Friday, February 08, 2008

They Love Extraordinary People


by Jonathan e Goldman

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume 3: The Black Dossier

DC Comics, 2007


Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic book series, introduced in 1999, draws famous characters from the British literary canon and turns them into American-style superheroes, a Justice League for an older age. Since its debut, Moore’s many fans have devoured two collected editions of the work (and sat resentfully through a 2003 feature film that defines the concept of “loosely based”). Now, Moore and O’Neill, bypassing serialization, have published another volume, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume 3: The Black Dossier, an intermediary installment that bridges the gap to the fuller, further adventures of the League currently being sorted out for future tomes but also underscores the project of historical revision that has underscored the series from the start.

From its inception, The League has been based on the premise that the twentieth century’s obsession with superheroes--people both perfectly ordinary and extraordinarily gifted—finds root in the adventure stories that gripped nineteenth-century England. Indeed, our Twentieth Century, proclaimed “the American Century” by an Indiana senator before it had even started, is marked by our fascination with those who could elevate themselves above the masses, literally or figuratively, whether they look like Spiderman, Lindbergh, Monroe, Ali, or Hitler. There is real logic behind Moore’s identifying this as a development commencing in the previous century; the 1800s were when (at least) English agrarian culture finally succumbed to industrial culture, which gave way to mass-industrial culture, which, by the 1890s, led to mass-visual culture. In such a society, the only way to rise above the faceless urban pedestrian crowds was to use one’s unique, extra-human abilities to fashion oneself as an icon. (See Wilde, Oscar—who knew this as well as Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster did.) So Moore’s League narratives treat popular, some would say pulp, characters—the Holmeses, the Moreaus—as if they were all living in the same universe, one parallel to our own. His personae team up not only to fight Britain’s enemies but also to usher in a century in which ordinary people identify themselves not by clan allegiance, not my class allegiance, but by allegiance to the individuals who represent the ability to distinguish oneself from the rest. In other words, Moore’s backwards glance toward the last time we were changing centuries signals the transition to a culture defining itself by its extraordinary individuals.

The new volume takes the two characters who emerged as the primary protagonists of the earlier books, Rider Haggard’s Allen Quartermain and Wilhemina Murray, bride of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and advances them a half-century into the future, dropping them off in the 1950s. How they manage to still be alive, and, in fact, suddenly returned to the bloom of youth, is a mystery revealed to only the most diligent readers. The two arrive in an England that has emerged from World War and gone through ten years of a totalitarian state, newly ended as we start the story. An Orwellian government—many will recall that Orwell wanted to set 1984 in 1948, but his editors persuaded him to postpone dystopia by 36 years—has been overthrown, in favor of a (supposedly) more open democratic society. So Moore, who already imagined a British dictatorship in V for Vendetta, gets to excoriate a capitalist democracy for the methods by which it maintains itself.

This involves enlisting some of British culture’s Cold War icons and giving them the by now familiar Allan Moore deconstruction treatment. Of course, the neuroses and sinister undercurrents of comic book heroes have been Moore’s concern, both in The League and in his venerated Watchmen series (1986-7), since long before they were being fashionably explored in books and film. The original League fought its battles with berserker rage (Mr. Hyde’s) and nihilistic misanthropy (Captain Nemo’s); part of the dynamic of the series is its challenge to readers to balance their revulsion for such characters with the childhood impulse to root like hell for good guys fighting bad guys. Yet the extraordinary gentlemen of the more recent vintage are accorded even less respectful treatment. “Jimmy” Bond is cast (satisfyingly, to this reader) not as the personification of post-WWII British suaveness and sophistication, but rather as an insubstantial, infantile lech, practicing his budding ladykilling skills on a vapid, naïve, “Ms. Night”—who will, we understand, grow up to be the Avengers’ Emma Peel. As a bonus to enthusiasts of the era, Moore revives (yet again!) Harry Lime, Graham Greene’s/Carol Reed’s/Orson Welles’ third man and makes him in charge of Her Majesty’s Secret Service—the original “M.”

The treatment of these more recent, post-WWII figures demonstrates Moore’s own old-school liberal humanism. When he draws characters from written works, he paints them richly; he adds complexity to traitorous Hawley Stevens (H.G. Wells’ Invisible Man), and makes Hyde and Nemo downright tragic. To the characters he appropriates from film (and sure, Bond is an Ian Fleming creation, but let’s be real here—he is above all a movie trademark) and television, though, Moore grants no such redemption. The League series, in this sense, constitutes an act of canon-revision, an argument about what we still need to be reading, about what we need to maintain as part of our cultural consciousness, as vehement as any Harold Bloom has made--and many would say more persuasive. As much as the first two collections reaffirm the iconic status of writings by Wells, Stoker, Jules Verne, and Robert Louis Stevenson, The Black Dossier subtly suggests that we have gone wrong since, attaching ourselves to heroes embodying none of the nuance of a more patient age. The stance may be summarized by Quartermain’s remark about Bond (after the latter tries to date-rape Murray and gets beaten over the head with a brick for his trouble): “God, is this what it’s come to? The British adventure hero? Pathetic.”

In fact, The Black Dossier, for all its updating, is not only concerned with the recent past; it constitutes Moore’s most thorough assessment yet of Britain’s literary and popular traditions. The volume’s plot concerns the titular dossier, which, amplifying hints offered throughout the series, chronicles the activities of the league’s various incarnations over the centuries. Murray and Quartermain, having found themselves on the wrong side of the British government (meaning the correct side, the left side), contrive to swipe and peruse the dossier, a compendium of stylistically diverse documents. To read what they read, along with them, in real time, so to speak, comprises much of the experience of The Black Dossier. Thus, this premise provides Moore and O’Neill with the opportunity to demonstrate their virtuoso mimicry and postmodern sensibility. The volume careens from a “lost” Shakespeare play to a “sequel” to John Cleland’s soft-porn classic Fanny Hill to a (P.G. Wodehouse’s) Bertie Wooster memoir to a Tijuana bible to a concluding 3-D section (cardboard 3-D glasses accompany the book) set in the “Blazing World”—a 1666 science-fiction invention of English writer (and Dutchess of Newcastle) Margaret Cavendish. This is a further exercise in canonization of course; not only do Moore and O’Neill re-draw British history, but in so doing they suggest that the true league of extraordinary gentlemen is theirs. They show us, in fact, that the genuine extraordinarily gifted people are the writer (particularly, one feels) and artist, who have mastered these many languages, these many genres, and can convincingly conduct readers through them all.

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