The League Of Extraordinary Gentleman Vol 1

Victorian Justice League

The League Of
Extraordinary Gentleman Vol 1
by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill
America’s Best Comics
ISBN  9781563898587

Okay... so very behind the times but I’m finally catching up with the first collected edition of Volume 1 of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen and, this is the story the film was purported to be based on... I’ll get to that in a minute, in no uncertain terms.

My first observation, which gave me a chuckle, is that the publishers of the book are called America’s Finest Comics which... well, I think it says it all when you realise that the story is written by the great Alan Moore, the famous English author and drawn by the great, again English, comic book illustrator Kevin O’Neill. Both of these talents are one of a kind geniuses hailing from the UK.

Indeed Moore is, as far as I’m concerned, the greatest writer in comics of all time... nobody else even comes close (except for Neil Gaiman, perhaps... but not that close). Many films have been made of his properties and he’s tried to distance himself from the movie ‘adaptations’ as much as possible, going so far as to have his name removed from the credits of various big budget versions. His greatest work though is, curiously, untouched by Hollywoodland... namely The Ballad Of Halo Jones for 2000AD, which I still count as the single greatest piece of literature ever written, comic book or otherwise.

Kevin O’ Neill I also discovered from those early issues of 2000AD back in the day, drawing such strips as Nemesis The Warlock, among many others. His style is certainly unique and, well he passed away in 2022 and is very much missed.

Now then, I always quite liked the movie version of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen but, golly, having now read the original story on which it’s said to be based, I have to say I’m very unhappy about the way the movie turned out. It’s nothing like. It doesn’t have the breadth of the original tale in any way, shape or form. It’s like the writers of the film just threw a few related characters together (some of them and certainly not all the same ones or even with the same personalities) and did their own thing.

Take Allan Quatermain, for example. Depicted as an old man as Sean Connery was when he played him for sure but, the movie version didn’t have him spending all his time fighting off his addiction to drugs and so on. Some of the characters are also similar but, not quite the same. For instance, the Mr. Hyde version of Dr. Jeykll is an abomination, using quite shocking swear words and basically ‘hulking out’ whenever an unstoppable and violent force is needed (like a wookie, good at tearing people’s arms off). Then there’s Mina Murray... it won’t take you long to realise that, before her divorce, she was Mina Harker from Bram Stoker’s Dracula... and since she was bitten she has, as far as this first volume is concerned, hypnotic persuasion. The Invisible Man is a bit of a villain but working with the group too... though not worrying about brutally killing innocent bystanders to help himself to things. And Captain Nemo, of course, who the film kind of got right, actually.... to an extent.

But it’s the depth of the other appearances too, in this world of 1898, as the group work together to wrest stolen Cavorite... yes that’s right, as invented by Dr. Cavor in H. G. Well’s The First Men In The Moon to aid space travel... from the fiendish Dr. Fu Manchu in the Limehouse region of London, where he builds a big war airship harnessing the Cavorite to bomb London. However, when ‘the league’ do finally get it back for the British Secret Service, they find out they were not working for whom they thought and were, in fact, working for Professor Moriarty, for his own fiendish schemes (there’s a lovely set of panels detailing how he survived the altercation with Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls).

So the league are, once again, on their way to retrieve the Cavorite and foil Moriarty’s plans... not realising that Moriarty was put in place as the Napoleon of Crime by the British Government itself, for reasons which might actually make some sense, if you’re as cynical as I am.

And on the way they meet a wealth of characters from popular literature of the time that had me lapping up this story and it’s lovely artwork with much joy. For instance, Edgar Allan Poe’s original detective character C. Auguste Dupin meets the league and puts them on the trail to recruit the Jekyll and Hyde character, who he thinks is a return of the monkey killer from The Murders In The Rue Morgue. They even, at some point, have to stay the night in a boarding school run by a certain Miss Rosa Coote from visceral Victorian BDSM tale Miss Coote’s Confessions, from the underground magazine The Pearl (among others... which started me on a course to sympathy with that particular lifestyle at a fairly young age... well, if the grown ups would leave notorious and bloody Victorian pornography around then, what do you expect?).

There’s even an appearance by the gang of the Artful Dodger at some point, who seems to be running the gang of pickpockets after the death of Bill Sikes in Dicken’s Oliver Twist.

But enough... I don’t want to spoil everything other than to say I thoroughly enjoyed the first volume of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen and I’m looking forward to reading the next one in the series, which I believe will make good on those shooting flares heading towards Earth from the planet Mars, which are mentioned in this one. What are the chances, eh?