Dont read this ( )

Mina Murray (fka Mina Harker, of Dracula) and Allan Quatermain (he of King Solomon’s Mines, not Port Charles), former secret agents of the crown, are back in Britain after a protracted stay in the Americas, in which they avoided the Big Brother regime back home. As before, Moore plays fast (but not loose) with British historical fiction and pop culture, and references in this one include James Bond, The Avengers, Woolf’s Orlando, Orwell’s 1984, Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster series, and more. Murray and Quatermain seek the black dossier of the title, which fills them (and the reader) in on what they and their colleagues like Fanny Hill and Orlando, have purportedly been up to for literally ages.

In what I found an unfortunate choice, the dossier is included in its entirety, albeit in chunks that alternate with Murray and her beau getting chased, beat up and shot at all over England and its environs. The dossier material is often in single spaced small type and while illustrated, it’s not really in comic-book format as is the main story. I found the frequent switches in narrative disruptive, distracting, and worse, unnecessary. I didn’t need six pages of the adventures of Fanny Hill, eighteen on Orlando, three by Bertie Wooster, or five by a Kerouac-ian beat poet. I wished many times that Moore and his editors had chosen instead to excerpt the dossier. Small doses of the fictional history would have worked as well, or even better. Then the book could have had a “director’s cut” that included all of Moore’s back matter for those, unlike me, who want it. Shorter excerpts would have gotten the same info across, still been as clever, given the reader more credit, plus not exhausted, annoyed and sometimes bored this one. ( )

Very disappointing. Lots of knowing text, not much story. Boring and confusing and overly clever backfill. Never thought I would give a Moore novel a bad review. ( )

I'm still not quite sure what to make of Black Dossier. I'm happy to see more LoEG, and pleased that where the comic is interrupted with diaries, books, and travel guides, these are not the same somewhat-dull walls of text that rounded out volume two. The majority of them are fascinating and entertaining, and bring much more life to the League's history than vol. 2 did. My favorite was the recounting of how Mina got Nemo to agree to joining the League.

However, I'm missing the old league members (Nemo and Hyde seemed so much more interesting than Allan and sometimes even Mina). It also feels like we've missed out on so many amazing adventures, which we get to hear about secondhand through the diaries, comics, and book-segments. Moreover, I was not in love with the plot. Allan and Mina basically steal the Black Dossier, a series of documents that outline the history of the League and the generations who have served in it (before and after Mina's League). What follows is a long chase story that involves James Bond, Bulldog Drummond, and the remnants of an Orwellian government. For a series that can be so smart, this plot seemed rather blah - I felt like this was mostly an excuse to give us League history and less about Mina and Allan's latest adventure.

If you've read all of vol. 1 and 2, there are lots of references and visuals that you will get, and be pleased that you get them... just expect to spend a lot of time poring over the book. While this volume has skads of references to other literature and films, it's become just as much a self-referential piece. The artwork is, as always, amazing. And that brings me to another thing... expect lots of sex and nudity. But shouldn't you expect that from any work that includes a Tijuana Bible? Particularly an Orwell-inspired one? The 3-D section worked surprisingly well. ( )

Having devoured the first and second League of Extraordinary Gentlemen books, I looked forward to this one hungrily for a year. Perhaps I looked forward to it too much; the antique pop culture references used to be gleeful, and generally supported the humour and characterisation; now, they've become long stretches of impenetrable text and they just get in the way. We scarcely glimpse Mina and Alan as we leap from Lovecraft to Beat, from Wodehouse to Fanny Hill.

The young Alan, especially, suffers from this. Except for one good line in the James Bond scene, he's really not given anything to do that reveals his Alan-ness; what is life like for him? What makes him more than a blonde square-jawed action hero? We don't know, and I was looking forward to finding out.

Actually, I enjoyed the Fanny Hill with the Beardsley-inspired art, the Wodehouse-Lovecraft pastiche was a laugh (although done before), and I loved the Pornsec Tijuana bible. I don't condemn Moore for the inside jokes - it's the author's right to do that, even if it does limit the audience - but as someone who was in on it, I didn't find it served the story.

It reminded me of the long stretches of Promethea where we trudged through the whole Tarot deck. The art was absolutely transcendent, and sometimes the wonderful characters survived the paragraphs of occult exposition, but often as not it felt forced and dry.

Maybe I'm missing the point. Maybe someone else can read the whole Beat pastiche without their eyes glazing over. Maybe if I hadn't come to it wanting to know more about Mina and Alan, I would have enjoyed it more. I still think Moore's brilliant, and not everything he does has to be to my taste. ( )