theAdhocracy | The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Volume One

Spoilers Ahead: My reviews are not spoiler-free. You have been warned.

I am one of those incredibly rare people who actually enjoyed the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen film, so as soon as I realised that general consensus states that the original graphic novels are far superior, they became a firm fixture on my reading list. At long last, thanks to some frankly ridiculous discounts at Forbidden Planet, I've managed to pick up the first two volumes. At even longer last, our weekend away in Cornwall presented a prime opportunity to finally start reading them.

My simple review is this: if volume two is even half as good as volume one, the series will be fantastic. Somehow, it's actually considered even better, so I'm pretty excited to find out how. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is everything a good graphic novel should be. The plot is intriguing, exciting and clever; the characters are interesting and fleshed out. Artistically, the drawing style isn't one I particularly gravitate towards but it matches the subject matter very nicely, plus every frame has such a huge amount of detail that the world basically builds itself.

And what a world it is. If there is one thing the League series illustrates better than anything else, it is that modern copyright laws hinder creativity. I knew the vague idea had been to take a group of Victorian (and earlier) 'superheroes' from old pulp fiction and penny dreadfuls, and set them in a world alongside one another, creating a grotesque equivalent to the Justice League or Avengers. It's a concept I absolutely love and the main reason I enjoyed the film so much, but the novels run with that theme far beyond anything I had hoped for. The choice of characters is brilliant and runs far beyond the titular League themselves. The inclusion of Mycroft Holmes and Moriarty was incredibly welcome and a brilliant 'twist', but even more so are the little details littering the pages. Literary references abound, with cameos from the likes of the Artful Dodger not just serving to make the reader grin but also to progress the story in clever ways.

The result is a brilliant, ingenious mashup of ideas, characters and tropes that play off one another wonderfully. Combined with excellent imagery, colouring and plot and I can fully understand why The League of Extraordinary Gentleman is seen as a classic of the form. It's so good I'm struggling to think of anything else worth writing about; it's just great and I cannot wait for round two!

Rewatch

Re-reading my prior review, I feel like I come away from revisiting this franchise with very similar takes: the story is great, the art a little body-horror but fits well, and oh my word, isn't this just the very perfect example of why modern copyright is a net-negative on creativity. All of the subtle cameos and cross-overs are just brilliant.

What I seem not to have mentioned much before, though, is how fun the trade paperback's included "extras" are. Yes, the blurbs and one-shot adverts, gags, and miscellanea are all fun ‒ although I do find the "end of chapter recaps" a little wearing, serving mainly to pull me out of the story ‒ but the penny-horror story, Alan and the Sundered Veil, is, in many ways, an even better plot than the main arc. The inclusion of both modern and old Carters, plus the Time Travel, Morlocks, and a minor dash of Lovecraftian horror, all blend together wonderfully well, and fit neatly into the wider universe. It not only serves to expand on the possibilities of future plots, whilst setting them up quite clearly, but also perfectly ties together Quartermain's own story, deftly filling in the gap between his well-known adventures and where Ms. Murray finds him at the start of the book.

My only disappointment is that, whilst the overly-floral prose is really good fun, I would have loved to see the tale in a more visual format. Still, given that we're dealing with unknowable horrors and n-dimensional journeys, I can see why they didn't try 😂