Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentleman began with a simple enough high concept: What if the stars of various Victorian adventure fiction teamed up to form a pre-superhero Justice League?
A lesser writer would have turned out something that resembled the 2003 film of the same name, but Moore’s research was impeccable, as was his ability to script a pastiche of the characters’ original creators. In two series, his literary superpeople saved England from Dr. Moriarty and Fu Manchu, and then staved off the Martian invasion from War of the Worlds.
And that was the last we heard of the League for a ponderously long time, although conflicts among Moore, his publishers at DC Comics and the editor that served as their go-between kept talk of future League books simmering on the Internet all the while. The next League book, a standalone graphic novel, was to be published by DC/Wildstorm, and then Moore and O’Neill were to take their concept to Top Shelf Productions for future volumes.
Given the lame-duck status of the property at this particular publisher, for whom he has such animosity, I would expect there to be a temptation for Moore to just phone it in a bit, and the hybrid nature of the book, which contains at least as much prose summarizing ideas for League comics as it does comics pages, suggest that that may be the case.
But if this is Moore slacking off, he sure works hard at slacking, and readers will have to work almost as hard to take this epic story in.
The principal characters in the original series—Mr. Hyde, Captain Nemo, the Invisible Man—were all fairly recognizable, thanks to all of the film adaptations they’ve appeared in over the years. But Black Dossier is set in the 1950s, and by that time prose adventure fiction is no longer the only medium from which Moore and O’Neill can pluck characters—film, comics and TV characters now appear too, and most of them are hinted at rather than named, so as to avoid copyright issues.
Dense doesn’t even begin to describe it, and I doubt I got even half of the references (not being British is a definite handicap). Of course, the treasure hunt of allusion-recognition is a large part of the fun, as is the weird format, which sees Moore challenging himself to imitate some of the greatest writers in history in the non-comics sections, while telling a tale in which the history of the universe is covered through the prism of the history of Western fiction.
The comics portions feature our heroes Mina Harker and Allan Quatermain stealing the titular dossier from the British government while trying to elude a young James Bond and an even younger Emma Peel and occasionally pausing to read the dossier, presented to readers as a newspaper-strip recounting of the life of Orlando, a folio from a lost Shakespeare play, an extended Jack Kerouac impression, a Tijuana Bible from the world of Orwell’s 1984 and so on.
It’s an exhausting, demanding read, one that is ultimately more interesting to analyze than it is entertaining to read. On a dramatic level, it’s probably the weakest of the three books, but well worth a read, if only to marvel at Moore and O’Neill’s lunatic ambition.