League of Extraordinary Gentlemen III vol. 2, 1969

....This came OUT? ....Well, I know what I'm doing tomorrow. I've given up on waiting for the release dates, so it's like a surprise! I'm sure you can tell, I sort of really, really like League. 

I'll get hate for this, but I think that out of his recent work, League is the best blend of narrative and Alan Moore's "Schtick" (kinky sex, personal philosophy, and social commentary). Promethea had potential, but then it became, 'Alan Moore on Magic", and while I don't doubt the quality of say, Lost Girls, occasionally it's like - was it Devin way back when who was like, "Do we really, really need to see Wendy and her brothers in a massive orgy with Peter Pan?"

Tom Strong is the next, following League in...how do you say it? Readability? Coherence?

I seriously enjoyed 1910, so can't wait. 

Aside:

Is there a point when you're willing to give a creator a free pass? Re: My complaints above with Moore. It's easy to say, 'It's Alan-Fucking-Moore, you vapid cunt"...But do you think he, as a creator/author/whatever, has a responsibility to deliver? (I've seen some of the vitriol spewed at George R Martin for the delays in his books - do we excuse their inability to commit to a scheduled date because of the product they're delivering?)

I'm confused about the delays, but if the end product is good it doesn't matter to me.

This is...interesting. I think I have a lot of problems with it, but it's also provided more meat for me to chew on than just about any recent series I can think of. One thing that a lot of people are having problems with is that the references are pretty heavily British, and this is an era where British and American pop culture are diverging pretty heavily, so a lot of it flies over North American's heads.

The important references are to The Avengers (the British TV show, not the comic book characters), the Mick Jagger-starring film Performance (and the Rolling Stones in general), Get Carter, and a bunch of British superheroes of the era. (And Oliver Haddo/Aleister Crowley, returned from the last volume. And, oddly enough, Lord Voldemort.) The big problem I have is that the Easter eggs are just that, Easter eggs. Jerry Cornelius shows up, but it's just a quick cameo; I'm really disappointed that he wasn't a bigger part of the story. Likewise, I guess there are copyright issues with Doctor Who, but still, you'd think his specter would hang over a 1969 version of the League the way Sherlock Holmes did the Victorian version. Instead he's just a face in the crowd. The focus is still squarely on Mina, Allan and Orlando, which is understandable, but they've basically become completely new characters at this point, and the story Moore is telling doesn't seem to hang on cultural references, but rather funhouse-mirror versions of real events (the death of Brian Jones and the Stones concert in Hyde park, primarily) which means that this is starting to feel like a whole other thing with a lot of cameos grafted on. Surely part of the appeal of LoEG should be "drafting" a new League in each era? Someone actually suggested that it would have been ballsy of Moore to ditch Mina, Allan and Orlando entirely and create a new League, and I actually agree. It's especially notable since Jack Carter has a hell of a lot more to do with stopping the villain and saving the day than the League does. If he'd been part of the League, they certainly would have come off as quite so useless.

Which is a shame, because if you strip away the expectations, the story Moore is telling is legitimately fascinating, even focusing solely on this volume and ignoring the larger story of "Century". You can tell Moore's had a big magnum opus about the 60s bubbling away at the back of his brain for years now (possibly "1963" was an early, abortive attempt at telling it?) and here he gets to tell it. It's a lot more complex and interesting than "Oh man, the 60s were awesome, man" or even "the 60s had a dark side". One of the most interesting motifs is the linking of the 60s to childhood and innocence--the very first panel is a statue of Winnie the Pooh, and then by the end, well, innocence lost. Also very cool, and something I wish Moore had looked at in more depth: the idea that the superhero is kind of the ultimate summation of 60s culture, which really seems insightful. Certainly you can make a pretty strong argument that the 60s were the heyday of the superhero, and that it's all been downhill since then.

Then there's the ominous hinting at stuff to come, including a glimpse at 2009 which, in the League Universe, seems to have become a fascist state even worse than Big Brother's. All of this may be linked to the recurring interference of Oliver Haddo, and there's a very strong implication that the "Moonchild"/Antichrist he longs to create is going to turn out to be a certain boy wizard. You can see all the ominous stuff creeping in around the edges, the corporatization of everything, the looming, gleaming towers being built--the idea being that this totalitarian regime reflects the way fiction and pop culture is bound up by corporate owners and endlessly exploited as of the present.

