Originally I had intended to write my commentary on Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (which I commenced in last week’s column) back last summer, when the film version opened, but my lengthy summer convention coverage got in the way.
Now, however, appears to be an even more propitious time. This month the second League mini-series concluded and was repackaged in a hardcover edition. This very week the DVD of the movie version was released.
Also, this week, I unexpectedly received in the mail a CD-ROM from Dr. Peter M. Coogan of Fontbonne University, one of the heads of the academic Comic Arts Conference held each year at the San Diego Con, containing copies of this year’s papers. Among them was Dr. Coogan’s own essay, “Wold-Newtonry: Theory and Methodology for the Literary Archaeology of the World Newton Universe.” This proved to be a highly detailed and enlightening treatise on the science fiction writer Philip Jose Farmer’s efforts to create a fictional genealogy that links the major heroes and villains of late 19th and early 20th century popular adventure, fantasy, detective stories and science fiction together. Farmer’s Wold Newton mythos, as noted last week, is a clear precursor of Moore’s even more extensive efforts to link fictions from ancient Greece onward together. It was through Coogan’s essay that I also learned about the numerous hobbyists who have continued building upon Farmer’s genealogy, including Jess Nevins, whose website of League annotations I commended last week (and who, quite rightly, is also named on the League DVD commentary track).
Moreover, in the Dec. 15, 2003 New Yorker, I found an interestingly relevant comment by art critic Peter Schjeldahl, whom I’ve quoted here before. Schjeldahl discusses the Whitney Museum’s current retrospective of the painter John Currin who, defying 20th century trends, clearly alludes in his work to artists of centuries past. “Currin puts art history in play,” Schjeldahl writes, and notes that one critic, in the exhibition’s catalogue, connects Currin to fifty other creators, ranging from high art Old Masters to fantasy illustrator Frank Frazetta. “It is pleasant to know things,” Schjeldahl concludes; “It is a delight to find one’s knowledge anticipated and engaged.”
Exactly so. This is what Moore does in League: he writes it to be accessible and entertaining to all his readers, but offers plentiful satisfactions to those who understand the allusions he makes to an enormous range of works throughout the history of Western literature.
Not everyone appreciates this sort of thing. The League DVD has a commentary track and featurettes about the making of the movie, but you will not find any comments in them by the director, Stephen Norrington, the screenwriter, James Dale Robinson, himself a longtime comics writer, or Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. This leads one to wonder just why this should be. (The movie’s star, Sean Connery, who plays Allan Quatermain, turns up in very brief interview excerpts in the featurettes; this suggests he actually had little of interest to say about the movie.) Instead, the commentary track is dominated by the producers, Don Murphy and Trevor Albert; the actors who play Jekyll/Hyde and the new Invisible Man also turn up and are quite entertaining in talking about and doing impressions of Connery. The producers talk a lot about set design (which is indeed good, especially the Nautilus interiors), costume design (also excellent) and special effects. (They had a low budget for CGI and it’s a welcome surprise that in most of his scenes, Hyde is actually the Jekyll actor in a body suit, not a computer-animated effect.) Murphy does recognize that the League members are all outcasts in Victorian society, but otherwise he and Albert have little to say about League‘s characterization and themes; perhaps here we have an explanation of why the movie version is so inferior to the graphic novel.
It is strange, considering Moore’s considerable research, interest in detail, and concern for explaining seeming discrepancies in continuity between League and the Victorian fictions on which it is based, that Murphy has such contempt for any of the people he calls “purists” and “documentarians” who question his own handling of the continuity. Making no effort to conceal his resentment towards part of his audience, Murphy tells his unnamed critics, “It’s just a fantasy movie” (echoing so many people we’ve heard dismissively say, “It’s just comics”) in the same tone of voice as one might say, “It’s just horse manure.” He also makes the standard reference to the comics fan as a “geek.” At one point, when he mentions how he learned from the Nevins website just how much detail Moore puts into League, Murphy even calls Moore “insane,” but then quickly catches and corrects himself. Sorry, too late, we heard you the first time.
In contrast, I’d point to the example of Peter Jackson, director of a far more commercially and critically successful film adaptation of a fantasy work, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, who is unfailingly respectful and empathetic towards Tolkien fans in his interviews, even when he acknowledges disagreements with them. Thanks to synchronicity, I can also point to David Edelstein’s article (“Ring Fanatics’ Long Wait Finally Ends, With an Eyeful”) in the Dec. 18, 2003 New York Times about the marathon screening of all three Rings films in Manhattan this week. Whereas so many writers would take cheap shots at the attendees’ love of these works, Edelstein treats the fans’ devotion seriously, recognizes it as a positive force, and even gets swept up in it himself.
