Product Description

Comics scriptwriting supremo Alan Moore's incredible, reinvention of classic heroes and villains - now available in an eagerly-anticipated paperback. What if some of the best loved literary characters in history were to band together to fight crime? What if Captain Nemo, Allan Quatermain, Dr Henry Jekyll (together with his brutish alter ego Edward Hyde) and The Invisible Man were brought together by a Miss Mina Harker (who once had a dalliance with a certain Count from Transylvania), to fight the menace of Fu Manchu? Enter the extraordinary world of Alan Moore with this fantastic collection to find out!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1905 in Books
• Published on: 2002-11-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Proving that mainstream comics could be infused with past literary/cultural ideals and still be best sellers, the America's Best Comics imprint took the dilapidated superhero genre and created three vastly entertaining hybrids with Tom Strong, Promethea and Top Ten. Now, a stunning coup de grace is delivered with this masterful pairing of Victorian adventure fiction's greatest characters and the old war-horse of the super-group. With the stunning The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, it would be no exaggeration to say that Alan Moore has produced a near-perfect piece of adventure fiction that is clever, literate, rich with excitement and hard to put down.

It's 1898 and at the behest of M, the mysterious head of the secret Service, Campion Bond is dispatched to procure the services of Miss Mina Murray (nee Harker), adventurer Allan Quartermain, "Science-Pirate" Captain Nemo, Henry Jekyll (and his monstrous alter ego) and Hawley Griffin (aka The Invisible Man). Together, they must combat an insidious threat that will decide supremacy of the London skies, but their success may unleash a far greater threat. With no shortage of action, Moore and O' Neill sustain a high level of suspense, intrigue, mystery and terrific wit that all contribute to an indispensable read. O'Neill's art, so memorable in Marshal Law, produces a London filled with vivid, magnificent architecture and a malevolent atmosphere ripe with thrills and danger. An unmitigated triumph, the sequel cannot come soon enough, with such a glorious past showing what the future can hold for comics. Magnificent--pure and simple. --Danny Graydon

About the Author
Alan Moore is one of the most respected and admired writers in comics today. His credits include The Ballad of Halo Jones, Watchmen, V For Vendetta and Swamp Thing. He is currently writing a League sequel, as well as Tom Strong and Promethea. Kevin O'Neill's work includes A.B.C. Warriors, Batman, Metalzoic and, more recently, Marshal Law, also available from Titan Books.

Customer Reviews

Yes, It is That Good!
If you're a fan of Victorian genre literature and have any interest in comics, this will very probably appeal to you. I'm a very casual comics reader, never buying any but borrowing anything that's at the library except for manga or pure superhero fare. As for 19th-century genre lit, when I was a child, I read some Stoker, H.G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, and the like. All that said, this is a highly entertaining work, probably the most purely enjoyable trade comic volume I've encountered.

The concept is pretty outstanding: Moore's taken public-domain "heroes" of the 19th-century and remixed them into a classic superhero team in the spirit of Justice League, X-Men, etc. They are tossed into a steampunk version of Victorian London to do battle with a nefarious villain from the same era of genre-lit. In this volume, the head of the British Secret Service orders his minion (Campion Bond), to assemble a team for a secret mission. He starts with Ms. Murray (the widowed wife of Mr. Harker from Dracula), who drags the gaunt former adventurer Allan Quartermain (the intrepid explorer of H. Rider Haggard's stories) from the depths of a Cairo opium den. They are spirited to safety by H.G. Wells' incomparable stern Sikh pirate, Captain Nemo, in his magnificent submarine technological wonder The Nautilus. Next stop, the backstreets of Paris, where a beast is terrorizing the prostitutes of the Rue Morgue. This ends up being the terrifying Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, whom they barely manage to subdue. The final stop is to the "Rosa Cootes' Correctional Academy for Wayward Gentlewomen", where a mysterious spirit has been "possessing" some of the boarders. This bizarre combination of boarding school and S&M academy is where we meet Hawley Griffin, aka The Invisible Man.

These initial adventures do a very good job of both establishing the marvelous setting and the individual nature of the five heroes. Each is a formerly respected, now somewhat fallen member of society. When a storyteller assembles such a team of flawed misfits, the result is usually either slapstick comedy or some form of redemption. In this case redemption is the order of the day, as the team is assigned to recover a stolen container of "cavorite", a mysterious compound which makes flight possible. It seems an evil Chinese East End triad leader named Fu Manchu has stolen it in order to build a superweapon. The remaining 2/3 of the book details their attempt to infiltrate his Bond-villainesque secret base and recover the material. A major plot twist halfway through reveals yet another literary criminal mastermind at work, one that many readers will have guessed at early on. Things build to a climactic and chaotic aerial battle above London's East End, with crazy fighting kites, firebombs, and plenty of wild action.

