Recently I spoke with a comics writer who said he had been considering using the phrase, “Enter freely and of your own will,” in a story, but decided against it because he didn’t think that today’s comics readers would recognize it as an allusion to Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
On the other end of the spectrum of opinion of this subject would be Alan Moore, who, together with illustrator Kevin O’Neill, created The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a comics series entirely founded upon characters, plot elements, and allusions to stories, both famous and obscure, from 19th and early 20th century fiction. (To credit League‘s publisher is nearly as complex as tracking down some of the book’s references: it comes from Moore’s America’s Best Comics, which is an imprint of WildStorm, which is now part of DC Comics, which is part of the Warner Brothers movie division of the Time Warner empire, formerly known as the AOL Time Warner empire.) The initial League miniseries, Volume One, was adapted into a movie from Twentieth Century Fox, which came out this summer, and the second comics miniseries, Volume Two, concluded this month, and was collected into a new hardcover edition.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, in the two comics miniseries, is an alliance of leading characters from five of the most celebrated stories of adventure, horror and science fiction published in Victorian England. There is Allan Quatermain, the hunter and adventurer from H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (probably nowadays best known in the United States through the 1950 MGM film version that turns up on TCM) and several other novels. Next is Mina Murray, formerly Wilhemina Harker, heroine and survivor of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Then there is Captain Nemo, creator and commander of the submarine Nautilus, the antihero of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea and its sequel, Mysterious Island. There is also Robert Louis Stevenson’s creation Dr. Henry Jekyll and his other self, Edward Hyde, who over the years has grown into a gigantic, superhumanly strong monster. Finally, there is Griffin, the title character of H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man. The five are assembled by British intelligence, which, as in the James Bond novels of the next century, is headed by a man known as M; indeed, his second in command is named Bond, Campion Bond, and is presumably a forebear of Ian Fleming’s hero. Together the five are sent to combat menaces to England that are as extraordinary, or even more so, as they themselves are.
THE VICTORIAN SUPERHERO
Recently while reading a new issue of a comic, I gloomily mused at how high page rates for writers have become, and how very little incident or dialogue they often get away with putting on an individual page: no wonder the typical comic today reads more like an overpriced series of scenes than a well-crafted story. This is not the case with Moore, who more than earns his pay, putting an extraordinary amount of well-researched detail even into props and peripheral figures in the backgrounds of panels in League.
Even the title of the series is constructed to hold multiple meanings. The most obvious reference in the title is to the 1958 novel and 1960 British film The League of Gentlemen, about a group of military men who emerge from retirement to stage a bank robbery. The same name has already been borrowed by a team of comedians for a recent BBC television series and by a rock band. But look more closely at the title. To superhero comics readers, League conjures up the image of the Justice League of America. And isn’t Extraordinary Gentlemen a highfalutin variation on the name X-Men?
In fact, like such past works of his as Watchmen and Miracleman, League is in part an exploration of the superhero concept, as Moore himself explained in a superb interview conducted by Mark Askwith in the July 2003 issue of Locus (Vol. 51 #1).
(Actually, the part of the interview I like the best is not the part about League, but Moore’s hypothesizing about the workings of the comics medium. Making the familiar point that the ancestry of comics goes back to Egyptian hieroglyphs and even to the primeval paintings in the caves of Lascaux, Moore noted that “the comic strip form… must be something we as a species find ourselves drawn to quite naturally.” He then speculated that the comics medium has such “power” because “the comic strip is one of the few art forms that engages both halves of the brain and sets them to the same task.” Of course.)
Moore explained in Locus that League originated when he began contemplating “the roots of these superhero characters” in comics. “Inexorably, it led me back to the fantastic characters of late 19th, early 20th century science fiction, who in some way provided the archetypes, or templates, from which a lot of later superheroes found their careers.” Moore gives as an example the fact that the Hulk is based on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a fact that the Hulk’s co-creator, Stan Lee, has long admitted. “The initial idea with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was simply putting together a kind of superhero team composed of striking characters from the fantastic fiction of the late Victorian period,” Moore stated.