There’s one thing that Murphy says in the DVD commentary that I found rather startling. Moore originally did the League comic for his America’s Best Comics imprint at Jim Lee’s WildStorm company. Murphy contends that for legal reasons, because the movie deal for League was in the works when Lee sold WildStorm to DC Comics, Moore and O’Neill retain ownership and control of the League property, whereas Moore’s other creations for ABC are now owned by DC. If this is true, how interesting it is. And how lucky for League fans that the series remains owned by the creators who care about its integrity. Today’s comics writers care so little for the past continuity at DC and Marvel (Why research it when you can rewrite it?), that Moore’s complex web of detail would be shredded once League fell into the hands of most other editors or writers.
VOLUME ONE
Before I discuss the movie in detail, I want to make some more comments about the initial League comics miniseries. Take warning: in discussing the series and film I will reveal the identity of the mystery villain. If this bothers you, skip over the League portion of this column before the next paragraph.
Moore cleverly builds the first miniseries around a war between the two leading villains of the British popular fiction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Professor James Moriarty, nemesis of Sherlock Holmes, and Sax Rohmer’s creation, Dr. Fu Manchu. Interestingly, this forces Moore to maneuver around copyright problems. On the DVD the producer says that Fu Manchu is still under copyright for thirty more years, that therefore they could not use him in the movie, and that he does not understand how Moore got away with putting him in the comic. Well, Moore is very careful: he never calls the “Doctor” by name, and while he portrays and describes him in ways that suggest to those who are familiar with the character who he is, he never states anything that definitely identify the “Doctor” as Fu Manchu as opposed to his various imitators elsewhere in fiction. (DC Comics, for example, has Batman’s foe Dr. Tzin-Tzin, and Ra’s al Ghul seems much like Fu Manchu if he were an Arab. Marvel’s Yellow Claw and the Mandarin are likewise in the Fu Manchu mold.) Moore’s tactics are similar to the ones that Marvel has had to use in recent years. When the Master of Kung Fu series was created, Marvel had the comics rights to Fu Manchu, and so the hero, Shang-Chi, was created as Fu Manchu’s son and battled him through the 1970s. But Marvel lost the rights to Fu Manchu, and therefore Shang-Chi could only make references thereafter to an unnamed “father.”
It’s also clever that Moore gives the head of British intelligence the code name “M,” thereby evoking the James Bond novels and films, encourages us to think that “M” is Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s brother, whom Conan Doyle established had some mysterious, powerful government position, and then surprises us by revealing that “M” is Moriarty.
Moriarty explains to his second-in-command, Campion Bond (presumably James’s forebear), that British intelligence selected him when they decided to “manufacture a crime-lord through whom they could control, and monitor the underworld…” In time, Moriarty truly became the Napoleon of Crime. “You see, when you begin shadowboxing, sometimes the shadows become real,” he explains. “Am I, for example, a director of military intelligence posing as a criminal. . .or a criminal posing as a director of military intelligence. . . or both?” This reminds me somewhat of Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night, though its protagonist, a double agent posing as a Nazi propagandist, did not consciously go over to the other side.
Actually, I find the idea that the British government would create its own crimelord hard to swallow. My impression of law-and-order types is that they are so determined to stamp out crime that they would never participate in it. Moore’s backstory about Moriarty seemed to me another example of his characteristic vision of the Big Bad Government: likewise, in Moore’s From Hell, Jack the Ripper turns out to be working for the government, though he goes to excesses they ultimately will not tolerate. Just as the Freemasons were a powerful clandestine organization in From Hell, so Masonic symbols are associated with British intelligence and Moriarty through the League comics: I am as yet unpersuaded by this sort of conspiracy theory.
In the flashback that reveals how Moriarty survived his battle with Sherlock Holmes at Reichenbach Falls, Moriarty wonders aloud, “Strange. he thought me… an enemy of the state… never reasoning… that it might suit the state… to create… its own enemy….” This raises questions. For one thing, it makes Sherlock Holmes look stupid: how did he miss finding out about Moriarty’s government connections? Why didn’t his brother Mycroft, who is himself in government intelligence, tell him? Why didn’t Mycroft turn Moriarty in for trying to murder his brother?
One of the contributors to Nevins’ website, Henry Spencer, suggests there that Moriarty’s role is actually inspired by a novel about the real life spy Kim Philby, who worked for British intelligence, but secretly served the Russians by spying on the British. The novel, Spencer says, suggested that the British had Philby infiltrate the Soviets’ spy network, and that “towards the end, Philby himself couldn’t have told you who he was really working for – whether he was a clever infiltrator in a spy network, or a clever spy pretending to work for counterintelligence.” Moriarty’s role in League makes more sense to me if one considers him an analogue to a double agent.
