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Volume 1 follows the tale of the league's formation, and a battle against the forces of the mysterious "Chinese Doctor" (actually Fu Manchu) and the machinations of Moriarty. In the second volume, the Martian invasion from ''TheWarOfTheWorlds'' is explored, featuring appearances by Dr. Moreau and John Carter of Mars. The "Black Dossier," an elaborate side-story, features the titular Dossier as a FramingDevice for [[ScrapbookStory the history of all the different iterations of the League, from the one in Shakespeare's time through to World War II]], and brings the references to a [[ReferenceOverdosed truly ridiculous level]]. The Black Dossier signalled a change in style for the comics; where the initial idea was "Justice League of Victorian England", the ambition evolved into creating a shared universe for ''all'' fictional places and characters. ''All of them''.
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Volume 1 follows the tale of the league's formation, and a battle against the forces of the mysterious "Chinese Doctor" (actually Fu Manchu) and the machinations of Moriarty. In the second volume, the Martian invasion from ''TheWarOfTheWorlds'' ''Literature/TheWarOfTheWorlds'' is explored, featuring appearances by Dr. Moreau and John Carter of Mars. The "Black Dossier," an elaborate side-story, features the titular Dossier as a FramingDevice for [[ScrapbookStory the history of all the different iterations of the League, from the one in Shakespeare's time through to World War II]], and brings the references to a [[ReferenceOverdosed truly ridiculous level]]. The Black Dossier signalled a change in style for the comics; where the initial idea was "Justice League of Victorian England", the ambition evolved into creating a shared universe for ''all'' fictional places and characters. ''All of them''.
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** His treatment of [[spoiler: Harry Potter's assorted characters is at least vaguely justified by the terms of the story and the world Moore and O'Neill have established up until that point. Moore's take on Potter exists in a world where 1984 actually happened, after all.]]
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* SpiritualSuccessor: Before ''The Black Dossier'' and ''Century'' moved the LOEG world into the 20th century, there was ''Albion'' by Moore, his daughter Leah and her husband John Reppon, which was basically ''League'' for 1970s UK comics.
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* ThematicSequel: Before ''The Black Dossier'' and ''Century'' moved the LOEG world into the 20th century, there was ''Albion'' by Moore, his daughter Leah and her husband John Reppon, which was basically ''League'' for 1970s UK comics.
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* ThematicSequel: Before ''The Black Dossier'' and ''Century'' moved the LOEG world into the 20th century, there was ''Albion'' by Moore, his daughter Leah and her husband John Reppon, which was basically ''League'' for 1970s UK comics.
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In March 2013 a SpinOff was published, still by Moore and O'Neil. ''Nemo: Heart of Ice'' is set in 1925, and features Janni in a race against a team of former {{Teen Genius}}es from the "Edisonades" to a South Pole based on ''Literature/TheNarrativeOfArthurGordonPymOfNantucket'' and ''Literature/AtTheMountainsOfMadness''.
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* AnyoneCanDie: [[Spoiler: By the end of Volume 3: Century, Mina is the only original member of the league who's still alive]]
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* AnyoneCanDie: [[Spoiler: [[spoiler: By the end of Volume 3: Century, Mina is the only original member of the league who's still alive]]
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* AnyoneCanDie: [[Spoiler: By the end of Volume 3: Century, Mina is the only original member of the league who's still alive]]
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** Also, James Bond's grandpa was a perverted little coward. Bond himself appears in The Black Dossier, and he seems to have retained his ancestor's qualities as, two pages into his appearance, he [[spoiler:tries to rape Mina. She beats him up]], and when Allan shows up, he knocks Bond's pansy ass to the ground, kicks him in the 'nads and mocks him. Further, the Bond in this version is specifically stated to be one who defeated Dr. No - the version played by Sean Connery, who also portrayed Quatermain's character in the movie. And then Moore proceeds to take this UpToEleven in the climax, in which it is revealed that [[spoiler:there never even ''was'' a Dr. No in the first place, Bond had betrayed England to the U.S, and [[MoralEventHorizon murdered one of MI5's own agents]]]].