Volume 1 has an illustration of the five League members’ hands joining to signify the formation of their team in a visual echo of an iconic image from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four #1. Can we take the comparison further? Hyde would clearly be a counterpart to the Thing, and in reflecting on Hyde’s feelings for Mina, perhaps it would be relevant to keep in mind the Thing’s frustrated early infatuation with Sue Storm, and his later romance with Alicia Masters. Quatermain, the oldest of the group, and Mina, who become romantically involved, would parallel Reed Richards and Sue Storm, though it is Griffin, obviously, who has the same super-power that gives Sue her “Invisible Girl” name. I don’t see any analogue in the League for the Human Torch. But is Nemo the analogue to another dispossessed prince who wars on surface dwellers and whose name begins with “N” – Prince Namor the Sub-Mariner, sometime ally of the Fantastic Four? Now, there’s an aspect of the Sub-Mariner I’d never considered: Did Bill Everett have Nemo in mind when he created Namor? Is that why he was called the “Sub-Mariner”?
For that matter, Volume 1 has an introduction, written as if by a Victorian-era editor, signed “S. Smiles.” Named after “Smiling” Stan Lee, perhaps?
In the first issue of Volume 1, Mina notes that she, Quatermain, and Nemo are all “strangers in our homeland,” “exiles” from British society. (Nemo is from India, but that was then part of the British Empire.) Hyde and Griffin, the two League members with actual super-powers, are outcasts of a different sort: they are criminals and monsters. So in League Moore is not simply creating a Victorian team of proto-superheroes; he is interpreting these heroes in the light of the revolution that Marvel wreaked in the superhero genre in the 1960s. These are heroes as outsiders, heroes with character flaws and/or troubled pasts, heroes shunned by the very society that they protect.
“What I was originally envisioning was a very high-spirited romp where I’d get the chance to write a lot of the characters that have interested me since childhood,” Moore told Locus. But casting his characters into the Marvel-influenced superhero mode means that there is a dark side to this “romp.”
Quatermain and Mina, unlike their three colleagues, are not regarded by British law as criminals. But when we first see the now elderly Quatermain in League Volume 1, he is in a drug-induced stupor, having retreated from the suffering in his life, presumably the deaths of his wife and son, into chemical addiction.
Mina, on the other hand, has become a pariah through no fault of her own. She was Dracula’s unwilling victim, and now society regards her as morally tainted by the experience. She is a “fallen woman.” The puritanical Victorians are horrified that she not only engaged in what they consider an unspeakable form of sex, but she did it with a man who was not her husband, and was a foreigner besides! Through Mina Moore is obviously making fun of Victorian sexual attitudes and xenophobia, but he is also propounding strong feminist themes. Mina’s case clearly resembles that of real life rape victims who are unjustly blamed for their own attacks, as if they had brought it upon themselves. Even Mina’s husband, Jonathan Harker, shuns her, leading to their divorce, which makes Mina even more anathema in Victorian society. It is Mina whom Moore makes the leader of the League (perhaps as a parallel to the fact that England and its empire at that time were ruled by a queen?), and he clearly suggests that the fact that to conventional Victorian opinion, Mina’s being an independent woman in a position of authority was as bad as her being a “fallen woman.” Some characters accuse her of being mannish, or a lesbian (not a compliment back then), as if she had violated her own gender by taking on the supposedly masculine role of adventurer and leader.
John Byrne has theorized that the superhero concept was created in America to compensate for the fact that by declaring independence from Britain, the United States no longer had a claim on the mother country’s mythic heroes like King Arthur and Robin Hood. I think there’s a good deal of truth to this, and that Superman and Batman, at least, exert as strong a hold on today’s popular imagination in America as their two British predecessors do here.
But I think that in League, Moore is making a very different point. The legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood originated centuries ago, but however vital they have remained over all this time, they are not enough. Each century and culture must find new forms for the archetypal figures of myth, for Joseph Campbell’s “hero of a thousand faces,” and for villains and monsters as well. So it is that in League Moore seeks to demonstrate that the heroes and villains who originated in the adventure stories, fantasy, horror and science fiction of the late 19th and early 20th century are the forebears of the superheroes and supervillains of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. But the first two League series also establish that there were earlier versions of the team in the 17th century (including the sorcerer Prospero and the supernatural creatures Ariel and Caliban from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Christian, from John Bunyan’s religious allegory. The Pilgrim’s Progress), and the 18th century (including Lemuel Gulliver and James Fenimore Cooper’s frontier hero Natty Bummpo, alias Hawkeye of The Last of the Mohicans). Moore thereby shows that the writers of each century have created heroes and fantasy figures that suit the culture of their times.
