League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - Classic or Dud?

:D

it strikes me that one really obvious character they could have had show up in LOEG (but only in the first two books, or maybe 1910) would have been Jonathan Harker.

isn't he dead though? or is that the surprise twist?

I thought she had just left him because she found him too drippy after being sexed up by Dracula.

I imagine him as being the Keanu Reeves Harker rather than the one from the book.

I'm the world's biggest League fan--a comic couldn't have been more specifically designed for me--but this issue didn't do so much for me. Partly it's the inclusion of more and more non-literary stuff (which is my problem, since the book is Moore's to do with as he will), and partly it's the increasing sex-obsession that makes it more and more like Lost Girls, which was beautifully done but ultimately kind of boring, as pornography tends to be (boring, not beautiful) at any great length.

plus, also, Iain Sinclair is a pain in the hole, and the use of his character here didn't do anything to change my mind

OTM James. Alan Moore's kind of at his best when he's not soapboxing about being Alan Moore - I love his work, particularly the League until you're consciously reminded that he's crowbarring the same subjects in all the time - Crowley/Magick, porno fetishism, and often Lovecraft (although I can parse that stuff) - it's alright for a bit, and you can't berate Moore for expressing his interests in these subjects - at the same time I really do not give as much of a monkeys about these things as he does. Promethea was the ultimate statement about 20th Century magic, but once you've read that you're either going to go off and read more about it, or you're not gonna want to hear the name Crowley ever again.

Out of interest, I tracked down a copy of Performance the other day and it was unwatchable.

u mad

Performance is a great film, I must agree with sic. Also having loads of Lovecraftiana in fictional works is a good thing, not bad. But I agree on all the porno fetishism in his recent work.

maybe i should try it again. I think the Lovecraft worked great in The Courtyard, as that was a huge sci-fi homage, but yeah, I do get a bit fed up of the same tropes and subjects getting trotted out from release to release, it's Moore's only chink in his armour AFAIC.

I won't buy anything from Avatar, but I can't remember overmuch Lovecraftiana in anything else

why will you not buy anything from Avatar?

fuck any publisher who threatens to sue his own freelancers for going public about being refused payment for published work (let alone threatening to sue readers who mention this on the internets) imo

otoh a comic book about the real world's fictional continuum set in 1969 that doesn't feature, say, Superman or Spiderman is a little o_0, no?

Having re-read it now, I really don’t understand this complaint – how many other American characters appear in this issue? Or non-British characters at all? (Edna Everage and Barry Mackenzie are Australian-born, but the strip was done for Private Eye while Humphries lived in London and largely set there, and Garland was and is a Londoner.).

A huge underlying theme of the Century series seems to be the decay of culture, and the League Of Marvels and Jack Flash references work directly into that – to have a successful, shiny, on-the-up superhero (was 1969 handsome studmuffin Romita-era Spider-Man?) would contradict it, even if it wasn’t an American import.

Having a full-body-stocking dude running around would also undermine the wonderful gag of Mina digging out an old LoM costume to fit into the Mary Quant, like-a-pendulum-do surroundings.

I am pleased to say I have finally gotten round to watching The Italian Job, after many years of only knowing it through parodies, pastiches and the odd clip seen on telly. Great film - very much of its time. Next stop, Get Carter.

Get Carter is great

A huge underlying theme of the Century series seems to be the decay of culture, and the League Of Marvels and Jack Flash references work directly into that – to have a successful, shiny, on-the-up superhero (was 1969 handsome studmuffin Romita-era Spider-Man?) would contradict it

yeah see, here's the problem

ie, the reality of what was going on in fiction does not jibe with Moore's depiction of it

Get Carter is SOOOOO much better (and grimmer) than The Italian Job

so Shakey, can you name all the characters used in this issue that Moore is misrepresenting in order to communicate this theme? and, as above, how many American or other non-British characters are in it at all?

thought I made it pretty clear it's an error of omission. if his theme is that culture has decayed over the course of the 20th century he kind of makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy by deliberately excluding the things that were NOT in decline (American comics, etc)

so a dude has written a book set in London with all-British characters in it, and you claim it is an "error of omission" not to have written it about Australian and Japanese and Malaysian and Flemish and New Zealander and Jamaican and Puerto Rican and Siberian and Fijian characters

oh wait no, you're just crying bcz USAmerican characters do not have a prominent role - quick, see if J0rdan and Whiney want to get in on this!

maybe he was writing about *British* culture being in decline, and thus thought that including American characters would be a bit irrelevent?

yeah, LOEG is primarily based around British characters - they do mention characters from other countries though... *Sigh* I kind of really miss the original League - it really feels like a missed opportunity not to have expanded on it as opposed to the increasingly diluted and esoteric Century books. These are all very well, but you can tell Moore's passion for Victorian classics burns much brighter than most other eras. Rather than just having some obscure character turn up, he'd actually include them in the plot proper. As it is, many of the villains in the Century/Dossier books (Bulldog Drummond, etc) could be pretty much anyone. I don't much care for Orlando, Allan Quartermain is becoming increasingly wimpy - the only consistent character is Mina and even she does weird off-character things (like taking the Taduki drug at the festival for some reason). Plus the supernatural element of the series (Jekyll & Hyde, Invisible Man) has now been replaced by a backdrop of magickal shenanigans as is Moore's wont, but I find kind of tedious.