Also, Moriarty parallels not only Dr. Gull from From Hell, but another figure from Moore’s past work, Ozymandias from Watchmen, the supposedly law-abiding former hero who secretly creates the very menace that the Watchmen reunite to oppose.
Whereas in the movie Moriarty is definitely killed, in the comics he simply floats away on some cavorite, the anti-gravity substance from H. G. Wells’s First Men in the Moon, supposedly to oblivion, but we know better than to count such characters as dead when we can’t find the corpse. So, can we hope that Moore has a future League yarn involving both Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes in mind?
The Allan Quatermain of League also resembles the Watchmen, in that he is a retired hero who returns to action and thus to his true purpose in life. Whereas the other Watchmen had reached middle age (like the original Justice Society when they reemerged from retirement), Quatermain has become an old man, not always able to keep up with the others, and, in the comics, his return thus has an element of pathos. Without a mission, Quatermain had sunk into self-destructive drug addiction; this parallels Bruce Wayne at the start of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. Having given up being Batman following the death of his surrogate son, the second Robin (much like Quatermain’s loss of his actual son), the middle-aged Wayne has turned to drink and acts out a death wish through race car driving.
Quatermain’s budding romance with the younger Mina reminds me of the similar love that evolves between the fortysomething Nite Owl (who, like Quatermain also has worries about sexual performance) and thirtysomething Silk Spectre in Watchmen, though the age gap between the League couple is much greater. Moore uses the device of having Quatermain and Mina initially bickering to disguise their mutual attraction from themselves. Well, this was corny when George Lucas did it with Han Solo and Princess Leia in The Empire Strikes Back, but it worked there, and it works in League as well.
Moore has stated that he was bewildered that Watchmen readers liked Rorschach, whom he tried to make so unpleasant; here’s yet another example of how an author does not always realize all the effects his work will have on readers. I wonder if Moore sees Griffin, the Invisible Man, as an unmistakably unheroic variation on Rorschach. In his bandages, hat and coat Griffin is visually reminiscent of Rorschach, and even makes similar strange sounds (Griffin’s laugh: “Aheheh”).
Whatever Moore’s intentions, in Watchmen Rorschach both appalls the reader and engages his sympathies and ultimately sacrifices himself heroically. The League character who most resembles Rorschach in these ways is Mr. Hyde. In League Moore recasts Hyde in the superhero mode, well aware that Marvel has already based its Incredible Hulk on Hyde. (And yes, Marvel has a villain named Mr. Hyde, inspired by the Robert Louis Stevenson creation, as well.) The Hulk has been portrayed in so many ways with such various personalities, that I wondered how Moore could make his Hyde-as-superhero different.
But of course Moore succeeds. Unlike any version of the Hulk, this Hyde is very much an intellectual, despite his animalistic drives, just as Jekyll is, and can even speak eloquently. This comes across clearly in a scene in Volume 1 between Hyde and Mina. Hyde is genuinely puzzled by his conflicted feelings towards her: he admits that he sometimes wants to rape and kill her, but says if he did so he would have to kill himself. This, Hyde says, “confuses me and makes me furious with you.” Hyde may be a monster, but in this scene he is calmly trying to reason out his emotional conflict. In this scene, too, Moore establishes a Beauty and the Beast theme to the relationship between Hyde and Mina, which reminds me of Marvel’s pairings of the Hulk with Betty Ross and the Thing with Alicia. This theme will become clearer and more dramatic in the second volume.
BELEAGUERED
Moore has been saying of late that he intends to retire from comics, having reached the grand old age of fifty (This is perhaps wise: the current comics industry does not recognize the existence of the middle-aged.) except for doing more of the League. I hope he wasn’t counting on royalties from sequels to the League movie. This disappointing film, based on the original League miniseries, was directed by Stephen Norrington, who is also responsible for the first Blade movie, which is well liked in some quarters but which I found to be an empty farrago of pointless violence.
Still, at first the movie seemed promising as I first watched it. For one thing, I prefer the movie’s version of Quatermain. I do not know what Moore has in mind for Quatermain’s future in the comics (although the Almanac provides seeming hints). But so far Moore’s Quatermain seems more an observer than participant. He looks aged and frail, complains that his age slows him down, and repeatedly fails in action scenes. (For example, Moriarty quickly shoots him down in their confrontation in Volume 1.) I can see why Moore uses him in the first Volumes: the readers can more easily identify with Quatermain and see events from his point of view; Mina’s personality is much more enigmatic, and the other three men are, shall we say, considerably less normal than Quatermain is.
