Kevin O'Neill (1) (1953–2022)

Well, here we are closing in on two decades of "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen." It's been extraordinarily influential, on comic book culture (steampunk!), the culture at large (bricolage!), and my own sense of what it means to consume culture (the first book even the most compendious Victorianist wouldn't dare read without a wi-fi connection at hand). The dialogue is on point, the villains are dastardly, the action is unrolled with immense glee. It's an ambitious narrative art project show more that works--"what if every book took place in the same world?" The high concept is immaculate, and where I find myself a bit let down is with certain aspects of the execution that are not aging well: O'Neill's art (sometimes evocative, sometimes ugly and dehumanizing), the needless graphic violence (I can't help it, man, I had a kid and my balls fell off and now I don't want to look at people being eviscerated or use "balls" as a metaphor for masculine bloodlust anymore), the non-White characters ("pastiche" and "parody" are certainly the intent, but are too close to "ironic humour," itself too close to "just a bit of fun," for me to feel at ease, though I certainly said things myself in the nineties that I regret in the teens), and most of all the rapes, the rapes--there are like a dozen rapes and attempted rapes over the course of the series, played for drama or as "pastiche" again, of the damsel-in-distress, or in one or two cases, I'm sorry, Alan Moore, just for laffs, and I understand that it sucks when the generational wheel turns and the things that made you outré and intense become the things that align you with oppressive power structures and everything you hate, and I get the temptation to just wrap yourself in your dark majesty and storm offstage, but you're answerable--even as we all are. I for one am glad that the present is improving on the past, in some wise, even if it means it also holds the past to present standards regarding how this stuff is represented. Alan Moore, you also kind of did the same when you ransacked the past for your comic book and let the Martians deathray Trollope's kind reverend and all, to be fair. Maybe once quorum is reached on not using sexual assault as a cheap gimmick we can work on gore too? Literary history gives us so many wonderful stories, after all. show less

'1910', the latest (2009) in Alan Moore's 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' is a bit of a potboiler by any standards. As usual, Moore assumes an in-depth knowledge in the reader of the highways and byways of past popular and esoteric culture, but whereas, in the past, the jumbling of images and themes appeared to be both coherent and instructive, here it is just showy.

It is as if Moore was making sure that he got in all the references in '1910' that were left over from previous works. show more What next '1920' with cute references to Crowley, Rohmer and Buchan. '1930' with a young Auden coming up against Junger, Evola and various characters from the Waugh novels? Und so weiter ... This Moorcockian conceit is in danger of becoming tired without the offer of some deeper message behind it. As with early Moorcock, it is more style and self-indulgence than substance and meaning.

Moore's work is here much like his character of Orlando, a gender-changing immortal but also a thorough bore who drops names from the past like the worst sort of metropolitan socialite. The graphic novel is saved by the illustrator, Kevin O'Neill, who takes this relatively lazy material and creates some arresting images - the naked daughter of Captain Nemo more at home at sea than on land is creatively transformed into victim and then brutal heir to her father's domain as much through draughtsmanship as penmanship. Not great but good.

But, as always, with Moore, we are judging him here by the high standards of his own past. He is still a cut above most graphic novelists even when he fails. This story is consciously Brechtian and bleak, one in which a localised catastrophe is mistaken by these paranormal investigators, who strike me as rather bumbling compared to previous incarnations, for the one yet to come: the holocaust that started in 1914. We know it is coming. They don't. And yet they are supposed to be more prescient than us.

This leads us to the strange mood of the piece - one of despair. Alan Moore has always been quintessentially British in his sensibility. This means, in fantasy terms, either dystopian (as in 'V for Vendetta' or 'Watchmen') or hopefully occult (as in 'Promethea'). In '1910', there is a lot of dystopianism and very little of the occult. The bad guys are the winners, bad acts only get punished through cathartic violence and lies protect the aristocratic order.

This sounds like Moore has captured perfectly the quiet rage now bubbling under the surface of Middle England in the wake of the credit crisis and political lies and failures. This rage is sometimes palpable in England today, especially amongst the older generation of the middling sort who foolishly trusted these people in office and in the City. It is a rage that floats between depression and violence and graphic novels do not do depression very well - the rage's impulse is thus towards violence in a comic book world where serial killers and pirates are looked on cynically as no worse than the system they declare war on, where ordinary humans are little more than rats and where apocalyptic violence seems both inevitable and purgative.

What Moore has done, perhaps in a fit of absent-mindedness but as an aspect of his genius, is capture the psyche of Western culture as we move into a period of extreme scarcity for some and the destruction of dreams for many others while the system itself seems to continue with all the momentum of a steam engine whose crew has long since bailed out but which managed to leave sufficient coal in the boiler.