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** Also, James Bond's grandpa was a perverted little coward. Bond himself appears in The Black Dossier, and he seems to have retained his ancestor's qualities as, two pages into his appearance, he [[spoiler:tries to rape Mina. She beats him up]], and when Allan shows up, he knocks Bond's pansy ass to the ground, kicks him in the 'nads and mocks him. Further, the Bond in this version is specifically stated to be one who defeated Dr. No - the version played by Sean Connery, who also portrayed Quatermain's character in the movie. And then Moore proceeds to take this UpToEleven in the climax, in which it is revealed that [[spoiler:there never even ''was'' a Dr. No in the first place, Bond had betrayed England to the U.S, and [[MoralEventHorizon murdered one of MI5's own agents]]]]. By ''Century: 2009'', while "James Bond" has become a LegacyCharacter handed down to different agents in succession (all the Bond actors from Connery to Craig appear), the original Bond is bedridden and ravaged by syphilis and other diseases.
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* LargeAndInCharge: Mycroft Holmes as [[JamesBond M]]. (This follows common [[WMG/SherlockHolmes theories]] about the character and his "Diogenes Club".)
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* OnlyYouCanRepopulateMyRace: a main plot in the "Minions of the Moon" story; the Lunar Amazons need a man since all the men in their colony were killed off by some disease, threatening their race with extinction.
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** His depiction of James Bond (at least, the literary version) isn't exactly flattering either, although it is more faithful to Fleming's original depiction. He does have Allan Quatermain basically point out that he's a very poor showing for the 'British adventure hero' in such a way that clearly suggests that Moore isn't exactly a fan.
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* GettingCrapPastTheRadar: In-universe; ''Black Dossier'' features several communications between Mina and Allan and the British authorities during their service. In one of them, Mina writes that the 'Fountain of Youth' the characters were seeking didn't work, Allan has died and that she is currently 'racked with grief', explaining the jerky handwriting on the postcard. Since she ''also'' mentions that she has [[BlatantLies quite by coincidence]] happened to meet a 'long-lost son of Allan's' which is 'some consolation', and since the volume has made it explicitly clear that Allan and Mina are now forever young and virile, the clear implication behind the rather delicate language is that Mina is actually wracked by Allan and her celebrating their newfound youthfulness together rather ... vigorously.
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* LegionOfDoom: One composed of [[DrMabusetheGambler Dr.Mabuse]], [[Film/TheCabinetOfDrCaligari Dr.Caligari, Cesare]], [[Film/{{Metropolis}} Rotwang, and Fake Maria]] is shown in the Black Dossier.
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* LegionOfDoom: One composed of [[DrMabusetheGambler [[Film/DrMabuseTheGambler Dr.Mabuse]], [[Film/TheCabinetOfDrCaligari Dr.Caligari, Cesare]], [[Film/{{Metropolis}} Rotwang, and Fake Maria]] is shown in the Black Dossier.
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* Mina Murray: Formerly Mina Harker, she re-takes her maiden name following the events of Bram Stoker's ''Literature/{{Dracula}}''; the reader has only her unsubstantiated word as to why she and her husband divorced. Her red scarf conceals a brutal set of slashing scars very unlike a traditional vampire's bite, because of Dracula's actually bat-like teeth. She was the first member recruited, and unequivocally the leader. Her position was decided by the team's first "M" [[spoiler: Professor Moriarity]] who believed her gender would prevent the men of the group from feeling a "territorial" desire for her position. Instead they all have deep seated misogynistic resentment.
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* Mina Murray: Formerly Mina Harker, she re-takes her maiden name following the events of Bram Stoker's ''Literature/{{Dracula}}''; the reader has only her unsubstantiated word as to why she and her husband divorced. Her red scarf conceals a brutal set of slashing scars very unlike a traditional vampire's bite, because of Dracula's actually bat-like teeth. She was the first member recruited, and unequivocally the leader. Her position was decided by the team's first "M" [[spoiler: Professor Moriarity]] Moriarty]] who believed her gender would prevent the men of the group from feeling a "territorial" desire for her position. Instead they all have deep seated misogynistic resentment.