BUILDING UNIVERSES
Moore was hardly the first writer to bring together characters and story concepts from books by different 19th century authors. This isn’t even original to postmodernism, the 20th century artistic movement that makes a point of conscious, even ironic allusions to the past works. The ancient Roman writer Virgil, in writing his epic of the founding of Rome, tied his story in not only to the Trojan War but to specific characters from Homer’s Odyssey, and centuries later the Italian poet Dante would not only use Virgil as a character, but blend together the underworld of classical mythology and the Christian version of hell in his Inferno. As for Victorian characters, there are already such precedents as Manly Wade Wellman’s Sherlock Holmes’s War of the Worlds, pitting Doyle’s great detective against Wells’s Martians, who contend against the League in Moore’s Volume 2.
In the Locus interview Moore pointed to the fact that Jules Verne and H. P. Lovecraft each wrote stories tying in to Edgar Allan Poe’s enigmatic tale of a journey into an eerily mysterious realm, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Moore said, “In some ways you could almost get the impression that these individual writers were actually trying to link up their stories in a common big world, so we’ve been able to extend that; out of that thinking the entire strip has emerged.”
One of the most significant precedents for League is the Wold Newton genealogy created by the science fiction writer Philip Jose Farmer in his books, Tarzan Alive! and Doc Savage: An Apocalyptic Life, which purport to be biographies of these two fictional characters.
Farmer asserts that a meteor landed in a place called Wold Newton in 18th century England, where a number of pregnant women were exposed to its radiation. As a result, these women’s descendants were people with extraordinary abilities, including Tarzan, Doc Savage, Sherlock Holmes, and numerous other heroes of adventure and detective fiction. Thus Farmer links together a large number of the heroes of 19th and early 20th century as members of a large, multigenerational family. They would all be the descendants of mutants, actually, so Farmer had unknowingly collected all these characters together into an analogue to the emerging race of Homo superior in X-Men!
Moore doesn’t try to link his major characters into a single family, but he casts his net far wider than even Farmer did. Moore told Locus that “I resolved . . . not to have any characters appear anywhere in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen referred to by name who were not characters either from or related to the fiction of that period, or perhaps back-engineered characters where we have taken somebody from a later work and retro-fitted a father or grandfather into our narrative.” He and Kevin O’Neill even went so far as to put into League‘s London grandiose buildings that had been proposed but never actually constructed.
What is original and unique about Moore’s work in League is not the fact that he combines characters from different authors’ work, but the sheer, immense scale of his achievement. As Moore told Askwith in Locus, “We are depicting an entire planet of human fictions as if they all existed in the same world.”
Moore’s universe building even extends to other worlds: Volume 2 issue 1 is set on Mars, and Moore establishes that Wells’s Martians come from yet another planet. It extends into other dimensions (through, for example, his references to the extradimensional monsters of H.P. Lovecraft). Moore has begun to describe past centuries (through establishing the existence of previous Leagues) and the far future (through his use of Wells’s Time Traveler in the backup stories in Volume 1). Unlike most comics writers, Moore even has a master plan for the lead characters’ fates. Volume 1’s backup stories flashforward into the Lovecraft-inspired tale that presumably will be featured in Vol. 3; and the New Traveller’s Almanac in Volume 2 establishes that Mina and companions will travel the world from 1899 to 1912 before she establishes a new League in 1913!. Most comics writers seem to make it up as they go along, but with League I wonder just how many future stories Moore has already conceived. Sherlock Holmes, for example, has such a strong offstage presence in League that I would think Moore must have plans for him. Surely with Moriarty and Martians raising hell in London, Holmes must be up to something that Conan Doyle never told us about to justify Holmes’ staying out of the fray.