I find Orlando very annoying.

I disagree on Bulldog Drummond, however. I think he was one of the less identikit characters in the more recent LOEGs, and I found his replacement by Bond (symbolising a whole era being supplanted yadda yadda yadda) surprisingly moving.

maybe he was writing about *British* culture being in decline, and thus thought that including American characters would be a bit irrelevent?

this makes more sense. Black Dossier includes a bunch of non-British stuff (Kerouac springs to mind) but the other books are focused on British creations, with a few exceptions (Dupin's brief appearance, the Edgar Rice Burroughs Martian stuff, probably some others I'm forgetting). Perhaps I was distracted by Moore not qualifying that he was explicitly referring to British literary culture declining in the 20th century, seemed like he was making a more general claim.

...in the text?!

even she does weird off-character things (like taking the Taduki drug at the festival for some reason).

Nah, this is repeatedly set up through the whole issue – she’s desperately insecure about aging out of the culture around her, and making brash efforts to keep current that belie her inner fears. So she takes the Tadlet ~because that’s what the young people do at these music festivals~ -- but since she’s taking it in a fearful frame of mind, and out of doubt about her own place in the world (and in a setting that’s strange and uncomfortable to her), she has a terrible trip that takes her out of her body and renders her internal/astral self as weak, lacking agency and out of place in her environment – all things her entire earthly persona is built on suppressing.

Consider me corrected - you're not wrong!

just read the black dossier. so great! had to force myself to read it all in sequence - long-ass, dry-ass text sections included - but it definitely pays off. the kerouac and wodehouse riffs were some of the best things in it.

wodehouse/lovecraft interlude is pretty funny. felt like the kerouac piece was interminable tho. which is part of the point probably

kerouac piece was completely impenetrable until i started reading it aloud to myself. did it in a mumbly, fast-talking fake dylan accent, and it became very easy to follow & enjoy. it's one of the funniest bits in the book, imo.

LoEG 2008 is pre-orderable, I see.

I just wish he'd done a few more Victorianian ones - seemed like such a rich vein to only use two slim volumes on.

Neat, you can peep the cover at Amazon.

Looks like Orlando with a laser sword, and is that Quatermain's head in the upper right?

kinda weak compared to previous covers imho

So, has anyone read the new book? Any spoiler-free comments on whether it's any better than previous two? I found 1910 and especially 1969 to be pretty meh, because they mostly just featured the main characters running through a cavalcade of various fictional references without affecting the plot that much, or having any real agency in general. After 1969, I'd much rather have read a new series about the life of Janni than continue with Mina & Alan's Increasingly Tired Adventures (even if this manner of distancing/estranging the reader was something that Moore actually intended). Is 2009 better in this regard?

I didn't think it was anything particularly special, but being Alan it's worth a read.

However, even though I keep reading them, I think each series has been a step down from the one before; so depending on how you rank what has come before you may want to take my opinion with a grain of salt.

I enjoyed it but think it may fall prey to the same things you mention. or at least as far as anybody not concerned might think.
has a lot of pictorial popular cultural references plus a possibly unexpected one that the plot possibly hinges on. though i guess that character did culturally proliferate through the years until it stopped having new product about it made, possibly still does.
has cameos by most of the Bonds and most of The Avengers girls too. plus Eastenders, Dr Whos etc in non-speaking appearances.

However, even though I keep reading them, I think each series has been a step down from the one before; so depending on how you rank what has come before you may want to take my opinion with a grain of salt.

Sadly, this is how I feel about LoEG too: each new volume has been worse than the previous one. If only it had been Top 10 and not LoEG Moore chose to continue after America's Best Comics folded, it felt like the former still had some great story potential in it. Or was it because of ownership issues that he was only able to take LoEG to a new publisher?

I don't know, I have enjoyed Century quite a bit - maybe because of being British? There are a great many references to touchstones of my childhood - Dandy, Victor, Battle etc, various TV things - so maybe I'm just the target audience.

I thought this barrelled along at a fair rate and although I didn't particularly care for the notion of SPOILER being the bad guy I thought it was as well handled as it could have been and after what could have happened following 1969 he actually didn't bear much resemblance to SPOILER at all. I quite liked SPOILER turning up too, although it's clear (to me at least) that it's just another facet of SPOILER.