* BizarreAlienSenses: Edward Hyde can see people's body heat [[spoiler: including Griffin's]].
* BloodKnight: Orlando, with a bit of CrouchingMoronHiddenBadass for good measure.
* BloodKnight: Orlando, with a bit of CrouchingMoronHiddenBadass for good measure.
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* BloodKnight: Orlando, with a bit of CrouchingMoronHiddenBadass for good measure.
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* Mina Murray: Formerly Mina Harker, she re-takes her maiden name following the events of Bram Stoker's ''Literature/{{Dracula}}''; the reader has only her unsubstantiated word as to why she and her husband divorced. Her red scarf conceals a brutal set of slashing scars very unlike a traditional vampire's bite, because of Dracula's actually bat-like teeth. She was the first member recruited, and unequivocally the leader. Her position was decided by the team's first "M" [[spoiler: Professor Moriarity]] who believed her gender would prevent the men of the group from feeling a "territorial" desire for her position. Instead they all have deep seated misogynistic resentment.
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* Mina Murray: Formerly Mina Harker, she re-takes her maiden name following the events of Bram Stoker's ''Literature/{{Dracula}}''; the reader has only her unsubstantiated word as to why she and her husband divorced. Her red scarf conceals a brutal set of slashing scars very unlike a traditional vampire's bite, because of Dracula's actually bat-like teeth. She was the first member recruited, and unequivocally the leader. Her position was decided by the team's first "M" [[spoiler: Professor Moriarity]] who believed her gender would prevent the men of the group from feeling a "territorial" desire for her position. Instead they all have deep seated misogynistic resentment.
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* [[SheIsAllGrownUp She/He/It/They Are All Grown Up]]: The Artful Dodger in V2, Billy Bunter in Black Dossier, Baz Thomas in Century. Rather more disturbingly, there's the revelation that Robert Cherry and Harry Wharton of [[BillyBunter the Famous Five]] grew up to be [[spoiler: [[Film/TheThirdMan Harry Lime]] and [[NineteenEightyFour Big Brother]], respectively]].
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* [[SheIsAllGrownUp She/He/It/They Are All Grown Up]]: The Artful Dodger in V2, Billy Bunter in Black Dossier, Baz Thomas in Century. Rather more disturbingly, there's the revelation that Robert Cherry and Harry Wharton of [[BillyBunter the Famous Five]] grew up to be [[spoiler: [[Film/TheThirdMan Harry Lime]] and [[NineteenEightyFour [[Literature/NineteenEightyFour Big Brother]], respectively]].
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* PetTheDog: Hyde, otherwise portrayed as a [[AffablyEvil cheerfully]] CompleteMonster, receives one in Volume Two when he has a heart-to-heart with Mina. As with most things in the series, comes complete with a literary allusion.
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* PetTheDog: Hyde, otherwise portrayed as a [[AffablyEvil cheerfully]] CompleteMonster, cheerful]] villain, receives one in Volume Two when he has a heart-to-heart with Mina. As with most things in the series, comes complete with a literary allusion.
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--> '''Mina''' ''(softly):'' Yes.
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--> '''Mina''' ''(softly):'' [[{{Dracula}} Yes.]]
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--> '''Mina''' ''softly:'' Yes.
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--> '''Mina''' ''softly:'' ''(softly):'' Yes.
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--> '''Mina''' ''softly:'' [[Literature/Dracula Yes.]]
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--> '''Mina''' ''softly:'' [[Literature/Dracula Yes.]]
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--> '''Mina''' ''softly:'' {{Literature/Dracula Yes.}}
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--> '''Mina''' ''softly:'' {{Literature/Dracula [[Literature/Dracula Yes.}}]]
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* PetTheDog: Hyde, otherwise portrayed as a cheerfully CompleteMonster, receives one in Volume Two when he has a heart-to-heart with Mina. As with most things in the series, comes complete with a literary allusion.