But within the context of the story, why would Campion Bond and British intelligence need him? Why recruit him and not someone younger and fitter? When we first meet Quatermain in the comics, he is a pathetic drug addict. It’s true that this fits the Joseph Campbell pattern of the hero being in a low condition when he begins his quest. But how did Quatermain fall so low? If he was such a heroic figure, would the deaths of his wife and son really be enough to incapacitate him so completely? (True, this is certainly a more credible reaction than the new Mr. Terrific’s to his similar losses two columns ago.)
In the movie, Quatermain makes it clear that that he retired because he feels guilty that his son died on a mission they were on, and this is a credible motivation for that. The movie Quatermain, though, does not descend into despair and addiction. On the DVD commentary track the producer Don Murphy explains that he got rid of Quatermain’s drug habit because he’d already depicted an opium-addicted hero in his film version of Moore’s From Hell, a film I liked. This makes sense, and it raises the question of why Moore keeps using this device.
At one point, in Vol. 1 #2, Quatermain and Nemo admit that each joined the League because he needed another adventure. Quatermain explains, “When we stop, we start to fall apart – .” This puts me in mind of the way that Sherlock Holmes used cocaine, but only to compensate for the intense boredom he felt when he went too long between cases. Perhaps Moore has this in mind, too. Still, the comic book Quatermain’s self-destructiveness just does not seem sufficiently motivated to me. Perhaps it is because the comic never dramatizes the deaths of his wife and son, to show their impact on him.
On the other hand, one can easily see why the movie League wanted the Quatermain played by Sean Connery. Since Connery was one of the film’s producers, I can guess that he didn’t want to play a drug addict. Certainly the septuagenarian Connery does not look frail: this Quatermain is convincingly still formidable, still potentially dangerous. The movie Quatermain seems to have retired in large part to escape the demands of his own fame. The movie cleverly establishes that Quatermain has a friend pose as him to regale his fans with anecdotes, leaving the real McCoy in peace. Perhaps we are intended here to compare Quatermain’s celebrity with Connery’s own.
Moreover, since Connery is indelibly associated with James Bond, it is brilliant to cast him as Quatermain, one of Bond’s heroic predecessors. It also sharpens the joke about Quatermain working for a head of British intelligence known as M. (I wonder if the movie changed the name of Moriarty’s right hand man because the makers thought that having Sean Connery meet Campion Bond would be pushing the joke too far. Instead they renamed the character “Sanderson Reed,” and how can I object to that?)
However, the fact that the movie Quatermain is so formidable and that he is played by the film’s only star makes him the dominant presence in the story. Now it is Quatermain who emerges as the League’s leader, thereby diminishing the role Moore gave to Mina. Through making Mina the leader, Moore was making a point about how unusual it was in Victorian England for a woman to hold a position of authority; in the movie this feminist theme disappears.
Moreover, whereas the comic creates an unlikely May-September – actually, more like May-November – romance between Quatermain and Mina, perhaps the moviemakers thought the age gap between the characters was too wide to bridge. That’s too bad, since the growing love between Quatermain and Mina is the emotional heart of the comics series.
Then again, perhaps it wouldn’t have worked with the movie versions of the characters. In the comic their romance is touching because of the frailties if each: Quatermain as a weary, elderly man, who thinks himself too old for sexual passion, and Mina as a literally scarred victim of her encounters with Dracula. In the movie Quatermain is more of a hearty, virile lion, and Mina has actually been transformed into a vampire, which would certainly complicate any romance.
Instead of a romance with Mina, the movie instead gives Quatermain a mentor/father role towards the League’s American recruit, Secret Service agent Thomas Sawyer, who, obviously, must be Mark Twain’s hero grown up. As Murphy states on the DVD, Sawyer was added to the movie’s League to appeal to American audiences. Putting Sawyer in the League doesn’t bother me that much. The characters in the comics League tend to have more to do with fantasy than Twain’s Tom, and one of Moore’s points is surely to have a British team of “super-heroes,” but Moore had set a precedent by putting Natty Bummpo in the 18th century League. Guiding Sawyer gives Quatermain a new emotional tie through which, the movie suggests, he is finding new purpose in life. Quatermain retired because he blamed himself for his son’s death; Sawyer becomes his new “son” through whom he has a second chance as father, mentor and adventurer.
