermain in 1950s England. And then I read it again, from first page to last and then I understood what it was all about.

In a word: world-building.

This was already apparent in the second volume, wth the inclusion of the New Traveler's Alamanac, and the hints that the Mina Murray led League was only the last in a long line of such team-ups.

But Moore and O'Neill seemed now tired of hints and clues, and just wanted to reveal the entire big picture. Hence: The Black Dossier.

The ambitious tome bridged the gap between the late-19th century League and 1950s Britain where Murray and Quatermain now dwelt (the comic depicts their efforts to secure the Black Dossier while avoiding British secret operatives including James Bond*, Bulldog Drummond and a young Emma Peel*). In-between, Moore has insterted written excerpts of previously published work telling the story of the intervening years, brushing a far more complete portrait of the League's world (a technique Moore used in Watchmen with the excerpts of Hollis Mason's autobiography). No longer content in copy-pasting fictional characters and places unto the "real" world, Moore and O'Neill have apparently decided to fictionalise history itself (hence, WWII was not fought against Nazi Germany, led by one Adolf Hitler but by Adenoid Hynkel's Tomania, the fictional statesman portrayed in Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator), so now not only all fiction is true but all history is fiction. Clever, clever.

Furthermore, by moving the setting from the 19th to the 20th century, modern medias such as movies, comic books and television programmes offered Moore and O'Neill even more characters and situations to plunder for fun and games, as well as modern literary sources (for instance, post-war Britain fell into the totalitarian regime depicted in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, with the identity of Big Brother an important plot point in the comic).

But of course, all of this would be a sterile act of intellectual masturbation, if Moore and O'Neill didn't have a story to tell. Although, in retrospect, the comic portion of the Black Dossier gets a bit drowned by the extraneous details.. Nevertheless, in the end, Mina and Allan managed to escape the clutches of their enemies and reach the Blazing World, which is exactly where Moore and O'Neill have dropped the acid tab. I'll tell you more about it when I actually manage to understanding it (don't hold your breath, though, this might take a while).

Next: a return to pure storytelling with the 3-part epic Century.


* For legal reasons, they could not actually name Bond, but the identity of the character should be very clear for those who actually read the Ian Fleming novels, or seen the early Sean Connery movies. As for Mrs. Peel, the legal bullet was dodged by portraying her as an adolescent, operating under her maiden name of Emma Knight.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (pt. 1)

1999

The idea behind this series is absurbdly simple: pick a few characters from 19th century popular literature and stick them together as part of a team of operatives working for the British government. So simple, in fact, that only Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill apparently thought of it. But, as usual, Moore's premise hides a more complex design.

In the original 6-issue series of League it becomes clear that Moor and O'Neill have a far more ambitious goal that simply having Captain  Nemo, Allan Quatermain, the Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde and Mina Harker getting together and fighting Professor Moriarty. In the Moore-O'Neill scheme of thing, all fiction is true. Hence the incredible amount of details present in every single panel of the series. To such an extent that Jesse Nevins has dedicated himself to analyse the panels and detect references to other books, novels and short stories.

Things get even more complicated as the series move along. The second 6-issue mini-series, taking place during the 1898 Martian invasion, as depicted in H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, has a back-up feature chronicling every single imaginary islands, continents, towns and cites and otherwise faraway places featured in almost 500 years of fiction. Thus uniting the adventures of the League with a broader world-view. At the end of this second mini-series the league seems to unravel: the Invisible Man is killed by Mr. Hyde, who in turns sacrifices himself to save Earth. An enraged Captain Nemo returns to his hermit ways while Quatermain and Mina travel on.

Moore's ambition was always unbounded, which is why he remains one of the most extraordinary comic creator of the last thirty years. The next stop for the League, as it moves from the 19th to the 20th centuries, was to explain everything while moving the series forward. A topic I will discuss in part 2 of this post.

(L to R): Allan Quatermain, Mina Murray Harker, Dr. Henry
Jekyll, Captain Nemo & Hawley Griffin (aka the Invisible Man)