ps League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is probably the darkest of the ABC line; but, it also remained relatively separate, as Moore and O'Neill retained ownership. DC owns the three books they publish (or have exclusive publishing rights, which is pretty much the same thing); but, the pair own the series and concepts, though most of the characters are in the public domain. Moore would add some public domain superheroes to ABC, via Tom Strong, down the road.

I know the subject of rape and Moore's writing will come up; so, I will say, the attempt on Mina, in Cairo, is in keeping with such Victorian tales, where virtuous Englishwomen were targeted by foreign devils or underclass criminals. As with other elements of Victorian writing and attitudes, Moore is doing the same here. I don't see it as a trope in his work. From my perspective, critics of Moore go looking for instances of it turning up (or similar things) and ignore the similar prevalence in the work of other writers, within comics. I'm not defending Moore; but, I think his critics go to as much extreme as some of his defenders do. I will say that a trope or cliche in Alan Moore's hands is far more likely to be part of a great story than most other writers.

I really enjoyed Tom Strong's Terrific Tales though I have to admit I only bought it for Jonni Future.

ps i intend to cover everything, but only the League up through Black Dossier, since that was the end of it as part of the ABC line. I might pick up the remainder, in a separate thread. I will not cover the post-Alan Moore stuff, though, as I quit when he did. It was not the same material. I will include Terra Obscura, even though he didn't write it, as he was still involved with the line when it came out and grew out of what he had done in Tom Strong. Plus, I enjoyed it and love the Nedor heroes, for their visual appeal.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen #2



The cover is meant to represent a series of cigarette cards, which was a loyalty marketing gimmick perpetuated by tobacco manufacturers, before bubble gum companies picked up the idea.

Note that there are separate cards for Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde. Campion Bond is wearing a cricketer's outfit and cap, which was a pastime often featured in Victorian adventures and subsequent literature, such as the Raffles series of stories. Crickett was synonymous with the Gentleman Adventurer, while football was for the lower classes.

Creative Team: Alan Moore-writer, Kevin O'Neill-artist, William Oakley-letters, Benedict Dimagmaliw-colors, Scott Dunbier-editor

Synopsis: At the end of last issue, Chevalier Dupin, Mina Murray and Allan Quatermain had discovered Edward Hyde, who battered Mina and has knocked Quatermain senseless. Dupin unloads a pepperbox pistol to the side of Hyde's face and manages to shoot off part of his ear. He goes to attack Dupin and Mina and Quatermain has regained his senses enough to leap onto Hyde's back and shove a bottle into his mouth, which shatters against Hyde's teeth, filling his mouth with the laudanum that Quatermain had purchased to feed his cravings for opium. It manages to knock Hyde out, though Mina is rather upset when she learns what was in the bottle. They secure a cart and haul Hyde's unconscious body down to the waterfront and to the Nautilus (which is definitively named, in this issue). On the voyage back to England, Mina writes out a report, taking issue with the lack of briefing about Hyde, by Campion Bond...



The dock in London and Mina reports to Bond, though she is hardly subservient. She once again suggests that M is Mycroft Holmes. The men are put in the care of Inspector Donovan (one of the earliest detective characters, predating Sherlock Holmes, in the UK), while Bond warns Mina about further speculation as to M's identity. He remarks of Sherlock's death (at Reichenbach Falls, in "The Final Problem"), has emboldened the enemies of the British Empire and speaks of Robur the Conqueror (From Jules Verne's Clipper of the Clouds, aka Robur the Conqueror and Master of the World) and that the astronomer, Lavelle, has noticed strange images on Mars (from War of the Worlds). He further remarks of strange "miracles" as Rosa Coote's, which have drawn the ire of the Rev. Septimus Harding (from Anthony Trollope's The Warden). Young girls, all virgins, have become impregnated by "The Holy Spirit." This is to be Mina's next stop, to find the next recruit, a medical student named Hawley Griffin.