With Mina the movie completely misses the point. Making her a vampire certainly creates visual spectacle and gives her decided super-powers. It also makes viewers wonder about the sequence in which she stands atop a seacraft in particularly bright sunlight. Being a vampire can certainly serve as a metaphor for Mina’s being regarded as a “Fallen woman” in Victorian society. But here the metaphor actually muffles Moore’s feminist theme. In the comic Mina is not a social outcast because she is a monster out of Gothic fantasy, but because of her very realistic history as a victim of sexual abuse, a divorcee, and an unmarried career woman. (In the movie Mina is still “Mrs. Harker,” a widow, not a divorcee.)
Murphy explains on the DVD commentary track that the filmmakers could not use Griffin, the Invisible Man of H. G. Wells’s novel, because Warners and Universal (Both?) own the rights to the name. I presume Murphy means the movie rights, since Moore uses Griffin’s name in the comics. Still, the legal intricacies here puzzle me. Moore uses so many of Wells’s concepts, including his Martian invaders, that I assume they are all now in the public domain, and I would have assumed further that they could now be used by anyone in any medium.
But instead the moviemakers substitute their own Invisible Man, a thief who stole Griffin’s invisibility serum, and in doing so signal that they want to back away from the dark side of Moore’s comics. Moore’s Griffin is a criminally insane murderer and rapist who comes to a particularly nasty end. The moviemakers instead came up with an Invisible Man meant to be a likable prankster, as if every superhero team needs an in-house comedian. (Look at how the animated Justice League has turned the Flash into a jokester and occasional screw-up.) Invisible Man II, though, just isn’t all that amusing or different from the standard movie cliche of the Cockney comic relief character.
With Hyde, too, the movie shies away from confronting the dark side of Moore’s work. Ferocious at first, this Hyde seems all too altruistic in the big battle in Moriarty’s lair at the end. He is, after all, supposed to embody Jekyll’s id; Moore’s Hyde is believably motivated by sheer rage at his enemies and powerful urges towards physical violence. What does humanize Moore’s Hyde is his relationship with Mina, but that makes it into the movie no more than Quatermain’s did.
Also, anyone who knows that Hyde started out as a much smaller being, or are puzzled when the film shows Hyde seemingly perpetrating Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue will not have their questions answered by the movie; Moore, on the other hand, makes certain of explaining such matters in the comics.
Similarly, the movie does not bother to explain why Nemo, an Indian prince who hates the British, is now working with them, although Moore did not do much better on that score. The movie actually makes Nemo an even more brilliant inventor: I like the fact that he has created the first automobile. Nevins compares League to “steampunk” science fiction, which transplants modern inventions into the 19th century. On seeing the car in the movie, what I thought of was the television series The Wild Wild West, a James Bond-like show set in the 19th century West, wherein Dr. Miguelito Loveless and other scientific geniuses concocted inventions far ahead of their time. (Murphy, though, mentions the show dismissively on the commentary track.)
The car, alas, is part of the movie’s absurd Venice sequence, wherein we are intended to believe not only that Nemo’s huge Nautilus could move through the city’s shallow canals, but that the car could race through a city renowned for centuries worldwide for not having streets.
The movie does pick up Moore’s clever bit of making Ishmael from Moby Dick into Nemo’s first mate: apparently Ishmael has a pattern of working for obsessive captains. But then the movie blunders by killing Ishmael off: surely one of the points of Moby Dick‘s ending is that Ishmael, untainted by the madness aboard Ahab’s ship, is the ultimate survivor.
The movie also adds Oscar Wilde’s unaging Dorian Gray to the League, but drains him of any psychological depth. Now Wilde’s metaphor of Gray’s portrait turns into no more than a gimmick: it not only keeps him from aging but makes him invulnerable. (I suppose had Moore put Gray in the League, the portrait would have been a metaphor for a secret agent’s ability to commit unpleasant deeds while maintaining an innocent cover.)
According to the movie, Gray cannot look upon his own portrait; in the book, Gray can look at it and is fully aware of the moral corruption it depicts. It is when Gray tries to destroy the portrait that he instead destroys himself. Even the portrait in the movie is a disappointment, and no match for Ivan Albright’s painting for the MGM movie version, which is so good that it is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I’ve seen it. (When Dark Shadows did its own riff on Dorian Gray, it came up with a decently effective painting that I saw in person when it was exhibited for auction at a Dark Shadows festival. No one bought it; these filmmakers should have.)
The movie’s version of Moriarty is pretty much a failure. The actor playing him looks too young and handsome to be Doyle’s character. The fact that Moriarty both heads British intelligence and runs a criminal empire seems no more than a plot twist here, whereas in the comics Moore uses the opportunity to speculate on the nature of role-playing in real life and the potential for misuse of government authority.
