As noted, the stylish, angular art of League flowed from the pen of O’Neill, an alumnus of 2000AD (Rebellion Developments), who is perhaps so far best known for having co-created the superhero parody Marshal Law with writer Pat Mills. O’Neill’s work nicely recaptures the verve of penny-dreadful illustrations without succumbing to the temptation to ape those illustrations. Indeed, his slick, idiosyncratic visuals range from the iconic to the intricate—the detail of some panels herein recalls Will Elder at his Mad height.
The script, meanwhile, issued from the busy word processor of Moore, inarguably the most significant writer in modern mainstream comics and arguably the most significant writer in comics, period. Moore—a practicing shaman who physically resembles a latter-day Rasputin—first came to the attention of most American readers with his work on The Saga of Swamp Thing (later just Swamp Thing) for DC in the mid-’80s. That work fast led to three superhero prodigies: Miracleman for Eclipse (now defunct), and V for Vendetta and Watchmen for DC again. In the dozen or so years since that memorable triumvirate, Moore not only has written a challenging first novel—Voice of the Fire, published by Victor Gollancz in 1996—but also has broadened his horizons both inside and outside mainstream comics, penning everything from spin-offs of Spawn (Todd McFarlane’s horror/superhero amalgam for Image) to an odd collaboration with artist Mark Beyer for Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly’s RAW.
League, in fact, almost precisely occupies the midpoint on a conceptual continuum formed by Moore’s most memorable recent works. In specific, it sizzles with the funny-book electricity of the other stellar offerings from ABC, while inhabiting, more or less, the same milieu as the majestic, mature From Hell (Eddie Campbell Comics) and appropriating Victorian literary icons like Moore’s very mature collaboration with Melinda Gebbie, Lost Girls (Top Shelf, forthcoming).
Those icons, all drawn from literature of the fantastic, constitute the titular League: Mina Murray of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (scandalously divorced from Jonathan Harker following the events of that novel), Allan Quatermain of Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines and other adventures, Captain Nemo of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island, and the eponymous foci of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson and The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells.
Moore and O’Neill’s narrative opens in 1898 in an alternate England, where a portly, patronizing man named Bond recruits Miss Murray into the service of Queen Victoria. Directly, with Nemo—a turbaned tower of intensity—she journeys aboard the Nautilus to Cairo, there to retrieve a gaunt, benumbed Quatermain from an opium den. In due course, the trio next captures the brutish Hyde in Paris and the see-through psychopath Griffin (the Invisible Man) in a singular English girls school.
Miss Murray and her outre team then tackle a threat to the Crown regarding which Bond briefs them. A source of antigravity, invented by an excitable British professor, has fallen into the hands of an Oriental warlord known only as “the Doctor”—a sinister figure out of Sax Rohmer—who’s ruthlessly established himself as the East End’s kingpin of crime. Antigravity, Bond notes, would transform the Doctor into an almost incalculable danger to the British Empire, in that it would make him “capable of subjecting England to an aerial bombardment with explosives.”
For their individual reasons, the five resolve to thwart his plans, and this they do, with aplomb. At that point, unfortunately, the misfit quintet learns their efforts have only strengthened a menace of what seems to be even greater evil—a circumstance they further resolve to rectify.
The narrative concludes with pulp-ish gusto. It seethes, indeed, with images and conceits worthy of Lester Dent (the first and finest writer on Street & Smith’s Doc Savage) at his zenith: A gigantic chiropteran airship, powered by an unearthly element familiar from The First Men in the Moon by Wells, bombs London’s Limehouse district. In response, Chinese fighters attack it atop war-kites emblazoned with devilish faces. In the night sky, automatic harpoon guns slay with dreadful precision. And the altogether splendid Miss Murray proves quite forcefully why she’s the leader of the team.
Great fun, this—no bald synopsis can possibly do justice to the detail with which Moore and O’Neill have packed the tale, as well as “Allan and the Sundered Veil.” (For insight into that detail, curious readers should visit this Web site, where pop scholar Jess Nevins has copiously annotated this work and many more.) Others apparently concur with this assessment of League. Hollywood has come sniffing, for instance—but then, Hollywood nowadays comes sniffing about everything.
