| The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen | |
Cover of Volume One |
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| Publication information | |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Wildstorm/DC Comics |
| Genre | Alternate History Steampunk |
| Publication date | 1999 - Present |
| Number of issues | 12 |
| Main character(s) | Mina Murray Allan Quatermain Hawley Griffin Henry Jekyll/Edward Hyde Captain Nemo |
| Creative team | |
| Writer(s) | Alan Moore |
| Artist(s) | Kevin O'Neill |
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a comic book series written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Kevin O'Neill. The series was launched in 1999 as part of the America's Best Comics imprint of Wildstorm Comics. The series spans two six-issue limited series and a hardcover graphic novel, with a third miniseries due to be published by Top Shelf Productions. According to Moore, the initial concept behind the series was initially a "Justice League of Victorian England" but quickly grew into an opportunity to merge all works of fiction into one world. Says Moore: "The planet of the imagination is as old as we are. It has been humanity's constant companion with all of its fictional locations, like Mount Olympus and the gods, and since we first came down from the trees, basically. It seems very important, otherwise, we wouldn't have it."[1] Moore and O'Neill have revealed that they plan to map out many different eras in the League series with Allan Quatermain and Mina Murray being the two constants.
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In the aftermath of the events of the novel Dracula, a now disgraced and divorced Mina Harker (nee Murray), is recruited by Campion Bond on behalf of British Intelligence and tasked to assemble a league of other extraordinary individuals to protect the interests of the Empire. Together with Captain Nemo, Mina travels to Cairo to locate Allan Quatermain, then on to Paris in search of Dr. Jekyll; finally in London she forcibly recruits Hawley Grifin, the Invisible Man, who completes this incarnation of the League. Meeting with Professor Cavor, the League are sent against Fu Manchu in his Limehouse lair, who has stolen the only known example of cavorite and plans to use it to build an offensive airship, against which Britain would have little defence. Having eventually retrieved the cavorite, the League deliver it into the hands of their employer - none other than Professor Moriarty, who plans to use it in an airship of his own, with which he will bomb his adversary's Limehouse lair flat, taking large parts of London and the League themselves with it. An aerial war above London commences, and the League eventually triumphs. Mycroft Holmes replaces Moriarty as the League's employer, and the extraordinary individuals are tasked to remain in service to the Crown, awaiting England's call.
Placed during the events of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, the League split up into two groups; with Mina and Allan sent off to find a reclusive doctor in the woods, Nemo and Hyde remain to fight the first wave of tripods, but what is Griffin up to? Featuring John Carter and Gullivar Jones on Mars and a surprise ending to the invasion.
The Black Dossier centers on the eponymous fictional book (that provides a comprehensive review of all of the previous leagues over the centuries) which is stolen by a young man and woman in 1958 in a post-Big Brother England where they are pursued by a trio of ruthless government agents. This release also includes a variety of extras including a 3-D section and glasses, a Tijuana Bible.
In a 1997 interview with Andy Diggle for the now defunct Comics World website, Alan Moore give the title of the work as "The League of Extraordinary Gentlefolk". Moore changed the name to Gentlemen to better reflect the inherently sexist attitudes of the Victorian era.
The Victorian setting allowed Moore and O'Neill to insert "in-jokes" and cameos from many works of Victorian fiction, while also making contemporary references and jibes, and also bear numerous steampunk influences. In the first issue, for example, there is a half-finished bridge to link Britain and France, referencing problems constructing the real-world Channel Tunnel. The juxtaposition of characters from different sources in the same story is similar to science fiction writer Philip José Farmer's works centering around the Wold Newton family or Kim Newman's Anno Dracula series.
Every character in the series, from the dominatrix schoolmistress Rosa Coote to even more minor characters like Inspector Dick Donovan, is either an established character from an existing work of fiction or an ancestor of the same. This has lent the series considerable popularity with fans of esoteric Victoriana, who have delighted in attempting to place every character who makes an appearance.
