A Comic to Make You Feel Illiterate

The stereotype is that if you read comics, you're essentially illiterate. Anyone who actually believes that has never read an Alan Moore comic. Or specifically, any of his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics. If the title makes you think of the shite movie that came out several years ago, don't be scared away. The movie was crap and Moore had nothing to do with it. The general plot is the same--a group of characters ripped from late 19th works of fiction (Mr. Hyde, the Invisible Man, Allan Quartermain, the woman from Dracula, and Captain Nemo) are assembled as a super-duper spy team by the British government. They go on many adventures. The stories are clever, violent, sexy--everything you could want from a good comic. But the stories are secondary to the real reason for the comic's popularity.

You read TLOEG for the references. The lead characters are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of literary references. Every secondary or tertiary character, ever locale, practically every picture or object drawn into the background, is a literary reference, usually matching pretty closely in time to when a particular story takes place. I consider myself a relatively well-read person, yet compared to Alan Moore, I'm an idiot. I reckon I get about 20-40% of the references. At times it's frustrating, but usually I'm intrigued by how much he's able to squeeze into every panel. This dude's like the James Joyce of comic writing.

I just finished the latest installment, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier. There have been two trade paperbacks collecting previous comics in the series, but this addition was different in that it was published all at once and really is assembled as a dossier of The League itself. I'm embarrassed to say how long it took me to read, but in my defense, this wasn't just a comic. There's a lot of prose and even a short play in there, too. I would certainly say it was not as fun as the TPBs, largely because there's not much of a story here. It's essentially a book of exposition, describing the exploits of the League we're familiar with from the previous comics, as well as earlier incarnations of the League from other time periods. I basically had to read the comic with Wikipedia open next to me, because the percentage of references I understood plummeted (though there's lots of James Bond references in this one, since it takes place in the 20th century). All in all, it was a challenging but satisfying read, and the epilogue was actually pretty profound. And also just pretty. Artist Kevin O'Neill is quite impressive throughout the whole series, and the last dozen pages or so of BD are in 3-D. The glasses are kindly provided.

I highly recommend the first two TBPs for any literary, comic-reading types. I'd only recommend Black Dossier for established fans. And for the record, everything I've read by Alan Moore has been good (Watchmen, V for Vendetta). Verdict: Like listening to a punk rock album and realizing it's more cerebral than Bach.