Books

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Century:1969

Alan Hindle | Tuesday 26 July, 2011 15:53

At last year’s The Amaz!ng Meeting, a two-day conference of sceptics, reasonable atheists and debunkers of bunkum, Alan Moore was the final guest speaker. Imposing and grizzled, a practicing wizard in a room full of magicians and scientists, he divined the question he thought everyone was asking.

“What am I doing here?”

Not that he was unwanted. A giddy delight percolated through the assembly. Nobody there believed in Santa Claus, but this darker, earthier, more compelling Father Christmas, or possibly Woden, had appeared and we were as rapturous as children about to receive candied fish heads, or whatever Norse kiddies got for the winter festival of Jul. On the surface it seemed odd a crafter of mythical and fantastic universes should be speaking to a body of people who ostensibly oppose the muddle of mysticism. But Moore truly is a wizard, who understands that words and images can evoke ideas and thoughts as solid as ravens and writing desks in the mind, can illuminate corners of human complexity so hidden, dark and odd that logic and science are defeated in their understanding. Few things attract and happily addle magicians more than illusions they can’t figure out. So real magic, what Moore does, openly and (odd as it may sound) transparently, must have boggled and thrilled.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen first appeared in 1999. Written by Moore and filled with the thin, elegant lines of illustrator Kevin O’Neil, the book gathered together heroes and anti-heroes from Britain’s fantasy literature of the nineteenth century- Allan Quartermain, Captain Nemo, the Invisible Man, Dr. Jeckyll/Mr. Hyde and Mina Harker from Dracula. Having survived the lord vampire’s curse, Harker is now immortal, permanently young with only a ravaged neck kept covered by a crimson scarf. Over the series Quartermain has also been rendered an eternal, and with the sex-shifting 3000 year-old Orlando in the team they are now essentially young gods flitting through references to the entire library of British fiction.

The current series, Century, is a three-parter occurring in 1910, 1969 and the present. Anything from Moore gets me excited. However, this latest work is the first to disappoint me. I admit I haven’t seen the last two in this series, 1910 and The Black Dossier. The characters available to meet in the era of free love perhaps haven’t had the time to become as culturally rich as those from the Victorian age. Our heroes don’t do much other than bitch about the boredom of being immortal, and nothing really happens except for the rough and tumble side story of a high class thug, an excellent Michael Caine character, doing a spot of underworld detective work for his gangland patron. The most exciting thing Quartermain does is light cigarettes. Despite the potential for images from the psychedelic sixties there seems less for Kevin O’Neil to slash his quill at. The elaborate line-work of the early books just doesn’t happen. He slips in a wealth of caricatures of famous faces from the time, so it’s fun to play spot-the-celebrity, but it all seems quick and easy compared to previous Leagues.

Moore and O’Neil will be signing copies of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Century: 1969 at Gosh! Comics across from the British Museum on 30 July from 2-6 pm.

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