“The Black Dossier”: A (for real and much shorter) review.

I was conflicted about it. I enjoyed it, yes – generally it was a decent read. This is a brief piece of filler before the final volume. The story was pretty much a set-up, and it felt like it. Without revealing key spoilers…

Moore’s brilliant twists made up for the less compelling story – Chaplin’s Hynkel instead of Hitler? The government of 1984 taking power briefly in 1948? Classical mythology getting its due in graphic novels, including the Aeneid? Wonderful. The German and French Leagues were masterfully assembled – I wish the story had kept pace. Lovecraftian references, hooray! A Pynchon aside, hurrah! Triffids, This Island Earth, and an indictment on James Bond.

However, the whole Fanny Hill thing was too long and a bit too grotesque. I appreciate Moore’s activism for his views on sexual liberation, but he took it a bit too far here, to the point where Fanny Hill was dehumanized (unlike the other characters of past LoEG volumes) and was just a sexual punchline (the Tijuana Bible was along the same lines – or maybe it was just that O’Neill’s art was too creepy there).

Overall, I enjoyed it. It wasn’t great, it was doomed by the high expectations, and Moore took some shortcuts in order to reach his quirky references sooner, but I wasn’t too disappointed.

I enjoyed his fake Shakespeare, and I think the Beat novel was also a reference to Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls,” where the narrator trails off into incomprehensible rambling (more so than normal Lovecraftian speech) after facing a major threat, going from modern English to archaic English to Latin, etc.

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I suppose I’m one of the few who were not disappointed by the Dossier. But then, based on the first two volumes, I was expecting gorgeous artwork, a half-baked plot, a certain amount of embarrassingly juvenile perversion, and a prose section that I wouldn’t want to read. And it’s safe to say that my expectations were more than met on all accounts.

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