A Fanboy’s Notes: Victorian Edition
The first issue of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume II is out! If you need to be told, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a comic book about a superhero group – in 1898. The members include Alan Quatermain, Captain Nemo, the Invisible Man, Henry Jekyll (and partner) and Miss Wilheminha Murray, formerly Mina Harker. The assemblage is the creation of Campion Bond. Actually it’s the creation of the great Alan Moore and artist Kevin O’Neill, and published by the America’s Best Comics imprint.
In the first six-issue miniseries, the League found itself being used as pawns in a war between Professor Moriarty and Fu Manchu. The movie adaptation, with Sean Connery in the role of Alan Quatermain, began filming this month. (It is scheduled for a Summer 2003 release.) Moore has a huge amount of fun with Victorian propriety and hypocrisy. One worries lest Gertrude Himmelfarb, who is getting up there and likely prone to shocks, should come across it. The chief irony of the first series is less that the divorcee, Miss Murray, regarded as a slut and a scandal by her own teammates, is clearly the most stable and effective member of the group than that Murray herself earnestly cleaves to the very code that condemns her.
How much fun is this? This much: Unqualified Offerings has been an off-and-on comics fan since it was just a boy weblog. Mrs. Offering was not. Came the day that UO happened into a comics store, breaking a years’-long dry spell, and picked up the first issue of League on a friend’s recommendation.
In stereotypical fashion, UO was driving that day and Mrs. Offering was in the passenger seat. So on the trip home, the history buff and anglophile used just the tips of her fingers to tug the first issue of League out of the bag, and commenced turning pages, a faint sneer playing about her lips.
The sneer dissolved – “This isn’t bad.” – then transmogrified into rapt interest. She finished it in the car and gobbled up all subsequent issues.
The last image in the first miniseries was Wells’s Martian warships descending to earth. Almost the entire first issue of the new volume takes place on Mars itself. That means John Carter makes an appearance, as does a mysterious man on a flying carpet named “Gullivar.” This turns out not to be Swift’s “Gulliver,” but Lieutenant Gulliver Jones. No, Unqualified Offerings never heard of him either. Good thing we have Google now, huh? Jones was the creation of Edwin L. Arnold, and thought by Richard A. Lupoff and others to be Burroughs’ inspiration for John Carter. (David Bruce Bozarth’s skeptical account of the influence theory is available on the ERB mailing list site.)
Alan Moore knows way more about the history of British fantasy adventure than you do. And his style is to make no concessions for it. (If, like Unqualified Offerings, you’re playing catchup, you can find the entire text of Gulliver of Mars at The Jolly Roger.) Much of the dialogue in Vol. II, Issue 1 is in Martian – word-balloons full of non-roman characters. You only get english when Gulliver and Carter confer directly. The art carries the narrative burden, which was occasionally hard on the aging eyes of this website, if no one else. O’Neill is an interesting cartoonist, but he is a…post-perspectival one, and goes in for a fair amount of detail in some of the Martian scenes.
Which is to say, it can be hard to figure out what the hell is going on sometimes. But there’s a grandeur to it, as Gulliver and Carter lead their own Martian allies against “the mollusks” we know from Wells, who turn out not to be native Martians at all, but invaders of Mars too, and who also turn out to be using Mars as a staging ground for an attack on Earth. Our Heroes (and Heroine) appear, silently determined, only in the last three pages. One assumes that Moore will contrive to have Carter and Gulliver join them at some point.
You should almost certainly join them too.