Moore asserted in Locus that “By the end of the second volume, we’ll have charted, as well as we are able, the entire planet of fiction. I don’t know whether there is any more to this than another one of my deranged obsessions, but it feels as if there is. The more I’ve thought about this, it occurs to me that as long as there’s been a world we have been creating an imaginary counterpart to that world with different places, different people, different history, and to some degree that phantom world of the imagination has co-existed with our own.”
He has definitely hit upon something here. Throughout the history of literature, writers have had an impulse not simply to tell stories about individual persons or events, but to create what amount to alternate, fictional realities. Think of the enormous body of interconnected stories that comprise Greek mythology, and the way that Greek and Roman poets and playwrights would base their own works on the existing mythos. The same applies to the many works that comprise the mythos of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, which continues to inspire new variations to this day.
More recent writers of fantasy and science fiction may devise detailed alternate versions of the Earth of a past age: Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age, with its various countries, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Much of the appeal of Star Trek and Star Wars comes from the fact that these two series create alternate universes of characters, technology, other planets, civilizations and alien races, and histories spanning decades, even centuries.
But a writer need not create other countries or other planets to give the reader a sense of a fully imagined alternate reality. J.K. Rowling says little about the wizards of countries other than England in her Harry Potter books. Instead she turns from macrocosm to microcosm, and imagines the world of her British wizards and their students in such amazing and entertaining detail that she even comes up with unusual ideas for the kind of candy they eat and the way they send messages (via owls, in an appealingly quaint alternative to e-mail).
The idea of the alternate, imagined reality is not restricted to writers of fantasy and science fiction, either. Authors such as Henry Fielding and Charles Dickens wrote huge novels filled with characters that serve as panoramas of the England of their time; Leo Tolstoy similarly provides a cross-section of Russian society in War and Peace. Then there is the example of James Joyce, whose Ulysses serves as a highly detailed portrait of a fictionalized Dublin, as well as covering the events of a single day in the life of its main character, Leopold Bloom (June 16, 1904, whose hundredth anniversary soon arrives), in such detail that Joyce scholars can spend careers exploring this tiny space-time continuum.
Moore recognizes that there is more to the appeal of this fictional universe-building than appealing to allegedly obsessive-compulsive fannishness. He told Askwith in Locus: “There is obviously something important in this. If we did not have some kind of biological or cultural need to create these imaginary spaces and these imaginary beings, I really don’t think nature would have given us the capability to do it… Most things have to do with the quite stark issues of survival, and I’ve got no reason to suppose the human capacity for art and fiction and imagination is not in that category.”
THE BIG TWO UNIVERSES
Perhaps the two most extensively recorded fictional realities are the DC and Marvel Universes, each of which has given rise to thousands of stories over more than sixty years.
DC Comics has billed its fictional cosmos in advertisements as “the Original Universe,” apparently in the belief that Detective Comics #1 predates the existence of God. But for decades DC did not comprehend the potential of the shared universe concept. Batman and Superman regularly teamed up in World’s Finest, and leading DC heroes would join forces, first in the Justice Society’s adventures in All-Star Comics, and later in Justice League of America. But it was as if crossovers were confined to a handful of series. In the 1960s two supporting characters in DC editor Julius Schwartz’s books, the heroine Zatanna and the villain Dr. Light, were considered unusual because they shared the gimmick of continually moving from one of Schwartz’s books to another.
Since there was no concern for keeping all of DC’s series consistent with each other, discrepancies in continuity became inevitable. In Aquaman’s version of Atlantis, the inhabitants were humanoid bipeds; in Lori Lemaris’s Atlantis in the Superman books, they were mermen and mermaids. (Atlantis, by the way, is strangely missing from Moore’s survey of the League universe, though surely he must have plans for it.)
It was Marvel that truly pioneered the concept of the shared universe in superhero comics. This was primarily Stan Lee’s doing: since he edited all the books and scripted most of them, he had the freedom to guest star characters from one series in another series at will. This made commercial sense, expanded the possibilities for stories, and brought Marvel’s fictional world a greater sense of reality. So it was that in Amazing Spider-Man #1 the title character tried to join the Fantastic Four, and in Daredevil #2 its star, Matt Murdock, turned out to be the F.F.’s lawyer. Some new series were spinoffs from existing books, like The Silver Surfer.