My initial reading of this volume was somewhat disappointed, but I keep going back to it over and over again in my mind. It's really a staggering achievement on several levels, even if it fails on several others. I do kind of wish Moore hadn't tried to make this a League sequel but instead just told a story about the 60s, but I guess some of the power of the story comes from the fact that these are characters "of their time" that reflect the time and place more honestly, despite being imaginary, than any after-the-fact editorializing could do. Which is a neat trick to pull off at this far remove.

Also, I just read the prose story. It features the cast of the Wire (well, their fathers) living on the moon. Seriously.

Sonofabitch, I've gotta go read that prose story!

The comic part... I dunno, conflicting for me.  I didn't love it, but I kind of really liked the skewed state things were left in at the end.  I'll dig out 1910 and give that another look, and give 1969 another pass through with Jess' notes.  I am admittedly a shallower comics fan than some in this thread, but I enjoyed the book more in the first two series.

That's because the first two books are amazing. 

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Prankster 

I'm confused about the delays, but if the end product is good it doesn't matter to me.

 

This is...interesting. I think I have a lot of problems with it, but it's also provided more meat for me to chew on than just about any recent series I can think of. One thing that a lot of people are having problems with is that the references are pretty heavily British, and this is an era where British and American pop culture are diverging pretty heavily, so a lot of it flies over North American's heads.

 

The important references are to The Avengers (the British TV show, not the comic book characters), the Mick Jagger-starring film Performance (and the Rolling Stones in general), Get Carter, and a bunch of British superheroes of the era. (And Oliver Haddo/Aleister Crowley, returned from the last volume. And, oddly enough, Lord Voldemort.) The big problem I have is that the Easter eggs are just that, Easter eggs. Jerry Cornelius shows up, but it's just a quick cameo; I'm really disappointed that he wasn't a bigger part of the story. Likewise, I guess there are copyright issues with Doctor Who, but still, you'd think his specter would hang over a 1969 version of the League the way Sherlock Holmes did the Victorian version. Instead he's just a face in the crowd. The focus is still squarely on Mina, Allan and Orlando, which is understandable, but they've basically become completely new characters at this point, and the story Moore is telling doesn't seem to hang on cultural references, but rather funhouse-mirror versions of real events (the death of Brian Jones and the Stones concert in Hyde park, primarily) which means that this is starting to feel like a whole other thing with a lot of cameos grafted on. Surely part of the appeal of LoEG should be "drafting" a new League in each era? Someone actually suggested that it would have been ballsy of Moore to ditch Mina, Allan and Orlando entirely and create a new League, and I actually agree. It's especially notable since Jack Carter has a hell of a lot more to do with stopping the villain and saving the day than the League does. If he'd been part of the League, they certainly would have come off as quite so useless.

 

Which is a shame, because if you strip away the expectations, the story Moore is telling is legitimately fascinating, even focusing solely on this volume and ignoring the larger story of "Century". You can tell Moore's had a big magnum opus about the 60s bubbling away at the back of his brain for years now (possibly "1963" was an early, abortive attempt at telling it?) and here he gets to tell it. It's a lot more complex and interesting than "Oh man, the 60s were awesome, man" or even "the 60s had a dark side". One of the most interesting motifs is the linking of the 60s to childhood and innocence--the very first panel is a statue of Winnie the Pooh, and then by the end, well, innocence lost. Also very cool, and something I wish Moore had looked at in more depth: the idea that the superhero is kind of the ultimate summation of 60s culture, which really seems insightful. Certainly you can make a pretty strong argument that the 60s were the heyday of the superhero, and that it's all been downhill since then.

 

Then there's the ominous hinting at stuff to come, including a glimpse at 2009 which, in the League Universe, seems to have become a fascist state even worse than Big Brother's. All of this may be linked to the recurring interference of Oliver Haddo, and there's a very strong implication that the "Moonchild"/Antichrist he longs to create is going to turn out to be a certain boy wizard. You can see all the ominous stuff creeping in around the edges, the corporatization of everything, the looming, gleaming towers being built--the idea being that this totalitarian regime reflects the way fiction and pop culture is bound up by corporate owners and endlessly exploited as of the present.