Sherlock Holmes and Dracula are notably absent from the League's adventures due to their deaths prior to the events of the series, though the former appears in a flashback sequence, and the latter's connections to Wilhelmina Murray do not go unnoticed. Moore has noted that he felt these two seminal characters would overwhelm the rest of the cast. Holmes is still believed by the public to be deceased following the events of The Final Problem, although it is revealed in the second volume that Mina later meets with him.
Issue #5 of Volume One contained an authentic vintage advertisement for a Marvel-brand douche. Marvel Comics is DC Comics's chief rival within the comics industry and Moore had had a public dispute with DC, his former employer. This ad caused DC executive Paul Levitz to order the entire print run destroyed and reprinted with the offending advertisement edited. None were ever distributed in the US; however, a small batch had been shipped to the UK and escaped the destruction. With only 100-200 thought to exist this makes it more than 10 times rarer than the Elseworlds 80-Page Giant that Paul Levitz also recalled, hence is probably the rarest modern comic book in existence.[2]. See Recalled comics for more pulped, recalled and erroneous comics.
In Top 10, Moore creates a "Miracle Douche Recall" headline on a newspaper, which is not only a reference to the furor, but is also a reference to when Marvel Comics had previously forced Marvelman, which was written by Alan Moore, to change its name to Miracleman.
Alan Moore departed from Warner Bros., including its subsidiaries DC Comics and Wildstorm Comics, as a result of a dispute with the filmmaker over an incorrect allegation that Moore had approved of the film version of another of his comic book works, V for Vendetta, and failed to retract the comment or apologize. As a result, Moore has confirmed that any future installments of League stories will be published by Top Shelf Productions and Knockabout Comics.
The third volume will be a 216-page epic spanning almost a hundred years and entitled Century. Divided into three 72-page chapters, each a self-contained narrative to avoid frustrating cliff-hanger delays between episodes, it will take place in three distinct eras, building to an apocalyptic conclusion occurring in the current twenty-first century.
Chapter one is set against a backdrop of London, 1910, twelve years after the failed Martian invasion and nine years since England put a man upon the moon. With Halley's Comet passing overhead, the nation prepares for the coronation of King George V, and far away on his South Atlantic island, the science-pirate Captain Nemo is dying. In the bowels of the British Museum, Carnacki the ghost-finder is plagued by visions of a shadowy occult order who are attempting to create something called a Moonchild, while on London's dockside the most notorious serial murderer of the previous century has returned to carry on his grisly trade. Working for Mycroft Holmes' British Intelligence alongside a rejuvenated Allan Quatermain, the reformed thief Anthony Raffles and the eternal warrior Orlando, Miss Murray is drawn into a brutal opera acted out upon the waterfront by players that include the furiously angry Pirate Jenny and the charismatic butcher known as Mack the Knife. Actually Chapter One revolves around the song Pirate Jenny (Seeräuberjenny) from Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera. Characters in this chapter will burst into song at various points in the narrative. Moore has written new lyrics for Mack the Knife, Pirate Jenny, What Keeps Mankind Alive and Mack's Plea From The Gallows.[3]
Chapter two takes place almost sixty years later in the psychedelic daze of Swinging London during 1968, a place where Tadukic Acid Diethylamide 26 is the drug of choice, and where different underworlds are starting to overlap dangerously to an accompaniment of sit-ins and sitars. The vicious gangster bosses of London's East End find themselves brought into contact with a counter-culture underground of mystical and medicated flower-children, or amoral pop-stars on the edge of psychological disintegration and developing a taste for Satanism. Alerted to a threat concerning the same magic order that she and her colleagues were investigating during 1910, a thoroughly modern Mina Murray and her dwindling league of comrades attempt to navigate the perilous rapids of London's hippy and criminal subculture, as well as the twilight world of its occultists. Starting to buckle from the pressures of the twentieth century and the weight of their own endless lives, Mina and her companions must nevertheless prevent the making of a Moonchild that might well turn out to be the Antichrist.
