Kevin O'Neill: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (The Black Dossier)

We had a look last time at volumes 1 and 2 of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. On to the next:

(2007)

I always try to say as little as possible when doing a Scenic Route post - the entire point of it is to put the words aside and just look at the pictures - but the nature of the work will necessitate some annotation this time around. Not the true annotation that a close and rewarding read of the work might uncover, just more than usual of my own slapdash re: plot and structure.

Designed by Bill Oakley (to whom, RIP, the work is dedicated) and Todd Klein.

Moore did not intend vol. 3 to be the actual third volume of the series but more of a sourcebook to the mythology of the series, a little (but only that) like the Silmarillion to The Lord of the Rings. He also saw it as a way to not deprive his collaborator of a paycheck while he was getting the true follow-up to vols. 1 and 2 - the Century trilogy - together for him to illustrate. 

The story begins in 1958 with now-immortal Mina Murray in disguise (as Odette O'Quim, "Oodles" to her friends), laying a honey-trap for a certain Secret Agent "Jimmy" Bond (grandson of Campion). "Oodles" goads him into taking her to the ruins of the Ministry of Love, a standing reminder of England's recent experiment with INGSOC "Big Brother" socialism. 

Before it was the military intelligence HQ of Airstrip One, though, the Ministry of Love was where Jimmy's grandfather kept the secrets of Empire, including - most especially - the Black Dossier, which contains the secret history of the now-disbanded League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Bond turns rapey, and Mina - aided by an also-now-immortal Allen Quartermain - thrash him soundly. 

007 doesn't fare too well in the LXG-verse.

The new M dispatches Harry Lime, a patched-up Jimmy Bond, Emma Peel (going by her maiden name Emma Night) and her uncle, an aged Hugo "Bulldog" Drummond to go after them. 

Mrs. Peel comes off considerably better than her double-0 counterpart.

In between sex, naps, and hitch-hiking, Allen and Mina read through the Dossier (more on that in a bit.) They want to get back to the Blazing World, a mystical archipelago somewhere to the north of the UK. At a spaceport, Jimmy, Emma and Hugo find Allan and Mina, who escape in a Fireball XL5. 

As fantastic as the elements of that last paragraph are - and O'Neill, as we'll see, excels at bringing them to life - it's the little unheralded bits along the way where O'Neill excels even more.

When their ship crashes in the Scottish countryside near their destination, they finish the journey on foot with their pursuers hot on their heels. They reach their friend - the mysterious Galley-Wag - just in time.

He escorts them to the Rose of Nowhere, his space-zeppelin with a crew of hyper-sexualized Dutch Dolls. Before they fly away, Bulldog Drummond almost stops them, but Mina tells him the truth about the death of his best friend (the future Mrs. Peel's father). 

Hugo tries to kill Jimmy for his actions, but he is shot by Jimmy at point-blank range. Mina and Allan successfully return to the bizarre 3-D universe of The Blazing World and deliver the dossier to Orlando, the original caretaker of the League from centuries earlier. 

The end.

Several new characters are introduced in The Black Dossier:

The Gally-wag and the Dutch Dolls, Orlando, and Prospero (clockwise from top l).

This is mostly the only time we've seen extended illustrated sections with these characters - not counting Orlando, who will be a main character for the next volume of stories. More on him/her later. But everyone appears in the supplemental sections here and to come, especially this Blazing World business.

When this first came out, I didn't know what to make of it at all. Allen and Mina didn't seem like themselves at all, Bond seemed a mean-spirited swipe, it was relentlessly pornographic, yadda yadda. None of these things are dealbreakers on their own - some of them might even be considered pluses - but initially they combined to keep me at arm's length.

After a few years and a few closer reads, I've come to love it. It's a challenging work, for sure, not just aspects of the frame narrative but most especially the Dossier sections. To this day I discover things in there that only make sense after finishing the last (so far) volumes in the series.

Speaking of the Dossier of the title, let's pause here to remember he in whose name we gather today. Is there nothing Kevin O'Neill cannot draw? We saw last time how he could take visuals already deeply embedded in people's consciousness like the Martians from War of the Worlds and make them his own; here he does the same with much more specialized (arguably) content.

I remain amazed that no matter the turn of plot, the locale or era, the genre or style of illustration, the facial expression, the level of depravity, or the celebrity/ icon likeness called for, the art hits its mark and considerably more each and every time. O'Neill's collected League work has to be some kind of world record for holy-shit convergence of all the above. I can't think of a single other artist who hits on as many levels in as many ways.

Let's have a look at some of the contents of the Dossier in the order they appear. The descriptions are from the wiki; my own remarks appear in the captions and afterwards.

1. "On the Descent of the Gods" an account of the Gods of the League universe, as written by Oliver Haddo.

2. A 25-page Life of Orlando comic strip which tells the entire life of Orlando from his birth in the City of Thebes in 1260 B.C., up to the Second World War told in the style the 1950s British comic Trump.

3. A faux William Shakespeare play detailing the foundation of the League by Prospero from The Tempest.

4. An imaginary sequel to John Cleland's Fanny Hill with full-page illustrations akin to those that Marquis Von Bayros illustrated for the book.

Much too pornographic to screencap, so here's a blown-up detail from one of the backgrounds of the League with Natty Bumpo and the gang. Good heavens what ribaldry do they espy?

5. A Bertie Wooster and Jeeves prose story involving one of Great Old Ones from the stories of H.P. Lovecraft.

6. And "The Crazy Wide Forever," a short story written in the style of Jack Kerouac.

There's also Campion Bond's memoirs and some mementos of INGSOC.

And even more!

Any way you slice it, an embarrassment of riches. 

A few words on Orlando.

As mentioned above, a new major character joins the cast in The Black Dossier: Orlando, the immortal who changes from man to woman every decade or so. Immortal characters are tricky. There's a tendency to make them interact with too many historical personages over the centuries. (Young Indiana Jones - a G-rated prototype of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in limited but somewhat interesting ways - deserves credit for having the same problem but over only decades.) I can't tell if Orlando is an exaggeration of this trope or an over-the-top contribution to it. I suppose it can comfortably be both. There's something - in the spirit of the LXG overlap-verse conceit - almost Mango or Princess Kenny about the literalization of Orlando's backstory, though. There's nothing inherently silly about an immortal who (in his/her own words in a later volume) is too shallow to really mind being immortal, but there's something about reducing everyone in history into someone who just can't help banging Orlando because he/her is Orlando that stretches things too far for me. I think it's adding this other Rambo side to the character that does it for me - the set-up just can't accommodate it. 

Then again, if you re-name the series Orlando's Super-Bang Across Eternity, and see it through that lens, well! It's damn interesting, isn't it? Perhaps it's just me. I would love to discover that the entire genesis of the League was Alan Moore's creative exercise on working out what "banging across eternity" would actually entail, with Orlando being the result.

Until next time.

~