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League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Dark Dossier

post #1 of 14
11/13/07 at 11:41am
Thread Starter 
It's out tomorrow and early reviews make it sound like a lot of fun. A 3D section, parchment paper like sections, and presumably more thinly disguised literary cameos than you can shake a stick at.
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post #2 of 14
11/13/07 at 11:51am
Is this a new "series", or is it a companion to the first two?
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post #3 of 14
11/13/07 at 12:44pm
Isn't it "Black Dossier"?
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post #4 of 14
11/13/07 at 12:52pm
I thought it was a standalone one-shot. Anyways, good luck to all international readers that want to read this.
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post #5 of 14
11/13/07 at 1:10pm
It's a sort-of standalone that will go back to the origins of the League, and forward into the 20th Century League. And yeah, Black Dossier. It's been on my Amazon wishlist for over a year with no definite release date, and then suddenly, BAM! So weird.
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post #6 of 14
11/14/07 at 2:50pm
There's a very good interview with Moore detailing the tortured publishing history with this book. He also gives a pretty solid sales pitch for it:

Quote:
Like I said, I’m kind of conflicted in my feelings about this book. It’s going to be coming out in an edition that is less than we originally imagined and were told that was how it was going to be published. That inevitably takes a little of the shine off it. But with that said, this is a phenomenal piece of work. Speaking just for Kevin, the amount of different art styles he has apparently moved through in the course of this book is simply breathtaking. He’s moving from pastiches of great 18th century political cartoonists to 19th century illustrators like the Marquis Von Bayros, and a whole plethora of other illustration styles – and, it’s always unmistakably Kevin, but just the breadth of ability that he’s brought to this book is astonishing. And, I’m quite pleased about the literary side of this book, as well. I mean, we are both rather showing off in the course of The Black Dossier. The story that wraps around the Black Dossier section is, in itself, incredibly compelling and ties up an awful lot of the fictional threads in the 1950s fictional landscape in Britain and America – and to some degree, the 1960s landscape that is to come. But, the various parts of The Black Dossier – when I say that it’s a sourcebook, that doesn’t really convey what the various parts that we’ve included are really all about – I mean, there’s an unpublished Shakespeare plan, there’s a Jeeves and Wooster novella by P.G. Wodehouse, and there’s a continuation of Fanny Hill, called Being The Further Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, which will be published, hopefully, with the edges of the pages uncut, in the style of old Victorian books, where the readers will have to cut the edges of the pages themselves. And, I think I’m proudest of all of a piece that is a pastiche of Jack Kerouac – a pseudo-beat novel, complete with an exploitational pulp cover that has very little to do with the inside, that Kevin has done. It’s called The Crazy Wide Forever, and I’m pretty pleased with that as a piece of writing. And, there’s tons of other stuff. Like I said, it’s about everything that the reader might ever have wondered about the League, realized in a dazzling manner. We’ve got a 24-page life of Orlando, that’s told in the style of one of the classic British boys’ comics, where we have beautiful painted artwork in the style of people like Don Morris or Frank Bellamy. And, it tells the story of the life of Orlando from his birth in ancient Thebes in the 12th century, B.C., through to the Second World War, and, in doing so, provides a detailed timeline for the entirety of our fictional world – in much the same way that we gave a fairly detailed map of the fictional world in our almanac in the second volume. So, there are all of these astonishing things crammed into a couple of hundred pages. It’s roughly the length of a collected volume. And, I think the amount of stuff that we’ve got crammed in there – much too much to actually list here – is pretty remarkable. I think that this is probably, in many ways, a whole new level. We seem to have stepped up into new territory with The Black Dossier, which we are going to continue to build upon in the forthcoming volume three from Top Shelf.
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post #7 of 14
11/14/07 at 5:59pm
Thread Starter 
I've picked it up today and it's a tremendous piece of work. Dense, full of literary references, and quite fun.

That said, DC will be lucky to avoid being sued by the Fleming Estate.
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post #8 of 14
11/14/07 at 6:30pm
Think there's any chance of this being pulled at some point? I should probably snag it sooner rather than later (wishlist).
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post #9 of 14
11/14/07 at 7:33pm
Thread Starter 
I believe it's most precise to call "Jimmy" Bond a right cunt. Harry Lime as M was a piece of brilliance as well.

BTW, annotations for Black Dossier are already up at http://www.shsu.edu/~lib_jjn/dossier.html for those that are having a hard time placing some of the many cameos.
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post #10 of 14
11/15/07 at 12:17am
Picked it up on the way home. There are two covers. I got the darker one.

This and a new issue of Criminal in one stop-- BONANZA!
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post #11 of 14
11/15/07 at 1:02am
I haven't read a word yet, but damn this is a beautiful book.
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post #12 of 14
11/15/07 at 1:28am
Thread Starter 
I think Moore created a new sub-genre of horror fiction with "What Ho, Gods of the Abyss". I'd pay money to hear Hugh Laurie narrate that section.
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post #13 of 14
11/18/07 at 10:14pm
Pretty good read, Haven't done anything but the comic section yet. I thought SPOILERS

- Liked the negative take on the man who would be 007. Really liked it.
- Missed the urban morass of violence and depravity which encompassed some much of the first two books.
- A little too much of the main couple, who aren't that interesting. Aside from Bond, neither were the villains. More Orlando would've been better.
- Liked the little mention of Nemo subbing around in this alternate dimension.
- Loved the Cthulhu diplomat getting pissed off and leaving. What a suck.

On the whole, it's a very entertaining read, but I don't think it quite measures up to its predecessors. That's a tall order, of course.
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post #14 of 14
11/29/07 at 1:21am
This is awesome stuff. It's cool to see LoEG taking over and linking various concerns he's been toying with for a decade now, in 1963, Supreme, Tom Strong, Top Ten, and Promethea--this comic now seems like the lynchpin for all this recent work, putting a cap on it and setting the stage for something new.

I've heard a few complaints that the ending is Promethea II: Metaphysical Exposition Harder, but I tend to think that Moore's going back to this mode for a reason--I mean, the last page is basically Moore literally addressing the reader in the guise of Prospero and going, "OK, now that we've got that out of the way, and I'm not stuck writing for DC anymore, stand back and I'll really show you something."
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