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* PetTheDog: Hyde, otherwise portrayed as a cheerfully [[AffablyEvil cheerfully]] CompleteMonster, receives one in Volume Two when he has a heart-to-heart with Mina. As with most things in the series, comes complete with a literary allusion.
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--> '''Mina''' ''softly:'' {{Dracula Yes.}}
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--> '''Mina''' ''softly:'' {{Dracula {{Literature/Dracula Yes.}}
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* PetTheDog: Hyde, otherwise portrayed as a cheerfully CompleteMonster, receives one in Volume Two when he has a heart-to-heart with Mina. As with most things in the series, comes complete with a literary allusion.
--> '''Hyde:''' ...of all the people I've met, you are the only one that does not ''hate'' me. You've met ''worse than me,'' haven't you?
--> '''Mina''' ''softly:'' {{Dracula Yes.}}
--> '''Hyde:''' ...of all the people I've met, you are the only one that does not ''hate'' me. You've met ''worse than me,'' haven't you?
--> '''Mina''' ''softly:'' {{Dracula Yes.}}
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* NothingButSkulls: in the story "Minions of the Moon", Mina and the Galley-Wag find a field full of human skulls, belonging to the male Lunites that have died from a plague.
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Zero Context Example of renamed trope
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* TheGump: Orlando and as time goes on Mina and Allan as well.
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* TheLoad: Randolph Carter to his teammates in the story ''Allan and the Sundered Veil'', much to his great-uncle John's dismay.
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Not the trope.
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* FanDisservice: Plenty in volume 2. [[spoiler:Griffin brutally attacks and humiliates Mina]], which is followed by [[spoiler:Hyde raping Griffin before killing him]], and on the side there's [[spoiler:Mina's sex scene. With Allan]]. Then ItGotWorse. [[spoiler:Allan likes Mina's scars. ''A lot'']].
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* FanDisservice: Plenty in volume 2. [[spoiler:Griffin brutally attacks and humiliates Mina]], which is followed by [[spoiler:Hyde raping Griffin before killing him]], and on the side there's [[spoiler:Mina's sex scene. With Allan]]. Then ItGotWorse.it got worse. [[spoiler:Allan likes Mina's scars. ''A lot'']].
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** [[spoiler:Except Dr. No. He never existed.]]
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** [[GetCarter "Jackie Boy"]] for Vic Dakin in Century:1969
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** [[GetCarter [[Film/GetCarter "Jackie Boy"]] for Vic Dakin in Century:1969
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[[quoteright:300:http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/leagueextraordinarygent.jpg]]
Not to be confused with ''Series/TheLeagueOfGentlemen'', which is something entirely different. (Although they might [[LoadsAndLoadsOfCharacters be in here]] ''[[LawyerFriendlyCameo somewhere]]''...)
Writer AlanMoore and artist Kevin O'Neill's vision of a SuperHero team, like the Comicbook/{{X-Men}} or the JusticeLeagueOfAmerica, set in the world of Victorian English penny-dreadful adventure stories. Moore combined {{public domain character}}s from the period, hundreds in total, into a coherent whole. The first volume of the series was published from March, 1999 to September, 2000.
The League's members:
* Allan Quatermain: The GreatWhiteHunter from ''Literature/KingSolomonsMines'', now an old, ailing opium addict. He doesn't function too well. [[spoiler: That is, until he gets rejuvenated. He's much more effective sixty years later.]]
* Mina Murray: Formerly Mina Harker, she re-takes her maiden name following the events of Bram Stoker's ''Literature/{{Dracula}}''; the reader has only her unsubstantiated word as to why she and her husband divorced. Her red scarf conceals a brutal set of slashing scars very unlike a traditional vampire's bite, because of Dracula's actually bat-like teeth. She was the first member recruited, and unequivocally the leader. Her position was decided by the team's first "M" [[spoiler: Professor Moriarity]] who believed her gender would prevent the men of the group from feeling a "territorial" desire for her position. Instead they all have deep seated misogynistic resentment.