More importantly, however, in May 2001, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen won a Bram Stoker Award in the “Illustrated Narrative” category from the Horror Writers Association (a “worldwide organization of writers and publishing professionals dedicated to promoting the interests of writers of Horror and Dark Fantasy,” according to its Web site). Competing for that award had been works by Joe R. Lansdale, Robert Weinberg, and Bernie Wrightson—none too shoddy company.
Even more importantly to devotees of Moore and O’Neill’s work on League, by the way, a celestial light show at the end of this adventure explains why it’s labeled “Vol. 1/I/One”—and hints at the Wellsian impetus for the next volume, which I, for one, look forward to a great deal.
Bryan A. Hollerbach lives in St. Louis, where he works as a proofreader for a “Big Five” accounting firm. In his spare time, he also writes about pop culture and serves as associate editor of NoisyPaper, a local alternative tabloid to which he contributes a monthly column about television.
Two Novels of Speculative History: The Year the Cloud Fell by Kurt R. A. Giambastiani and Phoenix Fire by Tim O’Laughlin
Reviewed by Christopher Cobb
8/20/01
I’ve been reading a lot of historically-oriented speculative fiction this summer. It’s been fun! I like what I’d call “speculative history” because it can hold in tension two of the most distinctive impulses in speculative writing. On the one hand, an “alternate history” can develop as a coolly intellectual thought experiment, an investigation into the principles of historical change using “what-if” scenarios, tweaking some aspect of the past to discover what consequences follow from it. On the other hand, a historical romance can passionately evoke past worlds now lost to time or missed opportunity. These impulses are in tension, but they’re not mutually exclusive. The best works in this kind, like Guy Gavriel Kay’s parallel-world fantasies or Howard Waldrop’s short stories, follow both impulses at once. None of the books that I’ve read this summer reach the level of these, but the better ones use the competing impulses in speculative history to powerful effect. They teach their readers to love the worlds they evoke, and in the process they challenge their readers to consider how our own world might be different. Two of these novels, both first books for their authors, both set in America in the present or relatively recent past, highlight the strengths and weaknesses of speculative history.
Here’s a frozen moment from a different world. Cheyenne warriors, mounted on bipedal dinosaurs, race at speeds no horse can match to prevent the women and children of their camp from being massacred in a surprise attack by U.S. Army forces. They had left the camp undefended to journey to a parley with representatives of President George Armstrong Custer to discuss the return of his son, whom they hold hostage. Will they arrive in time? What will happen to relations between the Cheyenne and the United States as a result of this sneak attack? What will happen to relations between George Custer, Jr., and his captors, whom the younger Custer has gradually learned to respect? This is a turning point in the plot of Kurt R.A. Giambastiani’s The Year the Cloud Fell: An Alternate History.
In Giambastini’s alternate history, a change in natural history underpins a major change in the political history of North America. Certain species of dinosaurs, including small (as dinosaurs go) runners (of the ornithomimid family ) and tyrannosaurs have survived to the present era on the North American prairies. Domesticated by the tribes of the Great Plains, these beasts give the Native Americans decisive military advantages over U.S. forces in speed and destructive power. Consequently in the late nineteenth century, the northern Plains, technically part of the United States since the Louisiana Purchase, remain outside U.S. control, and the Union’s settlement of the Pacific coast has never taken place. The plot of the novel is set in motion when the Army, directed by Custer, Sr., tries a new approach to defeating the Cheyenne Alliance. They will send an experimental dirigible airship, piloted by Custer, Jr., to scout the Cheyenne’s territory. If they can find the Cheyenne’s permanent settlements, they can neutralize the Cheyenne warriors’ advantages in mobility by attacking the settlements, forcing the Cheyenne to fight a stationary battle in defense. Giambastiani sets up a multi-layered thought experiment, providing the material means to make his alterations of military history, which he takes very seriously, plausible.