But Stan Lee went still further. He and Jack Kirby tied the new Marvel continuity into its Golden Age past by reintroducing Captain America and the Sub-Mariner. They also bridged genres by having the star of their combat series set in World War II, Nick Fury, turn up in the present, first in Fantastic Four and then as the hero of their James Bond-like spy series, Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD. Later Marvel writers would move further in these directions. Jim Steranko brought Kirby’s 1950s villain, the Yellow Claw, into the SHIELD series, and Roy Thomas would revive numerous Golden Age characters, and even tell create a new series about Marvel’s top 1940s superheroes, The Invaders, set during World War II. Steve Englehart linked Marvel’s superhero universe to its teen girl titles by making one of their leads, Patsy Walker, into a member of the Avengers, and dispatched several Avengers back in time to meet Marvel’s Wild West heroes, like Kid Colt and the Rawhide Kid.
Obviously, the new generation of comics writers who were inspired by the Marvel Comics of the 1960s enthusiastically embraced the shared universe concept. When this generation came to DC, they applied the idea to DC continuity, and began molding DC’s fictional worlds into a consistent universe as well.
As Marvel expanded, most of its new series, even those outside the superhero genre, were set within the fictional reality of Spider-Man and the other core heroes. Over the years, this reality expanded far beyond the New York City in which most of those heroes lived. Marvel stories ranged into future times (the era of Kang the Conqueror) and ancient times (the era of Kang’s other identity, Pharaoh Rama-Tut), into other planets and galaxies (the Kree and Skrull Empires), and other dimensions (like Dormammu’s Dark Dimension).
What is especially relevant to a discussion of Moore’s League is that Marvel also connected its modern mythos of heroes and villains to other fictional universes. Again, Lee and Kirby were the ones who started the process: Marvel’s versions of Thor and Hercules were founded, respectively, in Norse and Greek mythology, and Lee and Kirby even adapted some actual Norse myths into their Tales of Asgard series. Through the Black Knight, Roy Thomas linked the body of Marvel stories to the mythos of King Arthur and his knights. In the 1970s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Monster, H. G. Wells’ Martians (in the Killraven series), Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu (in Master of Kung Fu) and Robert E. Howard’s Conan were all absorbed into the Marvel cosmos.
And the process kept on going. In the 1980s Roy Thomas, as writer of Thor, not only sought to bring Marvel’s version of the Norse gods more closely in line with the actual myths, but crafted stories that clearly tied not only Jack Kirby’s Eternals mythos but also even Richard Wagner’s cycle of operas, The Ring of the Nibelung, into Marvel’s world.
It was probably Mark Gruenwald who coined the phrase “Marvel Universe,” making it part of the title of his creation, The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, to which I contributed in its various editions. Mark recognized the importance of the grand fictional cosmos that Stan Lee and the other Marvel writers had constructed over two decades, and realized that an important next step was to compile all the information established about it, as if he were creating a map for the benefit of future writers and readers traveling vicariously in the Marvel Universe.
Since Moore’s original intention in League was to devise a team of 19th century superheroes, I wonder if, in assembling League‘s vast fictional universe, he consciously intended to create a late 19th/early 20th century equivalent to the Marvel and DC Universes. Like Marvel and DC’s writers, Moore has assembled the disparate creations of numerous writers into a complex but coherent whole.
I suspect that Mark would have liked the concept behind The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and might have been both dazzled by and envious of Moore’s achievement in piecing together his immense New Traveller’s Almanac in the second volume. Speaking of which. . .
THE UNOFFICIAL HANDBOOK OF THE MOOREVAL UNIVERSE
For the second League miniseries, Moore informed Locus, “We hit upon the idea of coming up with this massive and extensive fictional travelogue in which we would provide ‘A New Traveler’s Almanac’ that. . .would detail all of the fictitious locales that had ever been alleged to exist.”