Jess Nevins has included some of my points in his latest update.

http://jessnevins.com/annotations/2009annotations.html

I loved this one (though not quite as much as 1969, at least on first read), and am enjoying the Mindless Ones' annotations.

If only it had been Top 10 and not LoEG Moore chose to continue after America's Best Comics folded, it felt like the former still had some great story potential in it. Or was it because of ownership issues that he was only able to take LoEG to a new publisher?

Yes, Moore and O'Neill own LOEG, which was originally a Homage book. All the ABC line were WFH. DC won't even let the other creators of Top Ten continue it.

any thoughts on the new one Nemo: Heart of Ice?

pretty fun, kind of slight. It did make me think that Moore's criticisms of mainstream superhero comics as being endless retreads of existing properties in service to the nostalgia of middle-aged men ring sort of hollow when that's basically what he's doing with LOEG. It's just that instead of using superheroes he uses figures from pulp literature.

I think League has been on a steady decline since the first volume. Nemo did nothing to change my mind. I had hoped they maybe these little sidetrips would reconnect with some of the magic that has gone out of the series of late but alas it wasn't to be.

:-( is it worth checking out at all?

Depends on how much you want to see Kevin draw Lovecraftian monsters. Otherwise I got nothing from it.

Compared to Top 10, it's just really bland work.

I like it fine, but I wouldn't claim it to be anything more than genre exercise + reference-spotting

O'Neill's style is not really ideally suited to Lovecraft imho

It did make me think that Moore's criticisms of mainstream superhero comics as being endless retreads of existing properties in service to the nostalgia of middle-aged men ring sort of hollow when that's basically what he's doing with LOEG. It's just that instead of using superheroes he uses figures from pulp literature.

― Donkamole Marvin (Shakey Mo Collier),

OTM -- he's a fine one to talk, etc.

Moore's criticisms of mainstream superhero comics as being endless retreads of existing properties in service to the nostalgia of middle-aged men

None of these non-original characters (iirc? Maybe Tom Swift in the text pieces?) have been in LoEG before, so it's far from endless. And can you cite his specific criticisms?

I think Shakey was talking about this Moore interview, particularly these two comments:

It’s the paucity of imagination. I was noticing that DC seems to have based one of its latest crossovers (Blackest Night) in Green Lantern based on a couple of eight-page stories that I did 25 or 30 years ago. I would have thought that would seem kind of desperate and humiliating, When I have said in interviews that it doesn’t look like the American comic book industry has had an idea of its own in the past 20 or 30 years, I was just being mean. I didn’t expect the companies concerned to more or less say, “Yeah, he’s right. Let’s see if we can find another one of his stories from 30 years ago to turn into some spectacular saga.” It’s tragic. The comics that I read as a kid that inspired me were full of ideas. They didn’t need some upstart from England to come over there and tell them how to do comics. They’d got plenty of ideas of their own. But these days, I increasingly get a sense of the comics industry going through my trashcan like raccoons in the dead of the night.

...

But, the people running the industry have taken it down a blind alley, and it’s largely because they don’t have any ideas of their own. There’s no vision of the way that comics could be done. That’s why they have to rely upon peoples’ visions from the past. It’s like a lot of contemporary pop music. It contents itself with recycling the great sounds of the 1960s, 1970s, and increasingly, the 1980s. People today deserve good useful stories. We deserve art that is of our time. We don’t deserve this endless recycling of a particularly nice beat or sound effect of the 1960s. Yes, the past is there to plunder. A lot of the ideas of the past were discarded before they should have been. They’ve still got an awful lot of life left in them. But, don’t make that an exercise in retrospection. Pick up those ideas and do something new with them. Make them shine again. But, I think that it’s been a long time since the comics industry had any talent that was capable of doing that. The talent it did have that was capable of doing that, it either worked them to death or alienated them. I tend to see the people who run the comics industry as being largely like some variety of tapeworm or some other parasite. But, they’re not very good at it. Any self-respecting tapeworm or parasite never kills the host. That is number one on the parasite’s list of dos and don’ts—don’t kill the host. I very seriously doubt whether the comics industry as we know it is going to be here in even five years’ time. Like I said, this could have been avoided if there’d ever been an investment of genuine new ideas and energy, rather than this lazy sort of complacent approach of simply saying, “Oh, we can take these old ideas and recycle them endlessly. The audience doesn’t know any different.” I think the audience has demonstrated that they do know differently, by voting with their feet.

But Moore doesn't really say it's bad to recycle old ideas (how could he, when most of his own major works are based on pre-existing characters/stories?), just that it's bad if you don't do "something new" with them. Though to be honest, LoEG hasn't been particularly good with the "something new" part either.

yes that is the interview I was thinking of thx Tuomas