Mina confers with her colleagues and remarks that Griffin was believed involved in a murder, though a dead albino man was identified as Griffin. Griffin was not an albino, Mina remarks. Jeckyll is entrusted to Bond for treatment to try to control his changes and control Hyde.

The group arrives at Miss Rosa Coote's Correctional Academy for Wayward Gentlewomen and are greeted by the headmistress, herself....



She delivers a very "hands-on" greeting to Mina and her "husband and servant," as Quatermain masquerades as the husband and Nemo as the manservant. Nemo is not happy about masquerading as a low caste servant and Quatermain is not enthused about portraying a husband to Mina, as a liberated "harpy." Mina brings up the strange events and Miss Coote acts excited and mentions redecorating going on, due to the attention. Mina is pretending to be a parent, inspecting the school before possibly enrolling a daughter there. they are given a tour and see a teacher caning one Olive Chancellor (from Henry James' The Bostoners) and are introduced to one of the pregnant girls, Becky Randall (Rebecca of Sunnybrook farm). miss Coote remarks that all of the "visitations by the Holy Spirit" have all occurred in the same wing, which is where the group is lodged, for the night. They note the rather lascivious decor and, when alone, Mina remarks that teh decorators are more likely to be the fathers of the unborn children. Nemo complains about the charade and assumes Mina will take the spare single room, while the two men take the double. Mina is not THAT liberated, when it comes to comfort.

Quatermain and Nemo compare notes, one the great Colonial adventurer, the other a great Colonial Rebel. Quatermain mentions his deceased wife and son, buried in Africa and both speak of a love for adventure. They hear load cries and moans and rush into the other room, where Mina is also awake and trying to locate the source. they head towards the dormitory and a girl runs past, saying the "Holy Spirit has got Polly." They rush into the dorm room to find the girl, Polly (Pollyanna Whittier, of the book Pollyanna), floating in the air, her legs spread apart, crying out in surprise and pain. They rush to the girl and Mina tries to grab hold of her and can feel another physical presence. She tells Quatermain to help and he feels something like skin and tries to grab around some unseen object. Nemo lends a hand and gets his arms around what seems to be a throat, but gets headbutted.
Nemo yells to block it from leaving the room and Mina stands in the doorway, holding a pail. She hurls paint from it and it hits the invisible object, revealing it....



Mina then smashes the pail into the head of the revealed man. She has secured Hawley Griffin, aka The Invisible Man.

Miss Coote turns up to investigate the noise and Mina reveals their identity and mission and turns Polly over to her for care, while Polly vows to remain optomistic, despite being "manhandled by a demon." The team departs back to London, in a coach.

The group meets again at their new headquarters, in a secret annex of The British Museum...



Griffin is housed in a glass fronted cell, among other oddities, as Quatermain examines a sarcophagus, with the notation of the Cult of Ayesha (from H Rider Haggard's She, as well as Ayesha, The return of She; She and Allan and Wisdom's Daughter). Bond says Donovan has interviewed Griffin and suggests he will work with them, in exchange for a pardon and cure for his condition. They see another room, through glass, where Donovan interrogates Hyde. They learn that Jeckyll faked a suicide and fled to Paris and no longer needs his potion to change, as stress will accomplish it.

The are taken to another room, where they meet Professor Selwyn Cavor (of HG Well's The First Men in the Moon), who asks Bond if they are the ones who will retrieve his Cavorite. The metal was stolen by a warlord, a depraved individual, who was part of the Opium Wars....



{Mina scrutinizes an etching of the original League, with Sir Percy and Lady Marguerite Blakeney (of The Scarlet Pimpernel), Lemuel Gulliver (of Gulliver's Travels), The Reverand Dr Christopher Syn (from Dr Syn: A Tale of Romney Marsh), Fanny Hill, and Natty Bumpo (aka Hawkeye, of The Leatherstocking Tales series, by James Fenimore Cooper)}

At first they thought the German Kapitan Mors (from Der Luftpirat und sein lenkbares Luftschiff, aka The Air-Pirate and His Steerable Airship), but Bond says it is the East End crime lord, known as "The Doctor" (not the Time Lord, but a certain crime lord, in the Limehouse District). There job is to locate his lair and retrieve the Cavorite, before it can be used to create a devastating aerial weapon.

