Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier has been hailed in some quarters as a masterpiece, in others as Alan Moore’s worst excesses all combined into a single dense volume. I’m not sure yet where I stand on this axis, but a few things about the book puzzled me.
– I realize that Moore’s taste for literary tomfoolery is well-known at this point, but I thought the grown man on page 56 clearly buttfucking a stuffed bear and referred to both as “Christopher” and “Robin” was fairly over-the-top. Yes, Alan Moore, we know, Victorian children’s literature is rife with sexual innuendo, blah blah Freud blah blah blah, we got it, okay? Christ, wasn’t three hundred pages of a Dorothy/Alice/Wendy tantric threeway in Lost Girls enough already?
– Likewise unsubtle was the photograph of Dan Didio on page 104 with a big handlebar moustache drawn on it and a crudely drawn word balloon saying “I like felching.” Really, was that necessary? I mean, it was kind of a stretch to suggest that Mina and Quartermain considered it “important evidence.”
– I know Moore enjoys references to other literary works, but including Anna Livia Plurabelle from Finnegans Wake is either Alan Moore bragging that he is the only person on the planet to have actually read Finnegans Wake all the way through and know what the fuck it is about, or alternately Alan Moore lying about same, and I could have done without either.
– That having been said, I’m willing to bet that in Finnegans Wake, Anna Livia Plurabelle does not have sex with a mutant donkey space invader.
– The addition of The Outrageous Hitler-Man to the team smacks of smartassedness, as his only superpower is “the power to enrage.” Also, I’m not sure where the hell Moore is going to pretend that The Outrageous Hitler-Man’s literary roots lie, although I understand Jess Nevins claims that The OH-M is actually a seventeenth-century Welsh folktale. Of course, Jess Nevins also claims that Alan Moore doesn’t send him kickbacks, so, you know. Grain of salt.
– I’m still not sure why page 81 was edible.
– Everybody has already said their piece about the three-dimensional portion of the book, and I think the idea was clever and well-executed. Except for the one panel where a figure looking suspiciously like Alan Moore points at you and says “now YOU are part of the League, by proxy of imagination!” Honestly. Just sell fake membership cards like everybody else.
– Does Allan Quatermain have to speak in Victorian English all the way through the book? Towards the end of the book, when the setting is the 1960s, he starts to sound irritatingly like Mr. Burns. The reference to the Beatles “not being true vaudevillians” seemed kind of forced.
– I don’t have much criticism for Kevin O’Neill, who is rightfully acclaimed as a genius sort of artist. I didn’t even mind the pornographic woodcuts he kept hiding in the background, presumably at Moore’s insistence. However, I draw the line at hidden pictures of Twiki from the old Buck Rogers TV show.
– The first letter of every page in the book spells “Fuck you, Grant Morrison. Yeah, you heard me, fuck you, Mister “God of All Comics.” I’m the man, not you. I’m the guy who’s won actual literary awards. All you’ve done is some rubbish non-linear narrative and rewritten some crap Superman stories from the Sixties. I fucking ended the Superman story, right? “Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow?” I did that in a day and a half while I was high on coke. You heard me, you Scottish twat. Let’s see some Hollywood producer rape YOUR work and turn it into shitty movies designed to lull people into a catatonic consumerist sleep.” I can’t help but think this is rude, even if it is horribly hard to find.
– Finally, although I understand the meaning is obviously one that’s supposed to be ironic, having a page labeled “How To Kill The Dreaded Nee-Gro” is just in poor taste, okay?
Other than that, though? Pretty good.
Okay, so it was sold out everywhere I looked. Come on, I’m probably pretty close.
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Proving what kind of idiot I am, I was flipping through to page 56 before I realized it was all a joke.
Let’s see some Hollywood producer rape YOUR work and turn it into shitty movies designed to lull people into a catatonic consumerist sleep.
–d
I’m just early enough into my read that I wasn’t sure which bits were true and which were jokes…although as it went along, I began to suspect something was up.
Wish I’d realized it was all jokes before I ate page 81, though. You were right, it was edible…but page 82 wasn’t.
God help me, I went looking for the Dan Didio image while thinking, “How could I have missed that?”
There’s never enough tantric threeways.
Yeah, it was the Amazing Hitler-man that made me tilt my head, but the edible page made me really go, “heay, he just might be messing with us….”
Brilliant work and says a lot about Moore that so much of it is believable.
See, here I was going “Jesus! How did he get a copy?”
Get thee to The Beguiling – where copies (both cover variants) sit in fat stacks, and so much good stuff has come in over the past couple of weeks I left with a bill over $100, and had completely forgotten to pick up “Dossier”… which is what I went there for originally.
Augh! I thought it was all true!
*sniffs* this is worse than santa claus….
Personally, I was shocked to learn Quartermain is uncircumcized.
(Only $24.95 to find out if I’m kidding.)
…er, Jim, even without looking at it, I’m not sure if that would be surprising whether it’s in the book or not. Quartermain was born at a time when only Jews were circumcised, after all, and he ain’t Jewish.
I kind of wish things would go back to that way. Since my Protestant parents eat pork, they aren’t taking the Old Testament THAT seriously. Why did my foreskin have to pay for it?
I’ll get around to checking out Black Dossier soonish. I don’t even own Volume 2 yet, merely borrowed it at the time. The parodies of Moore’s crazy brilliance above made me laugh, and I completely fell for the main post. Color me gullible (it’s a shade of Puce).
Damn you, MGK. You got me. Well done.
…er, Jim, even without looking at it, I’m not sure if that would be surprising whether it’s in the book or not.
Yeah, see, I wasn’t so much expressing surprise at the conclusion as the evidence that was, er, presented.
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“However, I draw the line at hidden pictures of Twiki from the old Buck Rogers TV show.”
Bizarrely, one panel of From Hell really does contain a hidden R2D2. Not a joke; I think it came up in an Eddie Campbell interview once.
I find it extremely alarming that I find at least two-thirds of these to be entirely plausible.
I haven’t read the book, and I had no idea any of this was fake. The edible page bit was, I thought, just you throwing in a joke about the craziness of Alan Moore’s concepts amidst all the “authentic” stuff.
Man, talk about meta.
I just read the comic the other day.
I assumed all this stuff you mentioned was in the extras that I couldn’t be arsed to read.
…
Some people think I am a smart man. This particular chain of events is conclusive proof to the contrary.
[…] My Review: League of Extraordinary Gentleman: the Black Dossier Alan Moore just came on my face. […]