Lavonardo

The two first episodes of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill were nothing short of great. The plotlines, recycling the popular culture of the turn of the 20th century were packed with imaginative second takes of famous stories, and even more importantly, believable new adventures for characters known by the readers well in advance.

The second tale was apocalyptic, the group was violently torn apart in the grande finale, and any return seemed unlikely. However, the Gentlemen returned with a third helping last november.

Unlike most other comics, this was not a cheap retroactive alteration of the continuity - what’s dead remains dead, and it’s now a whole new ballgame.

And it is a different game indeed. For starters the format has been changed. The Black Dossier is not a conventional graphic novel, but includes lots of purely textual material, as well as supplementary comics not part of the main storyline.

Also the storyline itself has changed direction. The plot does not continue from where we left off in 1898, rather it encompasses the history of civilization, and concentrates on the unorthodox special forces the British Empire has fielded throughout the years.

A background story concerns itself with the remnants of the Gentlemen in the fifties, but this is interleaved with snippets of books and plays that deal with the past or future incarnations of the group. The supposed writers of said documents include William Shakespeare, John Clelland and P.G. Wodehouse, and both the comic itself as well as the supplementary material are packed with even more intertextuality than before - the annotations clock in at 400 kilobytes.

Sadly, despite the impressive pedigree and a wealth of source material, the graphic novel fails to reach the lofty heights attained by its predecessors. While it is interesting to attempt picking out the references in the material, ranging from trivial to things known only to the worst obsessive-compulsive fanboys, the story itself remains limp and frankly, uninteresting. The vast chunks of interleaving text (especially the lengthier bits) interrupt the flow and almost deter the reader from progressing. The stories sound great, and with the possible exception of the Shakespeare play, would have benefited from having been shown to the reader, as opposed to just being told. Alan Moore’s ability to convincingly emulate writers of the period to produce the likes of Bertie Wooster meeting the Cthulhu Mythos head-on are not to be disrespected, but I would have much rather seen the scenes flow visually.

The book is released in the United States alone, with no forthcoming European publication - this is, according to the publisher due to unspecified copyright issues.

I certainly hope that this strange publication remains a singular oddity, and the forthcoming “real” chapter three of the saga, Century returns to the level shown in the first two chapters.