Indeed, in the Almanac, which runs in six chapters as a backup text series in Volume 2, Moore goes all the way back to ancient Greece and Rome, including references to places from Homer’s Odyssey and the tales of Jason and the Argonauts, and Lucian’s True History, itself an ancient example of science fiction. Moore includes characters and places from Homer’s Odyssey, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Rabelais’s tales of the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel, and the Arabian Knights. He draws from works by major authors including Jorge Luis Borges, Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness), Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe), Fyodor Dostoevsky, Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose), William Faulkner, Victor Hugo, Franz Kafka (The Castle), Mark Twain, John Updike (The Witches of Eastwick), and Virginia Woolf (the character of Orlando, who joins Mina and Quatermain on their travels); from plays by Aristophanes (Cloudcuckooland from The Birds), Henrik Ibsen (the trolls from Peer Gynt) and Alfred Jarry (Ubu Roi; from musicals by Brecht and Weill (Mahogany), Lerner and Loewe (Brigadoon) and Rodgers and Hammerstein (Oklahoma!, South Pacific), operettas by Gilbert and Sullivan (The Mikado, even the seldom performed Utopia, Limited), and operas by Mozart (The Magic Flute), Puccini (Madame Butterfly) and Wagner (The Flying Dutchman and Tannhauser); from poems by Coleridge and Tennyson; from classic fairy tales (Beauty and the Beast, Bluebeard, Puss-in-Boots, Sleeping Beauty, and works by Hans Christian Anderson); from movies starring the Marx Brothers (the rival nations of Freedonia and Sylvania from Duck Soup) and W. C. Fields (Klopstokia from Million Dollar Legs); from David Lynch’s television series Twin Peaks and (a particularly unlikely surprise) the Coen brothers’ movie The Big Lebowski; and from the comic strips Pogo (an Okeefenokee Swamp populated by talking animals) and Li’l Abner (Dogpatch and the land of the Shmoos).
There’s Skull Island from King Kong Shangri-La from Lost Horizon, and even the Duchy of Grand Fenwick from The Mouse That Roared. There is a reference to an interdimensional portal in Kansas that leads to another realm, presumably L. Frank Baum’s Oz, and an explicit mention of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia. There’s Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World, Washington Irving’s Sleepy Hollow and, Edgar Allan Poe’s House of Usher, H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham, Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot and Ira Levin’s Stepford, Dr. Seuss’s Mulberry Street and the tiny, two-dimensional world of Flatland. The Almanac names or alludes to Babar the Elephant, the Hardy Boys, the Lone Ranger, the Phantom of the Opera, Zorro, Voltaire’s Candide, and even the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. In describing the Arctic, Moore even inserts gags about the Coca-Cola company’s recent series of commercials involving polar bears.
Throughout Moore draws connections between similar concepts. He reports on a pirates’ conclave attended by Captain Blood, Captain Hook, and Long John Silver. He speculates that Paul Bunyan was descended from the giants of Jonathan Swift’s Brobdingnag (one of whose skulls is prominently seen in League scenes set at the British Museum). I am particularly delighted that Moore designates two famous artificial beings as the married monarchs of Toyland: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Monster and the female automaton Olympia, created by E.T.A. Hoffman and featured in my favorite opera, Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman. Toyland is up near the North Pole (near where Shelley left her Monster at the novel’s end), and, hence, appropriately near the home of Santa Claus, whom Moore describes in a surprising and amusing fashion (Itself, it turns out, based on Siberaian legends).
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, and The Hunting of the Snark all play a role in the Almanac. I was disappointed that Moore reports that the Alice of the League’s reality died in childhood, soon after returning from the Looking-Glass world, and decades before the start of League. Moore makes the interesting point that her sojourn there had transformed her into a looking-glass version of herself (apparently with her molecular structure reversed), and she could therefore not digest food on returning to her own reality, and so expired. Too bad, I thought. Moore does seem to take a certain ironic pleasure in killing off characters from children’s tales in League: hence the Cheshire Cat and White Rabbit end up as stuffed exhibits in the British Museum. I would have been interested in seeing what would have become of an Alice who had actually undergone the adventures Carroll described and grew into adulthood in League‘s world. Would she have become an explorer, still investigating other realms, maintaining her characteristic common sense attitude in confronting the unknown? But is she dead? Isn’t that her peering out from a mirror in the group shot of the League on the cover of the collected edition of Volume One? Hasn’t the question been raised in the past whether, when Alice entered the looking glass, her reflection would have emerged into the real world? Can it be the reflection who perished? Volume One’s cover reminds me of a moment towards the end of Disney’s animated Alice in Wonderland, in which Alice, in Wonderland, peers through a keyhole to see her other self asleep in the real world.