At one point in the movie, Moriarty poses as the “Fantom,” an architect and inventor, disguised as a scarred, bearded man beneath an armored mask and costume. New York Times critic Elvis Mitchell claimed that the Fantom’s beard was intended to make him look like Moore; well, perhaps. What all of the reviews I read missed was that the Fantom’s name and scars evoke the Phantom of the Opera. But, again, this comes off just as a gimmick. The Phantom’s identity and story are so tied to his obsession with the opera singer Christine and his lair beneath the Paris Opera, that the character seems empty without them. (And are we meant to think that the Phantom was merely Moriarty in disguise?) But the Fantom’s scars, armor, and advanced technology also made me think of Doctor Doom. Now that is intriguing, considering Moore’s theme that the League anticipates 20th century superheroes. (A woman friend of mine once pointed out to me the similarities between the Phantom and Doom, explaining she found them both to be dark romantic figures. Now that was an interesting perspective that I, as a man, wouldn’t have had on Doom.)
But the real failure of Moriarty in the movie is similar to the failure of his Phantom guise. Moriarty exists in Conan Doyle’s stories to be Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis, his evil opposite, his dark side given separate form. (I even once saw Jeremy Brett, one of the best portrayers of Holmes, do a play in London called The Secret of Sherlock Holmes, in which Moriarty proved to be Holmes himself, with a split personality.)
It seems wrong to pit Moriarty against other heroes; Moriarty without Holmes seems pointless. In the comics Moore gets around the problem by making Sherlock Holmes a palpable presence throughout the two miniseries, even though he is not actually involved in the stories: Moore and O’Neill portray in flashback the showdown between Holmes and Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls, and the missing Holmes is continually being mentioned.
Whatever its flaws and inadequacies, I still liked the first half of the League movie: the gathering of the team, one by one, came reasonably close to the letter and spirit of Moore’s story. But from the Venice road race onward, the movie devolves into standard, fast-moving but utterly empty and suspenseless action sequences (reminiscent of Blade, in other words). The League’s storming of Moriarty’s lair is too much a dull retread of the familiar James Bond movie story device of invading the villain’s fortress in the final act. If only they had done the airborne battle from the climax of Volume 1 instead, which could have achieved real beauty, with airships hovering over Victorian London; perhaps the CGI effects required would be too expensive.
The fact that the movie makes Moriarty a munitions maker, seeking to induce Europe into world war, shows that the filmmakers, or at least the screenwriter, James Dale Robinson, understands one of Moore’s major themes in League: the coming of modern, more devastating methods of warfare in the Twentieth Century. This theme is made clear right from the opening, through an onscreen caption and the startling appearance of a tank, long before they were invented in the real world. But Moriarty’s munitions factory cannot compare to Moore’s depiction of attack from the sky in the comics, anticipating the Blitz in World War II England.
Finally, though the movie does establish Moore’s technique of bringing together characters from different Victorian novels, it does not do more than hint at the complexity of the fictional world he has assembled. It’s nice that Ishmael shows up, and Murphy directs our attention on the DVD to a portrait of the 19th century League hanging on a wall. But still, the movie would need to have far more of these allusions to communicate the scope of Moore’s fictional world.
VOLUME TWO
The second League miniseries expands Moore’s fictional cosmos tremendously through both time and space, principally through the immense New Traveller’s Almanac text feature, but also through the singular fact that the first issue’s story is set entirely on Mars. Here Moore and O’Neill bring together H.G. Wells’ Martians with those from the early 20th century Gulliver Jones series, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter novels, and the science fiction of C.S. Lewis. I am grateful to Jess Nevins’ website for pointing out what I should have figured out myself, that Jones’s Arabian-style garb, combined with the fact that he has become a military leader of another race, is an allusion to T.E. Lawrence, a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia.
From the second issue on, Moore and O’Neill introduce the League into H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. They cunningly insert the League into scenes from the novel, as if they had been there all along and H.G. Wells had overlooked them.
Moore pointed out in his Locus interview how Kevin O’Neill’s art style for League evokes British illustration in Victorian times. Moore and O’Neill create fake advertisements to make the issues of League appear to be 19th century comic books, had such things actually existed. Moore includes rather arch captions and introductions, written in a parody of Victorian style, to introduce installments of League; these often decry the behavior of characters within the story for violating Victorian standards of propriety. Of course, League is a contemporary treatment of Victorian characters and their milieu, but I like the attention that Moore and O’Neill take to creating this surface illusion that League purports to be a late Victorian work.
Yet Moore also blatantly violates the illusion. In keeping with period style, when a character uses the F-word, he replaces it with asterisks, yet other rough language gets through unexpurgated. More importantly, in the second series Mina and Quatermain appear naked and have on-camera sex, and then there’s the sexual nature of Griffin’s final comeuppance. My own sense of order stipulates that you can’t expect us to suspend disbelief and pretend that League is a story in the Victorian style and then undercut the illusion so severely with scenes that one would have been unlikely to find in mainstream American comics even ten years ago.