Allan and the Sundered Veil continues, as Allan takes the drug, taduki, and is in the throes of a vision. Only the black maid, Marissa, who has repeatedly taken the drug, can see what Allan sees, his body turned inside out and a strange dimension of non-Euclidian shapes. She says he has not been taken to a past life, but to beyond the world as they know it, to another dimension. Allan finds himself in a violet world, where he runs into two men, Captain John carter, an ex-Confederate soldier, who was dying in a cave, when he felt himself pulled to Mars, and his great nephew Randolph Carter, of Providence, RI. The men hear strange sounds and cries and Allan grabs a burning limb from a fire, which reveals creatures that have centipede-like shapes, gelatin appearances, elements of frogspawn and other amphibian and crustacean forms. The creatures are horrible and Randolph is terrified, to his great-uncle's consternation. he draws his sword, ready to fight these creatures, as Allan holds his torch like a club. Another man apepars, on a strange floating contraption. he calls himself the Time Traveler and invites the others to climb aboard his machine. (So, we have Luna Ragnall, from the Allan Quatermain novels, John Carter of Mars, HP Lovecraft's Randolph Carter, and HG Well's unnamed Time Traveler).

Thoughts: Moore completes the assembling of his League, first securing Mr Hyde, as the group's Hulk and we learn that Jeckyll has become like Bruce Banner, turned into the monster in times of great stress. Dr Jeckyll & Mr Hyde was one of the two inspirations for the Hulk (the other being Frankenstein) and Moore reverses things, making the pair of Jeckyll and Hyde into a representation of their comic book descendent. Moore's Hyde is a vulgar brute, who swears and rants racist and other bigoted slurs, representing the worst natures of man, the fear and hatred of the unknown and those different. When he first reverts back to Jeckyll, we see that the wound is transferred to the doctor, as his missing ear has to be sewn up.

Moore formally identifies Nemo's ship as the Nautilus, which greatly deviates from Verne's description, but homages the squid attack upon the Nautilus. Perhaps this is an upgraded version of his craft.

Bond continues to be a mysterious superior to the group, though not as mysterious as M, who Mina believes is Mycroft Holmes. Within the Holmes stories, Mycroft is Sherlock's older and smarter brother, who works in some capacity, for the British government (Holmes tells Watson that Mycroft "is the British Government."). Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes presents the idea that Mycroft is head of the British Secret Service and his Diogenes Club is a front for the organization. Later, writer Kim Newman used this conceit for his own meta-fictions, The Man From the Diogenes Club, as well as the Anno Dracula series (which is sort of an alternate dimension from the other series), where the Diogenes Club is the branch of the Secret Service that deals with strange phenomena and creatures; a sort of mix of Dr Who, The Avengers, Sapphire & Steel, The Champions and Adam Adamant. Bond never confirms this and suggests Mina keep her ideas to herself, as M's identity is a State secret. We are told that Sherlock is believed dead, after battling Professor Moriarty, in "The Final Problem." Doyle wrote that story, as he had grown tired of Holmes and wanted to move on to other works, killing the detective after introducing his greatest adversary (with this being their only adventure together). Public demand led first to The Hound of the Baskervilles, then to the return of Sherlock Holmes, where Watson learns (in "The Adventure of the Empty House") Holmes faked his death, though Moriarty did fall to his, then spent time in Europe, earning a living as a violinist. Later writers turned this into fact, as Nicholas Meyer had Holmes consult with Sigmund freud, to deal with his cocaine addiction and then take a recovery sabbatical, telling Holmes to write that he had been killed by his mathematics tutor, Moriarty. Meyer wrote another Holmes adventure, The Canary Trainer, where Holmes is a violinist in the orchestra of the Paris Opera House, where he witnesses and investigates the events of Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera. Meyer had a third Holmes book, The West End Horror, that revolves around the productions of Gilbert & Sullivan, and also features a young George Bernard Shaw.

