Fables of Deconstruction Part 2 - League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Today was a tough call, do I cover one of the finest series ever penned by the uber-author Alan Moore, or utter crap like Ikki Tousen or Tantric Stripfighter Trina? Admittedly, I do like reading fan service bullshit once in a while (and I *may* write about it another day). But ever since I put down the first Fables of Deconstruction covering Planetary recently, this second entry has been nagging me.

Okay. Now. For all of you five or six people out there who didn't know, LXG was not just a terrible film starring Sean Connery that was widely panned by critics and filmgoers alike. It was not just a terminal flop that was responsible for the career downfall for its director, Stephen Norrington (who has not made a movie since, and he directed the first Blade). No, it was actually based off one of Alan Moore's best pieces of writing (along with Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and The Killing Joke), believe it or not. Moore himself distances himself from any of his works turned to celluloid in the assumption that Hollywood hacks ups the crap factor to his stories, but there was no finer time in history that proved him right.

The printed form of LXG is in reality a monument for people who love literature. The storylines are literally stuffed to the gills with literary references, so much so that I'm only going to touch on some of them here. There are entire websites out there that attempt to source every inclusion they can find. If the lead Victorian Age characters themselves are based on icons from Bram Stoker (Mina Murray), H. Rider Haggard (Allan Quartermain), Robert Louis Stephenson (Dr. Jekyll), H.G. Wells (Hawley Griffin) and Jules Verne (Capt. Nemo) in the first volume - then for sure the villains, settings, and obscure cameos are themselves literary references. In the first omnibus, the main villains are Professor Moriarty of Sherlock Holmes fame and Fu Manchu (of whose name is never given) and an early ally is the fat and slimy Campion Bond, a predecessor of Agent 007.

Volume Two of course goes further by adding the entire plotline of The War of the Worlds. The tripods come to Earth after having had their asses handed to them on a plate by an insurrection on Mars led by John Carter and Gullivar Jones. It's only through the involvement of a deranged hybrid-making geneticist who we all know is Dr. Moreau (and whose menagerie is savage versions of Rupert the Bear, Wind in the Willows and other beloved children's anthropomorphic tales) that Earth has a chance of survival.

Chronologically (albeit not in published time) Volume Three takes place in 1910, with the original team down to Murray and Quartermain. New allies are the eternally young she-male Orlando, the awesome ghost hunter-who-deserves-his-own-movie Thomas Karnacki (rather like today's Johan Krauss from the BPRD), and the smooth criminal E.W. Hornung's A.J. Raffles, an early type of Thomas Crown. Villains include Nemo's daughter, Jenny (the Pirate Jenny from Three Penny Opera), Mack the Knife, and a metaphor of the very real Alesteir Crowley, Oliver Haddo. The three storylines of a mass murderer, the rise of Jenny and the possible birth of the anti-Christ are interwoven here.

The Black Dossier takes the largest leap by being set in 1958. Interestingly (and wonderfully) taking place after the fall of INGSOC (the totalitarian government of George Orwell's 1984). Murray and Quartermain (Quartermain himself is now made younger from bathing in the light of She, from the story of H. Rider Haggard) are on the run from the government. They are pursued by the sniveling and psychopathically inept Jimmy (as in James Bond), Emma Night (to become The Avenger's Emma Peel eventually) and the aging Hugo Drummond. Murray and Quartermain attempt to flee the UK to make it to The Blazing World, where Prospero (from Shakespeare's The Tempest) had fled. Prospero himself was the leader of the very first League in Elizabethan times.

So as you can see - with very volume filled with literary allusions and with previous Leagues that have not received any print (going back to the mid-1600s with characters like Lemuel Gulliver, the Scarlet Pimpernel, Reverend Christopher Syn, etc) plus other countries such as Germany and France having their own versions, the possibilities are endless. There is, however, a final volume coming, taking place in London 2008. The Antichrist foretold in 1910 will come to pass. I wonder what that will look like, and moreso, what characters will show up in that tome.