Carrying on with my New Year's "Classic Comics Resolutions" re-readings, I finished The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier last night.




The Black Dossier isn't really the third volume of the LoEG series – it's more like a sourcebook for the alternate timeline world the series is set in. Although there had been prose sections in the first two volumes of the series, here the majority of the Black Dossier is a scrapbook made up of non-comics material, such as letters, maps, guidebooks, prose stories, a Tijuana Bible, magazine clippings, etc. These sections are framed by a comic story – kinda like a story-within-a-story – in which Mina Harker and Allan Quatermain (who is now magically de-aged after bathing in the fires of youth, as featured in the novel She by H. R. Haggard) steal the Black Dossier itself from an MI5 facility and are then pursued by sinister government agents across late 1950's Britain.

By this point in the story of the League, most of the characters we encountered in the first two volumes are long gone, leaving just Mina and Allan. The book's setting sees Britain emerging from under the heel of the fascist IngSoc government and the watchful eye of Big Brother, which originate from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four, of course.

One of the biggest differences between the Black Dossier and the first two volumes of the LoEG is that there are less public domain characters for Alan Moore to play with this time round, since the story is not set in the late Victorian era and thus can't utilise as many literary characters from that period. Moore gets around this by subtly changing names: so, for example, super-spy James Bond becomes Jimmy Bond, and The Avengers' Emma Peel becomes Emma Night (because Peel's maiden name in the TV series was Knight). In almost all instances though, it's pretty easy to see exactly who these thinly-veiled characters are supposed to be.

The book is incredibly dense with literary and pop culture references – even more so that the preceding volumes of the series! – and among my favourite moments in the Black Dossier are seeing Moore's less-than-sympathetic take on James Bond, in all his creepy and misogynistic glory. Hilariously, when Mina first encounters Bond she is undercover and going by the name of Oodles O'Quim (as in Pussy Galore, geddit?).

I also got a kick out of the scenes set in Birmingham spaceport, with cameos from Dan Dare and his companion Digby, during which, Mina and Allan escape in a robot-piloted rocket-ship that references Gerry Anderson's Fireball XL5. There's also a cameo appearance of an older and more forlorn "Billy" Bunter, which are strangely moving scenes (Bunter, a gluttonous schoolboy, was a tremendously popular fictional character here in Britain during the early 20th century).

Mina and Allan eventually escape their pursuers by returning to the weird, utopian universe of The Blazing World – which Wikipedia tells me is from a 1666 work by English writer Margaret Cavendish. Once there, the pair are reunited with their mutual lover, Orlando (from Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography), who can change sex from male to female at will. This final section of the book in the Blazing World is printed in old-school 3D colouring (and the book comes complete with 3D glasses) and is a particularly strange – even by Moore's standards – but nonetheless entertaining conclusion to the story.

Overall, while it's not a patch on the first two LoEG volumes, or indeed some of the later instalments, I still find the Black Dossier to be an engaging and interesting work. I really enjoy the book-within-a-book concept and the level of world building that Moore conjures up here is quite remarkable.

This is no mere "graphic novel", but something much more absorbing, paradigm-shifting, and, dare I say it, intellectual. At its heart though, the framing comic book portions present a thoroughly gripping pursuit narrative, in which Mina and Allan have to stay one step ahead of Bond and Night. It's not the best LoEG book, but it's very enjoyable nonetheless.

I certainly don't think it's as enjoyable as the first two volumes, or the three Century volumes, but I definitely think more of it than the Nemo trilogy.

Admittedly, the adventure/pursuit storyline that is told in comic form is rather slight from a narrative point of view, but it still grips me enough to keep me turning the pages (which is its job, of course). As for the rest of the book, I think I just find the level of world building that Moore engages in quite stunning in its complexity and depth. I do kinda find myself wondering at various points if I really needed to know all of this stuff (is the Black Dossier to the LoEG what The Silmarillion is to Tolkien's legendarium???). But as I say, the completeness and thoroughness of Moore's dedication to this fictional setting is quite remarkable. And besides, Moore's a good enough writer that he could probably write the ingredients from a cereal box down and I'd still find it pretty entertaining.

Immortus is lame! For a guy who’s Lord of Limbo and Master of Time, Space and Dimension, he’s not very good at this.

He brings up Goliath of Gath to fight Giant-Man and the Wasp.

And here comes Merlin to fight Iron Man.

And here’s Hercules to fight Thor. (It must be some fake Hercules. Or maybe it’s the mortal Hercules, the king of Tiryns.)

And all of Immortus’s champions get beat within a few panels.

The Enchantress casts a spell sending them all back in time a few days. The Avengers forget all about Immortus. But the Masters of Evil remember!

I remember that story when it was reprinted here. Yes, that was definitely not the Hercules we later came to know, eh?

The first 40 issues or so of Avengers was, for me, so forgettable. I didn't feel like it hit it's stride until the Buscema/Thomas team took over.

Noooo. I liked 12 a lot. Thor and Giant-man almost come to blows at the beginning.