In chapter three, the narrative draws to its cataclysmic close in London 2008. The magical child whose ominous coming has been foretold for the past hundred years has now been born and has grown up to claim his dreadful heritage. His promised eon of unending terror can commence, the world can now be ended starting with North London, and there is no League, extraordinary or otherwise, that now stands in his way. The bitter, intractable war of attrition in Q'umar crawls bloodily to its fifth year, away in Kashmir a Sikh terrorist with a now-nuclear-armed submarine wages a holy war against Islam that might push the whole world into atomic holocaust, and in a London mental institution there's a patient who insists that she has all the answers. This volume is set to be released in 2009.[4]
After volume three Alan Moore said that he would like to write some special, one shot stories that focus upon the personal adventures of the characters. "...me and Kevin would probably like to get on with some individual stories, some Tales of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen that could focus upon, say, one character. Orlando is a very tempting character to do a one-off special based upon, especially after you see the way that we've treated him/her in The Dossier." [5] It will have three separate stories in it, the first two will focus on a single character, whereas the third will detail something that Mina did in the 1960s.[3]
Volume Two has an extensive appendix, most of which is filled with an imaginary travelers' account of the alternate universe the League is set in, called The New Traveler's Almanac. This Almanac is noteworthy in that it provides a huge amount (46 pages) of background information - all of which is taken from pre-existing literary works or mythology, a large majority of which is difficult to fully appreciate without an esoteric knowledge of literature. It shows the plot of the comic to be just a small section of a world inhabited by what appears to be the entirety of fiction.
Many of the places described in the appendices seem to be drawn from Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi's The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (1980), though Moore adds numerous places not covered there.
Moore's work includes references to previous leagues and suggests there will be others subsequently. In much the same way that the New Traveller's Almanac, an appendix to the trade paperback collection of The League Vol. 2, detailed much of the geography of the League's world, the third volume, The Black Dossier, set out an extenseive history of the world of the League and each of its various incarnations, threading together hundreds of disparate works of fiction into a cohesive timeline.
In an interview with Andy Diggle in 1997, Alan Moore first gave a synopsis of the series which then had the working title of The League of Extraordinary Gentlefolk. Simon Bisley was originally going to be the artist for the series.
Volume I won the 2000 Bram Stoker Award for Best Illustrated Narrative. Volume II was nominated for the 2003 award, but lost to The Sandman: Endless Nights. Volume II received the 2003 Eisner Award for Best Finite Series/Limited Series. Time Magazine listed Volume II as the 9th best comic of 2003. [6] It was included in the 2005 edition of The Year's Best Graphic Novels, Comics, & Manga. Time also listed Black Dossier as the second best comic of 2007.[7]
UK Hip Hop artist CASS also assumes the identity of Hawley Griffin, going as far as to cover his face for promotional and public appearances when performing. CASS/Hawley Griffin's lyrics often contain references to themes and plot issues within Alan Moore's and H.G.Wells' works, including but not restricted to The League of Extraordinary Gentleman series or The Invisible Man.
A chapter in the 2005 nonfiction work The Cult of Alien Gods: H. P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture is titled "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen".
In his 2005 book The Areas of My Expertise, John Hodgman refers to Nemo as "the Sikh" and "the Science-Pirate", as Nemo was referred to in the League comics.
A film adaptation was released in 2003, also by the name The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The film stars Sean Connery, who plays Allan Quatermain, and features Captain Nemo, Mina Harker, Rodney Skinner aka An Invisible Man (the rights could not be secured to The Invisible Man), Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, Dorian Gray, and U.S. Secret Service agent Tom Sawyer (Gray and Sawyer were not in the comics). It is an original story, which is common for comic book adaptations which seldom feature direct translations. The film was intended to begin a franchise but because of its poor reception (a 16% at Rotten Tomatoes), it is unlikely.
The film was disowned by Moore and O'Neill. Alan Moore has since openly refused to acknowledge any adaptation of his work including V for Vendetta and Watchmen.
The DVD of the documentary feature film The Mindscape of Alan Moore contains an exclusive bonus interview with the artist Kevin O'Neill, elaborately detailing the collaboration with Alan Moore.
Jess Nevins has produced a series of annotations for each volume which are available online (see links) and have also been expanded into book form:
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