Rosa Coote's students are all girls from literature, as noted above, including Pollyanna. So, you can imagine a film version of the League (rather than the failed attempt), where Hailey Mills is floating in the air, the victim of Claude Rains. That's the horrible vision I got when I first read that scene, as the Disney Pollyana is my relationship to the literary work. I find it hard to see Pollyana playing the Glad Game, after that; but, that was the point of the character. Moore, of course, would bring together other literary young heroines, in Lost Girls, with Dorothy Gale (Wizard of Oz and other Oz books), Wendy darling (Peter Pan) and Alice Fairchild (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass), in an erotic tale, along with his partner, Melinda Gebbie, who also collaborated on the Cobweb feature, in ABC's Tomorrow Stories.

Moore mention's Griffin's death, at the end of Wells' book, but gives him an out, as he substituted someone else.

Professor Cavor is at the center of Wells' The First Men in the Moon, where he creates a vessel out of cavorite, which has anti-gravity properties, which carries him and companions to the moon, where they have an adventure. Here, we learn the substance has been stolen by a criminal doctor, to create an aerial weapon. This crime lord is none other than Dr Fu Manchu. Moore refers obliquely to him, since he was still trademarked by Sax Rohmer's estate and the first book hadn't yet entered the public domain. This was also the reason why marvel could not refer to Fu Manchu, in relation to Shang Chi, after they lost their license to those characters, until the earliest story entered the public domain, in recent years. He makes it quite plain, describing an evil doctor, like Satan, who resides in the Limehouse district. the story told by Rohmer (Arthur Henry "Sarsfield" Ward) was that he was in the Limehouse district and spied a Chinese man of pure malevolent visage, like the face of Satan; allegedly, an actual criminal figure. Limehouse was an area of Chinese residence and there were vice dens and criminal groups, though much of Rohmer's descriptions were racist stereotyping. Fu Manchu's physical description bore more resemblance to stage magician Chung Ling Soo, who was actually a white man, William Ellsworth Robinson, who dressed in Chinese robes and clothing and was made up to appear Chinese. His act and appearance was a copy of an actual Chinese magician, whose stage name was Ching Ling Foo.

Moore refers to both Robur and Captain Mors, both of whom were air pirates of the period literature, in France and Germany (respectively) Robur is best known for Master of the World, though the film version is actually, largely, an adaptation of Clipper of the Clouds, aka Robur the Conquerer, where the character first appeared, with a flying heavier-than-air dreadnaught, and some elements of Master of the World, where Robur has a new craft, that can perform in several environments, operating from a mountain base. These references are not just tossed out for similarity, as Moore is setting up later scenes of aerial warships of advanced design. Robur was a sort of aerial Captain Nemo, and the film, with Vincent Price, emphasizes this by having him wage war on arms manufacturers. Captain Mors is a more traditional "pirate," waging war from his airship. HG Wells would also dabble in this in his prophetic work, The War in the Air, which features a vision of a world war, with great airships attacking England, with gas bombs, as many had predicted, after the first World War. Wells also had similar things in his Shape of Things to Come, as a world war devastates civilization, reducing it to barbarous states, until a group of airmen and engineers, operating from a base in Basra, Iraq, set out to stop the warlords and rebuild civilization. In the film version, the airmen, Wings Over the World, fly giant flying wing bombers, which drop sleep gas on The Boss and his forces, subduing them non-lethally. They then build an advanced undergound city, leading to the climax, where portions of society argue and riot at the start of a manned space shot, from a giant cannon.