Mina’s nude scene also raises questions about her. In the first series my impression was that she was usually rather proper and even distant in manner, perhaps both to counteract the impression of others that she was a “fallen woman” and to better assert herself as an authority figure in a male-dominated world. In the second series, on the other hand, she is the sexual aggressor, insisting that the reluctant Quatermain have sex with her: “I am divorced, disgraced and disregarded by the world. Could anything make it more wrong, do you suppose?” she asks him. Moore even verges into questionable territory in indicating that however much Mina is horrified by her experiences with Dracula (and remember that vampirism is usually a metaphor for rape), part of her still longs for them: she actually asks Quatermain to nibble her shoulder. Mina is full of contradictions, and as yet I’m not sure they can be reconciled into a consistent characterization.
Series 2 takes Moore’s theme of the horrors of the new methods of modern warfare still further. In Wells’s novel the fact that the Martians are ironically killed by common Earth disease germs is presented as a sign of God’s providential protection of humanity; in Moore’s story the Martians’ deaths represent the first instance of germ warfare. Nemo is horrified by this new technique, though I’m not certain that cutting enemies down with automatic weaponry, as he enjoys doing, is really morally better. In Moore’s version the germs used against the Martians are lethal to humans as well. Supposedly these germs are confined to London’s South Bank, where the Martians have gathered. But, remembering the anthrax scares of two years back, I wonder if Moore considered how long it would take for the South Bank to become safely habitable, or whether air currents might spread the germs across the Thames.
Further, Moore shows that the germs used against the Martians were the result of an early form of what we would now call genetic engineering, perpetrated by another Wells character, Dr. Moreau. (Seeing Moreau with his beast-men in League should remind comics enthusiasts of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s High Evolutionary and his animal-men.) Thus Moore reminds the readers of contemporary developments in science and their own potential for destruction.
Having suffered sexual violence from Dracula, Mina in the second series undergoes a humiliating beating by the misogynistic Griffin which she compares to rape. Griffin’s attack on Mina enrages Hyde, who has grown more than fond of her. Hyde accuses Griffin of being “uncivil” to Mina, reminding me of Hannibal Lecter’s fury at a fellow inmate for being “rude” to Clarice in The Silence of the Lambs. Both Hannibal and Hyde take extreme action against these abusers of women. I wonder if Hyde and Lecter reacts so severely against these abusers because they recognize in those abusers their own potential for violence against women. (Come to think of it, Hannibal and Moore’s version of Hyde are also linked by a desire to devour their enemies. I am delighted that Nevins’ website points out that the fate that Hyde metes out to one of the Martians is actually a reference to Monty Python!)
Moreover, in the second series Hyde does not revert to Jekyll. The two are no longer separate, then, but have become one, with Hyde as the dominant persona. But I wonder if Jekyll’s personality influences Hyde’s in the second miniseries. Moore continues the Beauty and the Beast, but this Beast, Hyde, realizes he can never have the Beauty. In a sense he and Quatermain trade places. Quatermain started out in his self-destructive drug-induced stupor. He and Hyde both fall in love with Mina, but it is Quatermain whom she accepts. Hyde develops a death wish, clearly going into the final battle with the Martians in large part because he knows he cannot have Mina’s love. I wonder, too, if he does see his own potential for violence against women reflected in Griffin, then once he metes out punishment to Griffin, his task is not done until he metes it out to himself as well: he had already said in the first series that if he killed Mina he would have to take his own life. It seems odd that Hyde, representative if the id, could be suicidal; in Peter David’s Hulk: The End, the Hulk represents a brutish life force that will not allow Bruce Banner to die. So, perhaps as I suggested, this is Jekyll’s influence at work, turning Hyde’s violence against himself.
Knowing he is probably on a suicide mission, Hyde nonetheless joyously goes to confront the Martians in a sequence in which he manages both to shock and inspire the reader. I am reminded of something else that Joseph Campbell said in his PBS interviews, that one can perceive the “radiance” of life through “monsters,” and that through them one sees not beauty but “the sublime.”
Also, I really like Moore’s idea that London’s Hyde Park, a real place, is named in honor of the heroism of Mr. Hyde. Next time I visit London, I should make a point of visiting Hyde Park and contemplating just that.
