The Fiendish Plot of the Devil Doctor

League of Extraordinary Gentleman Volume 1: written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Kevin O'Neill (1999-2000; collected 2001): When it began, Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentleman (LOEG) looked like a worthy successor to the such predecessors as Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp's Harold Shea stories and Philip Jose Farmer's Wold Newton works. The literary and legendary characters of many different authors and cultures would turn out to live in the same world, where they could interact. Warren Ellis and John Cassaday were even working on a similar, contemporaneous project, Planetary, at the same comic-book company.

But things changed. Or things were gradually revealed. And coming back to the first volume of LOEG after reading the most recent volume, Century, I find that these changes were always indicated by plot points and lines that seemed like throwaways at the time. Nonetheless, the first volume of LOEG still reads like a somewhat sarcastic team-up of characters from different literary works of the 19th century. The really bizarre stuff was still mostly two volumes away.

So in 1898, Dracula's now-divorced Mina Harker (nee Murray), H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man, H. Rider Haggard's African adventurer Alan Quatermain, Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Jules Verne's Captain Nemo are tasked by James Bond's grandfather Campion, who is working for the mysterious M., head of the British secret service, with stopping Fu Manchu from destroying England with the aid of the anti-gravitational Cavorite he's stolen from Professor Cavor (a substance and a character in H.G. Wells' First Men in the Moon). During the course of this adventure, we'll also meet and mingle with Pollyanna, Moby Dick 's Ishmael (he's Nemo's first mate), Sherlock's brother Mycroft Holmes, Poe's French private detective C. Auguste Dupin, and a host of other fictional characters major and minor.

Artist O'Neill is called upon to do a lot of things -- stage epic battle scenes, keep things light when they're supposed to be light, reimagine Mr. Hyde as a giant, Hulk-like grotesque, draw hundreds of cameo appearances -- and he does them all well. He's a cartoonist of real wit and subversive tendencies.

Plot-wise, things get hinky very fast because things, as usual, are not what they seem. The at-least-slightly less metafictional aims of this first volume make for a slightly less introspective feel -- one doesn't feel like the whole enterprise of fiction is being interrogated on every page, even if it really is. The prose piece that concludes the volume takes us into some of the history of the members of the League, as we discover what led Alan Quatermain to the dire condition Mina finds him in near the beginning of this volume. Highly recommended.

Armagideon Time for Mack the Knife

Excalibur, Orlando, Anti-Christ, and Mina Harker (l-r)

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century (1910, 1969, 2009): written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Kevin O'Neill (2009-2012): In the otherworld of Moore and O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (LOEG) series, our fiction plays out as that world's fact. Focused on the myths and stories of Great Britain, LOEG may or may not be Moore's last comic-book series. This volume is now done, but an earlier story mashing up Captain Nemo's daughter, the crew of the Nautilus, and H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness awaits.

Literary mash-ups aren't new, and LOEG has been compared to many of its forebears (Silverlock, the Harold Shea series by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, and the Wold Newton universe of Philip Jose Farmer are three prominent ancestors) and contemporaries (Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson's Astro City, Warren Ellis and John Cassaday's Planetary).

No one in my experience, however, has gone more metafictionally mashy to such bizarre and telling effect. This can be frustrating at times (who the hell are some of these characters?), but overall the effect has been thrilling -- indeed, more and more thrilling, at least in a intellectual sense, as the series has continued to become less interested in the bones of conventional superhero narrative and more interested in the nature of story itself, its care and feeding, its rises and falls.

At first, Century seems straightforward: the League of 1910 (now comprising Mina Harker, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Allan Quatermain, William Hope Hodgson's occult detective Carnacki the Ghost-finder, and British super-thief Raffles) seeks to stop sinister mystic Oliver Haddo from creating both a Moonchild and the Anti-Christ itself.

Subsequently, things go galloping off madly in all directions, including the direction of Bertholt Brecht's Threepenny Opera. There's a lot of singing in the three chapters. That Brecht's play was a major reference point for Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen probably shouldn't go uncommented. Andy Capp walks through several panels. Fictional characters crowd the background and foreground, most of them staring at the reader.

And there's 1969, and then there's 2009. Some of the major plot points are so weird and ultimately rewarding that there's no point in me spoiling them. The identity of the Anti-Christ manages to be hilarious, horrifying, and perfectly apt within this world of Great Britain's fictions, the narrative dream-time of an Empire's rise and fall. Meanwhile, in the United States, the Bartlet administration of The West Wing gives way to the Palmer administration of 24. Lost's Driveshaft releases a new album. The armies of different fictional Moon-dwellers clash on the Moon, observed by characters from The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street. Whew.

Back in 1969, a rejuvenated Allan Quatermain suddenly looks a whole lot like Moore's John Constantine. Back in 1910, revelations about the Jack the Ripper killings fly by, almost unnoticed. From Hell? So it goes. Boy, does Moore ever seem to hate James Bond. Highly recommended, though on-line annotation sites are also highly recommended.