The British Museum is an inspired HQ for the team and Moore and O'Neil fill it with easter eggs, including a Brobdignagian skull, from Gulliver's Travels and relics from Ayesha, the subject of H Rider Haggard's She and other novels. The character was queen of a hidden city in Africa, descended from ancient Greeks, though Moore connects her to Ancient Egypt, before the Greeks. She (literally) will be related to future episodes for Allan Quatermain.

Mina observes the image of the first League, which is made up of earlier adventure characters, from the late 1700s and early 1800s, including Gulliver, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Dr Synn, Fanny Hill and Natty Bumpo, aka Hawkeye, of Last of the Mohicans (the inspiration for the nickname of Dr Benjamin Franklin Pierce). This was one of the few elements from the series that made it into the film version, as you see a version of this painting/etching, in the HQ. Too bad they didn't use any of the rest. The Museum will be a source for many future easter eggs, with the Brobdignag skull as a recurring feature. The look of the place brings to mind the trophies in the Batcave, including the giant penny and dinosaur. That is deliberate as Moore and O'Neill draw the parallels to these Victorian figures and later superhero comics. The family tree of the super hero sees the pulp novel hero as their father (and comic strip as mother, or vice versa, if you prefer) and the Victorian and turn of the century novels and story papers as the grandparents.

Before someone brings it up, yes, we have two issues of the series and 2 instances of rape (well one actual and one attempted). Both fit in with the context of the story, as the first occurs in an opium den, a haven of sin and vice, as seen by the Victorians. The second is within character for The Invisible Man, who was a deranged maniac, who would engage in such things, as power over others was his ultimate goal and invisibility brought him that power. Meanwhile, Moore is also satirizing both Victorian erotica, as seen in The Pearl magazine, where Rosa Coote existed, with its penchant for flogging and similar BDSM acts, no doubt inspired by the common form of corporal punishment in boarding schools and Victorian (and American) homes. Spanking/whipping/birching/caning was an accepted form of punishment and one of the elements of sexual fetishes is a connection to childhood experiences which created sexual feelings. Fantasies about spanking and related fetishes often revolve around punishment from an authority figure, which was a form of attention. Often in childhood, bad behavior is a call for attention, in the absence of attention with good behavior. Since such punishment might continue into adolescence, it can take on sexual connotations, just as foot fetishes might have a connection to the childhood experiences of crawling at an adult's feet (according to some theories) or clothing to certain sights or smells or sounds, from formative years that bring pleasing images or memories, which then become sexualized. So, Moore is mixing in literary comment and social satire, within an adventure story structure. Sex is a part of Moore's realms, as is power, and rape is an act of assuming power over another, while BDSM activities involve power exchanges and sexual activities. While it is easy to draw criticism for how often such things appear in Moore's work, it doesn't take to much searching to find examples in other comic works, but treated in a far less sophisticated fashion, either in vulgar means or such couched ways as to be more tease than trope. How often is bondage and peril used to sell comics, with overt sexual connotations scrubbed away, while actual use of adult BDSM relationships or activities is used either to represent depravity or is purely the world of erotica? American comics and cinema are rather squeamish and Puritan when it comes to such things, compared to European and other cultures, yet engage far more in the use of violence for drama (especially comics and film). So the question is, is this criticism of Moore based more on how he uses such things, the quantity in which he uses them or just the fact that he uses such adult themes and it makes the more repressed audience uncomfortable, rather than offended?

Anyway, I will leave it at that. From here on, I will focus on the plot and the links to other works.

Next, Moore unveils the next book in the ABC line, as he turns to the pulp hero to give us a new adventurer: Tom Strong.

Nice idea for a thread, Cody. I'm only familiar with the LoEG comic, which I adore being something of an Alan Moore fanboy. I enjoyed your write up of issue #1, and couldn't really find fault with any of your observations. I also like that you are evaluating the series within the context of Victorian history, literary conventions, and social mores -- all things upon with Moore is an expert. Such a reading is essential to understanding what Moore was trying to achieve in this series, in my view. I've yet to read your observations on issue #2, but I'm looking forward to doing so.

I'll be interested to read your reviews of the ABC comics.