* Dr. Jekyll: Or, more accurately, Mr. Hyde; as some 20 years of time have passed, he grew from his diminutive size as depicted in [[Literature/TheStrangeCaseOfDrJekyllAndMrHyde Robert Louis Stevenson's book]] into a powerful giant, and the SuperSerum was no longer needed to bring him out. He's also a psychopath of the grandest type, and prone to every excess. Both Jekyll and especially Hyde have a soft spot for Mina, who is apparently the only person Hyde never wanted to hurt (this is because she does not hate him for what he is) [[hottip:*.: Hyde is the ''evil'' side of Jekyll without any of his good qualities, and every person he meets doesn't know why, but immediately recognizes him as evil. He will never be loved or even accepted--but she has met [[{{Dracula}} worse]].
* Hawley Griffin: The title character of ''Literature/TheInvisibleMan'' by HGWells, a scheming transparent criminal megalomaniac first introduced in ''League'' raping teenage girls in a dormitory. (His on-page victim was {{Pollyanna}}, who decided not to let being brutalized get her down.)
* Captain Nemo: Returning to a depiction introduced in Creator/JulesVerne's sequel to ''[[TwentyThousandLeaguesUnderTheSea 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea]]'', Nemo is a disenfranchised Indian prince, a Sikh, whose mortal enemy is the British Crown. His Nautilus is a newly-constructed replacement that invokes the appearance and functionality of the giant squid atop a giant whale; Technical drawings suggest the sections can separate. His first mate is Ishmael, late of ''Moby-Dick''. One notable crewman is [[http://lxg.wikia.com/wiki/Broad_Arrow_Jack Broad Arrow Jack]], the star of an eponymous 1866 "penny dreadful" written by E. Harcourt Burrage.
Later members of the team include Orlando, an immortal man/woman whose gender periodically changes (from [[OrlandoABiography the very odd novel by Virginia Woolf]]), famous gentleman thief {{Raffles}} and occult investigator [[Literature/CarnackiTheGhostFinder Thomas Carnacki]].
Other notable characters include Professor Moriarty and Mycroft Holmes from the [[SherlockHolmes Holmesian canon]]. (The great detective himself only appears in a {{Flashback}}, as he would overshadow the other figures; at the time of the story, he's off faking his death around Europe.) A proposed ancestor to a certain [[JamesBond superspy]] is introduced in the person of Campion Bond: a priggish, rotund, cowardly, sanctimonious schemer with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. His family's got quite the reputation; quite the ''bad'' one.
The LiteraryAgentHypothesis is used as a plot point; the authors of the original stories are depicted as biographers, and the "real" events surrounding the league's members are often far more disturbing than the tales would have us believe. For instance, all the members except Murray are believed dead, having faked their own demises years before.
Volume 1 follows the tale of the league's formation, and a battle against the forces of the mysterious "Chinese Doctor" (actually Fu Manchu) and the machinations of Moriarty. In the second volume, the Martian invasion from ''TheWarOfTheWorlds'' is explored, featuring appearances by Dr. Moreau and John Carter of Mars. The "Black Dossier," an elaborate side-story, features the titular Dossier as a FramingDevice for [[ScrapbookStory the history of all the different iterations of the League, from the one in Shakespeare's time through to World War II]], and brings the references to a [[ReferenceOverdosed truly ridiculous level]]. The Black Dossier signalled a change in style for the comics; where the initial idea was "Justice League of Victorian England", the ambition evolved into creating a shared universe for ''all'' fictional places and characters. ''All of them''.
The first part of the third volume, "Century" was published in 2009, setting up an EndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt arc spanning the 20th and early 21st century. In 1910, the League investigates a doomsday cult led by magician Oliver Haddo, while simultaneously dealing with a madman killing prostitutes on the waterfront. New members of the League include psychic detective [[Literature/CarnackiTheGhostFinder Thomas Carnacki]], who has been having visions of what's to come, [[GentlemanThief high-class cracksman]] [[{{Raffles}} A.J. Raffles]], and League veteran [[OrlandoABiography Orlando]], as headstrong, omnisexual, and perpetually bored as ever. As this is going on, the dying Captain Nemo's daughter Janni has come to London to escape her father's plan to make her his successor, taking up work at a tavern on the waterfront. [[TheMusical And there are musical numbers. Lots of them.]]
