League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 2009

OF MASH-UPS, ETC.

There’s something very attractive about having unrelated characters meet each other.  H. Rider Haggard succumbed to the temptation when he had the lead characters of his two most successful novels meet in She and Allan  (1921). Universal Pictures did it in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) and subsequent movies. The whole idea of the DC Universe (and hence, subsequent superhero universes) is based on Sheldon Mayer and Gardner Fox’s notion that it would be popular amongst comics readers to see Green Lantern, the Flash, Doctor Fate, etc., meet up. Crossovers are a significant proportion of modern fanfiction; I myself know the attraction, having written (legitimate) Archers/Doctor Who cross-overs, and am now musing over how Pussy Galore and Cathy Gale are the same person because they were played by the same actor (which makes a plot development in Goldfinger look a lot more credible).

Alan Moore knows the attraction too.  He said as much in an article in The Daredevils back in 1983, when he introduced his Special Executive, created for Doctor Who comics, into his Captain Britain strips.  He did it subsequently with Lost Girls.  The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is the ultimate expression of that.  The conception behind this is that all of fiction exists in the same universe, forming the biggest imaginable “Big Dumb Narrative Object” (to borrow Roz Kaveney’s phrase).

The problem with mash-ups, however, is that you can’t just stick two characters together and expect them to work. They have to be the right two characters.  I discovered this when I tried to crossover Doctor Who, The Archers and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The problem wasn’t Ambridge, but melding Doctor Who and Buffy, because though both are in the fantastic, they have very different world views (basically Buffy believes in the supernatural and Who very firmly doesn’t).

This problem has afflicted some storylines of LOEG.  Of course, one can slip a whole series of characters into the background with little consequence, but foregrounding them can throw the reader out of the story.  Things were fine in the first two volumes, as the principal characters worked well together, because most Victorian literature emerges from similar background.  The Black Dossier was (for me) far less successful.  The  mixture of fundamentally conflicting mileus weakened the story.  One could accept the crossing over of The Third Man and James Bond, but inserting Orwell’s Big Brother into that as well strained the reader’s credibility.

Volume III spreads its story over a hundred year period, with the core characters now the ageless Mina Murray, Allan Quartermain and Orlando, with key moments being 1910, 1969 and 2009.  Overall it has much more success at blending characters than The Black Dossier. But coming into the modern era raises another issue – the fictional characters are no longer in the public domain, and Moore risks doing to other people’s characters what he would rather other people did not do to his.  Of course, LOEG is a mash-up, rather than a straight prequel, and Moore is not motivated by the crass commercialism that is behind DC’s Before Watchmen.  But there is enough glass in Moore’s house that he should at least be careful where he throws stones.

The conclusion of the volume has now been published.  Those of us who have been following Moore’s career for the past three decades and don’t necessarily consider everything he writes to be faultless may have noted that he sometimes has problems with endings.  Watchmen, the American Gothic storyline in Swamp Thing, and Marvelman/Miracleman all conclude in ways that are unsatisfactory.  (In fairness, I should point out that Captain Britain, V For Vendetta and Promethea have much more effective endings.)

So, how does 2009 shape up?  At first, one is simply awed by Moore’s gall.  That’s who the Antichrist is?  That’s who God is in the LOEG universe?  And then one feels that the great apocalyptic battle to which the previous issues have been building is a little anticlimactic, and functions primarily as a means of killing off a major character.  It also feels a little different to previous episodes.  For plot reasons, Mina, who has always been the prime mover of the League, and her lover Allan, are sidelined for much of this story, and the focus is instead on gender-swapping immortal Orlando.  Moore does some interesting things with the character, but he/she is not as rounded as the others, not as familiar.

But, whilst not as effective an end as those to volumes I and II, this is certainly far from a rubbish conclusion to the story.  Moore remains a skilled writer, and O’Neill’s artwork manages to preserve his stylization whilst still making recognizable the characters  who cannot be named for legal reasons.

At the end, there are hints that there will be more stories of the League to come.  I’m not sure where Moore can take this, but it will be worth sticking around to find out.