So, not a great work but already a work of our time and one that, more than the literary outpourings of metropolitan London society, should act as a warning that the street revolt that brought the vicious BNP into the European Parliament only a few months ago may scarcely have begun. show less

Whenever I mention the League of Extraordinary Gentleman I receive a blank look, and then I explain there was a movie adaptation with Sean Connery and there’s some glimmer of recognition. But, really, the film is awful and shouldn’t be considered in the same breath as the graphic novels from which it was adapted. By my count, there’ve been six previous volumes, and three spin-off volumes (the Nemo books). The last three books were actually one split into three, Century: 1910, Century: show more 1969 and Century: 2009, which is why The Tempest, the seventh graphic novel, is number four. For those who have never encountered this particular League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, they’re a group of fictional characters with, well, extraordinary abilities from Victorian/Edwardian literature. The original members were Mina Harker (from Dracula), Captain Nemo, Dr Jekyll, the Invisible Man and Allan Quatermain (from H Rider Haggard’s novels), but also featured Professor Cavor, Fu Manchu, Sherlock Holmes, Moriarty and HG Wells’s Martians. Subsequent volumes continued to mine and mashup proto-genre stories in many and clever ways. The Tempest, despite the ten-year gap, follows on directly from Century. As the title suggests, it centres around Prospero, and other fantastical Shakespearean characters, although it’s not unashamed to incorporate characters and institutions from other science fiction properties, such as TV21 – both Spectrum and World Aquanaut Security Patrol make an appearance. There are other dimensions to the pastiche – MI5, for example, operates a group of “J-series” secret agents, each of whom are modelled on the actors who played James Bond in the 007 movies, including Woody Allen. Some of the art is also clearly an homage to Jack Kirby’s. And it’s not all art – the book is split into six “issues” (was it published as a mini-series? I don’t know), each of which have cover art that spoofs well-known comics, and include an introduction and a letters page (written and collated by “Al and Kev”). The introductions are mini-essays on renowned British comic artists, such as Leo Baxendale and Frank Bellamy, and the letters pages are Viz-like spoofs in which it’s made clear the letter-writers are as fictional as the comic’s characters (or are they?). The story itself is told through a series of strips, echoing British comics’ anthology nature, some of which are colour, some black and white, and some 3D (glasses are included). This is a graphic novel that not only celebrates the works from which its characters were taken but also the British comics industry and its output. It is not just a graphic novel about the Blazing World – named for Margaret Cavendish’s 1666 proto-sf novel, and a sort of sanctuary for the series’s many characters – and the threat to its existence, but also a celebration of British comic history, told in a voice familiar likely only to those who have read British comics. I loved it. It wasn’t just the “spot the mashup”, or the somewhat convoluted story and its cast, but the fact it echoed my own experience of comics, British comics, although not entirely as, since I’m more than a decade younger than Alan Moore, it doesn’t quite map onto my comic-reading, which was Beano/Dandy to war comics such as Warlord, Victor and the Commando Library, to 2000 AD and Star Lord and Tornado… to books without pictures. Ah well. The Tempest is a great piece of work, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is an excellent series from start to finish. I find Alan Moore’s work stretches from the sublime to the indulgent, but this series is definitely the former. Recommended. But start from the beginning. show less

Third in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, this is a tour de force parading the breadth of culture of the two authors Alan Moore (writing) and Kevin O'Neill (illustration). It is also very self-indulgent and expects a lot from the reader.

The framing story sets Mina (survivor of an encounter with Dracula in Volume I) and Allan (Quatermain) in a glum early 1950s Britain just coming out of the wartime and post-war tyranny of a socialist state in a narrative that references 1984.

They show more recover a 'black dossier' of documents which purport to tell the history of the League in its many incarnations in time and in space (meaning witty German and French versions involved in the machinations around the origins of the First World War).

This becomes the excuse for a whole set of literary parodies and many other often cheeky treats, a few of them downright pornographic where O'Neill and Moore parody many popular cultural icons, including the iconic London Underground map and the wartime cartoon Jane.

It is almost too much of a rich feast. The parody of an American beatnik novel is literally unreadable (which is the joke) and Bertie Wooster's account of his experience alongside Gussie Fink-Nottle of dealing with his Aunt's dabbling with the Cult of Cthulhu is ... well, you get the picture.

At one level it is a romantic picture of a Britain that lasts in the imagination despite its national decline since the loss of its 'faery' nature with the death of Gloriana. At another it is the vehicle for an anarchic individualist assertion of the freedom to imagine, a very Moore theme.

There are innumerable 'in' jokes. James Bond is a slimy sexist government thug of weak intelligence. Sir Basildon Bond is Gloriana's 'intelligencer'. Fanny Hill's adventures with Gulliver and in the Venusberg are illustrated with stylish erotic parodies of Franz von Bayros' work.

But ultimately it gets ridiculous especially with the arrival of our heroes in a trans-dimensional faerie toyland on a flying ship captained by a Golliwog. This requires special 3D glasses to appreciate. Moore, as I do, will remember these as giveaways in the comics of our youth.

The magician Prospero (there is, of course, a bawdy lost Shakespearean work in the dossier) reepresents the final victory and primacy of magick and imagination over the prosaic reality of the grimy Britain of 'today' - probably actually 'today' today after the latest economic news.

Part of the comic's charm is that it can provide almost endless fun attempting to identify not only the obvious derivations from popular and high literature (such as the sex-shifting Orlando) but transpositions of name (so Dr Dee becomes both Prospero and Dr. Suttle).

All very clever, a work of immense labour and carefully constructed to fit into the universe of League comic books (there are six of them counting the Nemo trilogy), this is certainly worth enjoying in conjunction with the rest of the series. show less