The second volume of Century, published July 2011, finds the league back in swinging London in 1969. The team is down to just Orlando, Mina and Allan, but they get a ride from the octogenarian Janni on the Nautilus. They must seek out and stop the cult founded by the late Oliver Haddo and prevent him from using popular musicians for dark purposes.
The third and last volume of Century came in June 2012 and sees the League try to pick itself up in a rather dystopian year 2009. The Moonchild, barely sane after being carefully groomed by Haddo in the incarnation he assumed at the end of the previous volume, appears at last, and a final confrontation with the Moonchild is made.
The sheer number of sly references to Victoriana that are found in the pages of ''League'''s first two volumes astound many scholars; each page includes subtle and overt {{Continuity Nod}}s to British literary tradition and culture, everything from ComicStrip/RupertBear and other classic TalkingAnimal characters as Moreau's hybrid monsters, to a Cottingley Fairy in a jar of alcohol at the British Museum. On the other hand, they usually take these references in so horrifying a direction that it's sometimes more insulting if you recognize them. The trend continues with more contemporary fiction in the later volumes, often with clever WritingAroundTrademarks, as these works aren't public domain.
----
!!Provides Examples Of:
* AllMythsAreTrue: Or perhaps more accurately, all ''fiction'' is true.
* AllThereInTheManual: Knowledge of the books of the period (all of them) is very helpful to understanding the subtle goings-on, if not the main plot.
** And then there's stuff like the previous leagues, whose activities are chronicled in supplementary stories. You can seriously read a [[Creator/WilliamShakespeare Shakespearean]]-style play about Prospero and Caliban and their ilk forming the first League, complete with Shakespearean jokes like guards named Mr. Shytte and Mr. Pysse.
** There are also [[TheAnnotatedEdition books of annotations by Jess Nevins]] which point out some of the really obscure references, though even Nevins can sometimes get overwhelmed. When cataloguing one of the back-up "world tour" sections from the second volume, he subtitled it [[InWhichATropeIsDescribed "In Which Alan Moore Tries To Kill Me"]]. Said sections have one obscure Victorian reference ''per sentence''.
* AnythingThatMoves:
** Fanny Hill.
** Orlando, too.
** Hyde in his crazier moments.
* AssholeVictim: [[spoiler:Griffin]] to Hyde.
* AuthorAppeal: [[spoiler: The mÃnage à trois between Quatermain, Mina and Orlando.]]
** Alan Moore's fondness for old-time forms of pornography also tends to come through, to the point where later volumes can focus just as much, if not more at times, on the sexual exploits of the characters as much as their adventures. In particular, the first volume features characters and settings from Victorian pornographic journal ''The Pearl'', and ''Black Dossier'' gives us, among others, a ''Jane''-style Tijuana Bible from the world of ''Literature/NineteenEightyFour'' and the various exploits (in more than one way) of the eighteenth century League courtesy of Fanny Hill.
* AuthorAvatar: Quatermain in the first two volumes, The Duke Of Milan in the third.
* AuthorTract: Moore is usually respectful of the fictional characters he appropriates and is fairly faithful to their original representations. In ''Century: 2009'', however, his portrayal of [[spoiler: Harry Potter]] is not only unflattering but also inconsistent with how that character appears in their original source material. Moore makes his opinion of that work of fiction particularly [[{{Anvilicious}} transparent]] when he has [[spoiler: Mary Poppins appear and destroy him, in her role as 'guardian of the world's children and their imaginations']].
* BadassGrandpa: [[EdgarAllanPoe Auguste]] [[Film/MurdersInTheRueMorgue Dupin]] is Mina and Allan's liaison in Paris, and despite being in his late ''90s'' if not early ''100s'', he looks Mr. Hyde straight in the face and blasts his ear off with his pepperbox pistol. Mina is impressed.