Most of the works to which Moore refers are in the public domain, but I find it interesting to see how far he dares venture in including references to works still under copyright. I notice that he lists various locales from Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan novels, but does not mention Tarzan itself. Similarly, Moore includes Cimmeria, the homeland of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian, but only refers to Conan as Amra, the name he was given in his African adventures with the pirate Belit.
I could identify the references that Moore made in the Almanac to many of the works catalogued above. But there were scores upon scores that I didn’t recognize, many from celebrated books I’d never read, or had not read in decades, and others from much more obscure sources. For example, growing up, I discovered a science fiction novel called Plutonia in my local library and avidly read it again and again: it turns out to have been a Russian science fiction novel from 1924. I never saw or heard a mention of this book anywhere for decades;; it was as if I were the only person who knew about it. And yet, here is Plutonia in Moore’s Almanac, where he links it to other underground worlds in early science fiction, such as Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pellucidar.
So there are many passages in the Almanac that I just skim through, unable to recognize any landmarks. I wonder how other readers react to the Almanac. Do many of them just give up reading it in bewilderment or exasperation at trying to figure out what Moore is referring to? (Thankfully, he has the commercial sense to choose well known characters for the principal roles in the League storylines.)
However, I prefer to take pleasure in seeing how Moore describes the characters and places that I do recognize. As for the rest, fortunately there is Jess Nevins, an aficionado of Victorian fantasy, who has established a website replete with lengthy and detailed annotations on the two League comics series, at www.geocities.com/jessnevins; he’s also written a book, Heroes and Monsters: An Unofficial Companion to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen from MonkeyBrain Press. As a past writer of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe and Who’s Who in the DC Universe, it is a pleasure to recognize in Nevins a kindred spirit. Aided by a small circle of other erudite League enthusiasts, Nevins has managed to identity and interpret virtually all of Moore’s literary references, though there are a few allusions that puzzle even Nevins and his league of extraordinary annotators.
Nevins’ copious research even corrects misconceptions I had. I assumed that the humanlike bear and tiger bioengineered by Wells’s Dr. Moreau in Volume 2 were meant to be sinister versions of Winnie the Pooh and Tigger, too. Nevins’ annotations instead point to characters Americans would be unlikely to know, early 20th century British comic strip characters called Rupert the Bear and Tiger Tim. That’s actually a relief: I would not want to worry that the A.A. Milne estate and the Disney empire, currently locked in courtroom battle, would pause to join forces to crush Moore into oblivion.
Especially through the Almanac, League makes a strong argument for the importance of genre fiction, especially fantasy, adventure, and science fiction. By drawing on the works of figures of the artistic stature of Shakespeare and Mozart, and Cervantes and Wagner, Moore’s Almanac shows that many towering works of Western civilization have made use of the devices of fantasy genres. Through League Moore does not divide works of high art from those of low, “popular” art, but places them in a single continuum. “Whether it’s low art or high art, that is part of the subversive thrill of putting things from the most despised lower reaches of the artistic spectrum next to the most revered cultural icons. I think, surprisingly, both can be enhanced by the juxtaposition,” Moore states in Locus. He thereby encourages readers to find the profundity within the archetypal figures of popular fiction and to consider how the great authors worked with the elements of fantasy to create masterworks.
I’ve here written a lot about the concepts underlying the world of League, but not much about the stories themselves. That will have to wait for the next column.
ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
Attention, Boston area readers! Sex, Lies and Superheroes, the documentary about comics, a film I co-wrote, will be screened at the Somerville Theatre, in Somerville, near Boston, on Saturday December 20 at 10 PM. I won’t be there, but its director, Constantine Valhouli will be, along with bands performing, so you should go!
-Copyright 2003 Peter Sanderson
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