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.

The Golden Age of Space

This is one of those topics that make me smile - the Golden Age of Space. This concept was conceived back when people had little to no understanding of the real rigors of space travel and scientific understanding was poor. Other worlds bred incredible cultures, a rich variety of alien civilizations grew but required human input and empathy, and the flora and fauna ripe for hunting and civilizing influences. Little did humanity actually realize that space was disease and danger wrapped up in darkness and silence.

However, the ideas that came about from space being a fun way to spend an afternoon brought about some wonderful titles from people who imagined that Alpha Centauri was no less difficult to get to than Johannesburg. And although the bulk of these titles fell out of favor, they do tend to come back as retro-appreciation and even in some cases, modernized to catch up to our more cynical times.

JOHN CARTER - by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and brought back to life by Alan Moore in the second volume of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. He's a good ole Southerner who has been transported to Barsoom (the name Martians give their own planet). Because of the lighter gravity of Mars, he is much stronger and tougher than its native inhabitants - whether they are the hulking many-armed savage green Martians or the naked and voluptuous randy red Martians with whom Carter tends to mate, go figure. What is cool about the John Carter stories is not only were they written by Burroughs to begin with, but the fact that he took the time to expand upon the Barsoom universe - developing many races, cultures, and habitats that flesh out the Martian experience despite being as fantastical and grounded in science as a H.P. Lovecraft story. There is always talks of a John Carter movie and it could be fair to say that Avatar by James Cameron is inspired by it. John McTiernan and Jon Favreau have made attempts, but it looks like Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo and Wall-E) is the current option holder. If that's the case, then John Carter will be a CG flick.

GULLIVAR JONES - I would never have heard of him if it weren't for the fact that he too was included in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as a fighting compatriot for Carter on the battlefields of Mars. Sort of like Carter's much less successful kid brother, Jones didn't always get the girl or defeat his enemies. In this sense, he could have been developed as a much more complex character if anyone felt the need to take his stories and develop them further. Roy Thomas and Marvel Comics gave it a stab (they probably could not get the rights for John Carter) in the 1970s but that didn't last long. It was only Alan Moore who brought him back and only as a bit player.

FLASH GORDON - I think most people remember blonde football player god Sam Jones wearing that red tanktop fighting Max Von Sydow, who himself was majorly slumming it as Ming the Merciless to a soundtrack by Queen. Actually, I think everything was red in that movie. First published in 1934, there was a TV show broadcast in 2008 on the Sci Fi channel which thankfully didn't last long. The porn movie, Flesh Gordon, probably nailed (no pun intended) the idea of Flash Gordon the best - garish, cheap-ish, kind of racist, but overall something that you absolutely could not take seriously. However, there is a current Flash Gordon title written by Brendan Deneen which understands the overall Flash Gordon sensibility probably should only exist on the pages of comics.

BUCK ROGERS - most of us probably remember this as the Gil Gerard TV show where everyone wore skin tight white flightsuits and that stupid robot Twikki walking around with no purpose whatsoever - the show itself was a rip-off of Flash Gordon. He was originally created in 1929 by John Flint Dille and was named after Dille's dog. Conveniently falling into a coma, former air corps veteran Rogers wakes up in the 25th century to fight for advanced civilization humanity with some 20th century gusto against the "Mongol" hordes, which again makes for some pretty nasty racist metaphors - particularly as Buck Rogers grew in popularity during the Cold War versus the Red Menace. Dynamite Comics brought him back in 2009 with a completely new and unique visual style as part of the current theme of bringing space retro-back.

ADAM STRANGE - created by Gardner Fox in 1958, Adam Strange was DC Comics' version of John Carter, with similar origins but instead of Barsoom, the planet in question was Rann. He had his peak in the Cold War with simplistic stories but was brought back in a big way in 2005 during the Rann - Thanagar War, a precursor to the even larger Infinite Crisis crossover event. He was updated, given a real personality, and made a staple character in the DC scheme of things - eventually teaming up with Animal Man and Starfire of the Teen Titans against elements of Jack Kirby's New Gods.

AETHERIC MECHANICS, MINISTRY OF SPACE and IGNITION CITY - it seems a little wierd that Warren Ellis jumped on this genre but he did indeed with these three titles, starting with 1) Aetheric Mechanics, a steam punk space-age Victorian adventure starring Sherlocke Holmes and James Watson, 2) Ministry of Space, which ran in the mid-2000s and 3) Ignition City, which is still ongoing. I include a panel page of Aetheric Mechanics rather than a cover shot as its the inside artwork that is more impressive.

I'll focus on Ministry of Space and Ignition City as they were less a presentation of ideas like Aetheric Mechanics and more actual narratives - Ignition City focuses on pastiches of characters of Dan Dare, 2001, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and many more source materials. Basically, Earth has closed off space travel and its many astronauts and space explorers are now vagrants drinking their lives away in the last remaining space park, trying to figure out why it all happened and cut off from the truth. In contrast, Ministry of Space shows the high age of space exploration from the UK's point of view - as it races to the reaches of astral colonization and imperialism against other superpowers.

Fables of Deconstruction Part 1 - Planetary

I may revisit this posting in the future, Planetary is one of those titles that like Watchmen, is so multi-layered and referential that it makes it extremely difficult to nail down all the nuances in one sitting. But in the meantime, for those who don't know - Planetary is one of Warren Ellis' two magnum opii (along with Transmetropolitan) that put him on the map. It's a metaphorical sci fi opera with enough comic Golden and Silver Age references that the only comparison is Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (of which I will be covering soon enough). The fact that it's so well-written and hooks you into the mystery of comic history is a testament to the writing skills of Mr. Ellis and it makes up for some of his more lacklustre efforts.

On the surface, Planetary is a shadowy organization that dubs itself as "Archeologists of the Impossible", finding the secret history of humanity - whether it includes giant monsters, superhumans, alien visits, magical phenomena, bizarre cults, extra-dimensional crossovers, etc etc - ie., everything that takes place in modern sci fi and fantasy. If it existed, it's the job of Elijah Snow, Jakita Wagner and the Drummer to find it, log it, and if unable to use for the betterment of humanity, keep it hidden from those who would use it for evil gain.

But that's the surface, and it's what is happening underneath that truly creates all the complexities that make this a difficult entry. For below the cover story is the tale of the superhumans that have always existed. Those gifted individuals whose powers were the wellspring of most of the great works of fiction: pastiches of Fu Manchu, Tarzan, Doc Savage, the Shadow, Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, John Carter, and others famous in history or even contemporary, like Vertigo's John Constantine and Chow Yun Fat's Hard Boiled cop Tequila. Ellis touched on these icons of fiction in another title, The Authority, with the character of Jenny Sparks who shares this bloodline - but here we see that these people were the beginning of the secret history and a great conflict continues between those who are their descendants, and those who covet the title.

Like I said, I can't even begin to cover the narrative and the themes that play themselves out. But take my word for it, it's a long series that continues to this day but worth the time spent.