LIVING IN INTERESTING TIMES
Perhaps League is part of a new movement in comics that studies the character archetypes of adventure fiction and the different forms that they take through time. Bill Willingham’s Fables series for Vertigo has a similar premise to League‘s, bringing together a community of characters from classic fairy tales, although he sets them in the present rather than recreating a past time period. In Astro City Kurt Busiek is creating his own fictional reality, devising new superheroic characters around the archetypes, resulting in figures who resemble heroes we know (Samaritan evokes Superman, the Confessor resembles Batman, and so forth), but with differences that enable Busiek to comment on the conventions of superhero fiction. Busiek also spans the decades from the 1940s onward in Astro City, showing how superheroes and superhero fiction evolved and changed over that time; I wonder if he will get around to showing us Astro City in the Victorian era.
In League Moore shows that the character archetypes familiar from today’s superhero fiction were embodied by different characters in Victorian fiction. In 1602 Neil Gaiman takes a different approach, recreating the familiar heroes of Marvel’s Silver Age as if they originated in Elizabethan England. Both methods demonstrate how the basic heroic archetypes endure from age to age, and both show how the superhero concept, considered an American invention, works in a British context.
There are a few more specific similarities between League and 1602. Both 1602 and League‘s Volume 2 involve the mysterious contents of a much sought-after box. Both League (so far) and 1602 are also set at the turn of a century, League in the years leading up to the start of the 20th century, and 1602 two years into the 17th century. Of course, each series is appearing at yet another turn of the century, the early years of the 21st.
Each of these three turns is a transition from a time of stability and prosperity into a more uncertain and dangerous period. 1602 depicts the transition from the glorious reign of Elizabeth I, last of the Tudor dynasty, into the reign of James I, first of the Stuarts, and portrayed by Gaiman as a decidedly unpleasant fellow. The first two volumes of League are set in the final years of another great queen’s reign, that of Victoria, when the British Empire was at its height. One of Moore’s major themes in League is to show how advances in science and technology bring about the coming of modern warfare: he shows us the relatively new automatic weapons, which foreshadow the slaughters of World War I, aerial attack, anticipating the Nazi Blitz of World War II, and even germ warfare.
In an interview in Tripwire magazine, Moore stated that another aim of League was to make fun of “the absurdity of the Victorian vision, this idea of a supremacist Britain that ruled the entire world.” But his treatment is not entirely funny: people die in the Martian attacks.
In League Volume 2 Major Blimp (a younger version of the Colonel Blimp of British cartoons and the famed Michael Powell film) confidently declares that the military will destroy the new Martian threat by Monday morning. He is wrong, just as the British of these imperial times could not foresee the disasters awaiting them in the two World Wars.
Nemo comments on the courage of the British in the face of the Martian invasion, but Quatermain bitterly contends that the British are actually in denial, “pretending everything’s tickety-boo, Nemo. It’s the great British pastime.” Then Quatermain reminds Nemo of the massacre of the British forces at Khartoum in Sudan by the Muslim forces led by a religious leader known to the British as the “Mad Madhi.” Quatermain says, “Actually, the Mahdi’s revolt’s a perfect example of England’s complacency. We warred on a culture we didn’t understand. . . and we were massacred.” Nemo is convinced, and observes, “To hope for the best is an English failing.”
Well. League seems so British that I don’t know if Moore has analogues to contemporary America in mind. (Still, League is being published through Moore’s America’s Best Comics imprint at DC/WildStorm, enabling us to ponder the irony if indeed Englishmen are producing the best comics in America.) But, after September 11, 2001, the aerial attacks on an unsuspecting metropolis in League Volume 1 make me think of the attacks on the World Trade Center. In Wells’s The War of the Worlds, the British learned that the English Channel no longer protected them from attack, as they would learn in real life in the Blitz. After 9/11 there were comments that the United States could no longer count on the oceans to protect the country from terrorist assaults from abroad. Looking up at the sky in Volume 2 after the Martians have arrived, Mina comments that she had always thought the sky “sheltered humanity,” but “now it won’t ever be the same.” She sounds like a New Yorker after 9/11. The germ warfare in Volume 2 reminds me of the still-unsolved anthrax attacks in New York, Washington and elsewhere in late 2001. And then there are Quatermain’s comments on a Western country battling forces inspired by a seemingly fanatical Muslim leader and getting in way over its collective head. Does this make you think of America’s current situation in Iraq? Isn’t today’s United States, the world’s only super-power, comparable to late Victorian Britain, when it was the most powerful nation in the world?
Moore may have initially intended League as “a high-spirited romp,” but it has taken on disturbing relevance for our times. League may be a satire on late Victorian England, but it also works all too well as a commentary on early 21st century America.
A note to our readers: there will be a special Christmas edition of Comics in Context on view starting next Tuesday.
–Copyright 2003 Peter Sanderson
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