There's a lot to like in the book, notably an attention to detail that is head and shoulders above most graphic adventures. When Arabic and Chinese speaking characters are encountered, their dialogue is rendered in the actual script. The story and visuals are packed with 19th-century literary inside jokes that will reward repeated reading and the curious who seek out their meaning. (Alternatively, you can pick up Jess Nevins outstanding Unofficial Companion to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which decodes the inside jokes and tells you where everything came from.) This is not to imply that the book is stuffy or dull, because the writing is actually quite witty and arch -- providing you like puns, double-entendres, and other such wordplay. The artwork perfectly supports the story, as O'Neil's techno-gaslight London vibrates with energy and activity. The paneling is traditional and straightforward, as befits a retro-romp such as this, and full-page pieces teem with background activity and wit. There's a lot to look at in these pages, such as pickpockets and thieves operating in the background, or more amorous silhouettes... And when things get violent, they get very violent, as we are shown limbs getting ripped asunder, heads getting blown off, and soforth.

This is an outstanding work, although definitely not for younger children. Without being overly sensitive, one has to also keep in mind that in keeping with the setting and origin of the characters, one of the villains is a pretty vile stereotype of an evil "Oriental". Perhaps more disturbingly, the serial rape committed by the Invisible Man is treated as a subject of humor. This latter is slightly counterbalanced by having the team led by Ms. Murray, a setup which seems improbable for the setting. However, minor caveats aside, this is a splendid work of escapist adventure that is much better than the movie made from it. There is a second volume, which finds the team battling a Martian invasion.

I say, sah! Top drawer piece of writing, boss-wallah!
Everyone loves the premise, and most people have heard it: take various characters from various different victorian literary sources, and assemble them into a single superhero-style team. If you saw the film and were disappointed by how poorly they lived up to that premise, i can only beg you to give the comic a chance, because it bears very little relation to the silver-screen incarnation (why buy the rights to a book and then change every detail in the adaptation? i don't know, you'd have to ask the film-makers...).

This is a great book. It's brilliant fun, but it's also sometimes creepy (there are at least two team members who'd sooner gut the other characters than work with them) and occasionally thrilling. If you know anyhting about victorian literature you'll love playing spot-the-reference; i don't, but i've spent hours following up clues and leads on the internet, and i can assure you that even experts on the source material can find new, sneaky references after their fourth, fifth and dozenth read!

You don't have to follow them up though, it functions as a straight-up adventure story too. Like i say, I'd read Dracula, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, King Solomon's Mines and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyl and Mr Hyde before i picked up League, and had naively thought myself reasonably knowledgable about the source material, but i've since had my pride bruised and my mouth well and truly shut. Luckily, you can go into the story as ignorant as you like and just enjoy it as a ripping good yarn.

It's got many, many levels, this one, and it functions perfectly on all of them. Great stuff!

The first adventure of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
I knew they would never be a sequel to Alan Moore's classic comic series "The Watchmen" (and I wish Frank Miller had let well enough alone with "The Dark Knight Returns"), but certainly "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" is a kindred spirit in key regards. If the Watchmen were supposed to be superheroes that we recognized, even though we had never seen them before, then the League offers up recognizable fictional characters that we have never seen together before. Going back a century for inspiration, Moore creates a Pax Britannia circa 1898 where the "superheroes" are fictional characters who had been created by that particular point in time, to wit: Mina Murray (Harker) from Bram Stoker's "Dracula," Captain Nemo from Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea," Alan Quartermain from H. Rider Haggard's "King Solomon's Mines," and the titular characters of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" and H. G. Wells' "The Invisible Man." There is also reason to believe that "M," the shadowy figure who orders the League about, might in fact be Mycroft Holmes (and if you do not know what literary series he is from then just totally forget about enjoying this series).

If that, in and of itself, is not enough of a hook to get your interested in checking out this collection of the first comic book adventure of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen let me remind you that Alan Moore is doing the writing. The artwork by Kevin O'Neill is certainly evocative of the turn of the last century, or, more to the point, does not look like a contemporary superhero comic book. Moore and O'Neill also maintain a wonderful conceit throughout the series of presenting the comics as being published at the time of the story, filled with wonderful "ads" that are often as interesting as the story (one of which actually required the initial print run of one of the issues to be destroyed, a story you will have to find related elsewhere, patient reader).

Moore's intention was to deal with a superhero group before all the clichés were established (again, similar to how "The Watchmen" was in a different reality unencumbered by the DC and Marvel universes). Seeing an obvious parallel between the Hulk and Jekyll/Hyde, Moore let his imagination roam in his alternate, technically more advanced version of Victorian London. The more you know about literary history from this period (e.g., Emile Zola's Nana is killed in the Rue Morgue by Hyde), the more you will enjoy all this work. But this first adventure for the League still works if late 19th-century fiction is not your forte. British Intelligence has discovered that cavorite, a material that makes flying machines possible, has been stolen by a mysterious Chinese figure (Oh, come on, take a wild guess who it has to be). Campion Bond of MI5 has been ordered to assemble a team of adventurers to retrieve the cavorite, which is crucial to the race to get to the Moon.

"The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" is really much more fun than we usually associate with Moore's work. Certainly his tongue has never been further in his cheeks than with this series. The first three issues of Volume 2 have seen the light of day so far this year and if you read through this original endeavor you can quickly get up to speed with the current adventure. Just remember it is 1898 and Britannia waives the rules...