 

My initial reading of this volume was somewhat disappointed, but I keep going back to it over and over again in my mind. It's really a staggering achievement on several levels, even if it fails on several others. I do kind of wish Moore hadn't tried to make this a League sequel but instead just told a story about the 60s, but I guess some of the power of the story comes from the fact that these are characters "of their time" that reflect the time and place more honestly, despite being imaginary, than any after-the-fact editorializing could do. Which is a neat trick to pull off at this far remove.

That was an excellent review, Prankster. I have to say I'm still getting an enormous level of enjoyment from the series, but I've felt frustrated at times with the lack of depth to the Century books. While the 'story', such as it is, no longer seems to engage me emotionally most of the time (for whatever reason, much of the Janni Nemo material in 1910 fell flat with me, the entire book seemed a bit rushed story-wise), I find Moore's metatextual masterpiece as delightful as ever. The whole thing is becoming increasingly outlandish, a house of cards that threatens to collapse in on itself with every turn of the page, and yet he's still stitching ever more varied fictions into his great patchwork universe. It's his grand unified theory of imagination, and I find it impossible not to get a kick out of seeing a post war Europe menaced by the memory of Adenoid Hynkel, or having our heroes saved from a callow, villainous James Bond by the sudden appearance of a noble Galley-Wag ("Bread and tits, m'lady!").

As far as the characters go, I find Mina and Allan's psycho-sexual odyssey in the wake of having gained immortality at the Ugandan pool to be fairly fertile material to explore. Their feeling of timelessness, of being old yet perpetually young, strikes a cord with me, and that would be the character building aspect of the later books I've most enjoyed. You're right that in many ways they're very different characters than the people that we met in the first volume, but then again, they've been on such a remarkable, dare I say it, Extraordinary journey, that it makes perfect sense they'd find themselves changed by their experiences.

One thing that has bothered me a bit in Century is the Prisoner of London seemingly having knowledge of the 'real world'. In 1910 I found it pretty funny, when he's asked about Haddo and references Crowley, prompting Mina to exclaim "I had NO idea what he was talking about... for the first time in my life, I feel stupid...". Usually this is my reaction to whatever confusion I might encounter with the more obscure literary references in LXG, and it amused me to see the tables turned on Mina with her ignorance of life outside fiction. In 1969 though, when the Prisoner returns and he's going on about Wells, the Martian Invasion, and then states that he "enjoyed that second volume of yours"... Eh, it took me out of the story. For whatever reason I'm OK with a character who shows up and makes reference to real life future events like 7/7, but when he starts talking to the characters of LXG about the various published volumes of their own adventures... it felt like the unity of Moore's world was being compromised.

I think my big complaint with these century books is that they're being released as if they were stand alone volumes, put out more than a year apart, when I think much of the effect is lost without having them all collected together to go through at once. The setting and story were interesting this time out, but before things had even gotten going they were already being wrapped up. I think the 60s as envisioned by Moore (like pre war Europe before it in 1910) was ripe for further exploration than we get in these 80 odd pages. It's all very surface and brisk, when I feel like the story and characters at that point in time were owed a more in depth look. The acid trip, while fun, also felt like a poor man's version of the kind of creative paneling seen in Promethea. I love Kevin O'Neil, but it wasn't his strongest moment. As it is, I liked it, there was some interesting art, and I just wish there was more 'there' there. The Tom Riddle reference went over my head, but now that I'm aware of it I think it's great. I'm wondering if we'll actually get any Harry Potter next time out though. It seems like a copyright minefield, and there's no way they could make him a major character. At best he'd be referenced off hand.

As a final note, I found the epilogue (set in 1976) to be pretty heartbreaking. The League has never been worse off. Even during the Big Brother years at least Allan and Mina were in it together. All I can think is that Allan better hope the Ugandan immortality pool's effects will shield him from AIDS if he intends to piss his life away with IV drug use in the late 70s. Yikes.

I guess we'll find out how things wrap up next month in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume III Century 2009! Moore has stated that the book will feature Orlando returning to England from the ongoing war in the West Wing's fictional nation of Qumar, and that we'll see posters for a Vincent Chase movie in the background of one panel. It would hard for me to be more excited than I am right now.