Superhero Media: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - Volume 1

Why did I decide to talk about this series? Seriously, I could make each of these properly written and referenced literature essays with Harvard footnotes if I really wanted to. The depth to these comics is staggering, with meta-criticism, commentary on literary academia and Moore's nascent radical politics. For me, with my literary background, the "superheroic" elements of the story are almost secondary to parsing the meaning of a particular sequence. If you've heard anything about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, it probably has to do with the violence and sexuality portrayed in the books, which can be extreme and often brutal. The number of rape sequences and other violence perpetrated against women in the first volume is pretty off-putting, but knowing Moore's politics and leanings, this is clearly intended as commentary on what is (and isn't) considered "classic" literature; which has always been very patriarchal, at least up until the late 20th Century, when things began to swing away from this trend. Moore clearly also has a fondness for pulp literature and how it transitions to classical status, like The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde or Sherlock Holmes. 

The characters for this first outing are Mina Murray (Dracula), Allan Quatermain (King Solomon's Mines), Jekyll/Hyde, Captain Nemo (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) and Hawley Griffin (The Invisible Man), brought together by Campion Bond to battle the machinations of Fu Manchu. Of course, there is a twist and the League end up caught between Fu Manchu and Professor Moriarty's airborne forces. There's plenty of scenario fodder in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, for both supers games and VSF/Gothic Horror/Pulp, using the League themselves or other characters, though the majority of the characters are pretty low-powered, even including the fabulous technology on offer. The real gem in the trade paperback collection, however, is the prose story "Allan and the Sundered Veil", in which Quatermain, high on a magical drug, drifts into the space between worlds and joins with John Carter, Raymond Carter and The Time Traveller (The Time Machine), to battle Morlocks and hold off the influence of the Great Old Ones. There's not much action to speak of, but I can't help but get ideas for a VSF "Fantastic Four" and all the great games I could play with that team. I already have Allan and John Carter, once funds allow, I'll be grabbing a Time Machine with pilot and Raymond Carter for some games. 

Although the team of Victorian literary "heroes" has become somewhat trite and overdone, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen remains a masterwork from two of the medium's most masterful masters. For those more familiar with the pop-culture ephemera of the characters, the visceral nature of the comic may come as a shock and deter further readership, which is a shame, as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is well worth the time to read, and further time learning about the literature that inspired it. As much as I honestly don't mind the LXG film, it is a bit of a shame that it is the limit of most people's exposure to the franchise, as it really does have a lot to offer, even if it has inspired dozens of sub-par imitations over the years. Of course, that's not to say that your own adventures with the League need to be metatextual explorations of the changing role of classic literature in the postmodern world, fighting Tong and Martians is a perfectly valuable use of your time if that's what you want to do. Either way, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a solid read, just packed with inspiration for gaming.