* BadassNormal: There are technically a few of these, but Mina Murray stands out - a dainty, slightly-built ''music teacher'' rubbing shoulders with the likes of Captain Nemo and Edward Hyde!
* BadassSanta: In the ''League'' universe, Santa is an elderly shaman who lives alone in a hut at the North Pole, uses astral projection to travel around the world spreading good cheer every Christmas, and commands an army of malicious sprites (his "little helpers") as his {{familiar}}s. He also apparently murdered a few employees of the Coca-Cola company when they tried to buy the rights to his image.
* BechdelTest: In the first volume, set in 1899, Mina is the TokenGirl. By the final scene of ''Century'' set in 2009 just about all surviving characters are women, or both in the case of Orlando.
* BigBadEnsemble: [[spoiler: Moriarty, the Martians, Harry Lime, Oliver Haddo]]
* BiggusDickus: Sinbad, according to Orlando.
* BilingualBonus: Frequently enough that some of what you read will completely go over your head if you don't speak Arabic or Chinese. For example, in Fu Manchu's lair a man is being tortured by having words written onto his body in molten metal. The Chinese script translates as, "A man who does not know pain is like a book whose pages have not been written."
--> '''Peg''': Wij hebben ons vrijwillig aangeboden. Zijn geslacht is kolossaal. [[hottip:note:"We have volunteered. His sex is colossal."]]
--> '''Mina''': She, um, she says they volunteered because of his personality.
* BiTheWay: In Century 1969, Mina "tortures" a woman for information regarding a cult, and Quatermain and Orlando tend to share a bed regardless of Orlando's current gender.
* BodyHorror: Plenty of it to go around, but most notable is probably the true form of the Antichrist, as well as the still living severed head of Oliver Haddo in the third chapter of Century and the remains of the victims from the massacre at [[spoiler:Hogwarts.]]
* BloodKnight: Orlando, with a bit of CrouchingMoronHiddenBadass for good measure.
* BreadEggsMilkSquick: The dinner scene in volume two, in which Hyde reveals some of his origins. And that he'd (Disturbing spoiler, highlight to read:) [[spoiler:brutally beat and sodomized Griffin to near-death a few minutes previous. (The blood on his clothes, hands, and teeth becomes visible as Griffin finally dies in another room. Which happens to be above them, so that the blood is revealed to be dripping through the ceiling as well.)]]
* BreakTheCutie: Nemo's daughter Janni, oh so much. Ironically her gang rape by her employer and the customers of the bar she works in makes her willing to accept the role of Nemo, the very thing she ran away from home to avoid, in order to have her revenge. And she does. By the end of the volume Ishmael reckons she's more of a monster than her father. "Ain't it bleeding wonderful?"
* CelebrityParadox: Averted, see LiteraryAgentHypothesis
* CharacterExaggeration: Bulldog Drummond's racism ([[ValuesDissonance the reason]] the original stories haven't aged well) is turned up to eleven.
* ChekhovsSkill: Hyde's thermal vision. This being [[DangerouslyGenreSavvy Hyde]], he's smart enough not to tell Griffin about it, knowing that it might come in handy sometime.
* {{Chickification}}: Mina is a lot more vulnerable in ''Century 1969'' than we've seen her before. Explained as a result of the strain of being immortal finally starting to catch up with her. To be fair, Alan is a complete mess by the end as well, but that's mostly a consequence of losing her.
* {{Columbine}}: And with [[OhCrap magic]] too.
* ContinuityNod: To a lot of continuity; its BackStory is a distilled mixture of every book written [[strike:in the 1880s and 90s]] ''ever'', from Dickens to erotica. And includes a distant ancestor of the Dude from ''TheBigLebowski''.
* CrapsackWorld: Particularly by Volume II.
* DarkerAndEdgier: Everything. The [[spoiler: Nautilus]] gains a new, darker look and a ''lot'' MoreDakka [[spoiler: [[KilledOffForReal but a lot less]] [[IncrediblyLamePun Dakkar]]]] in volume three.
* DeadpanSnarker: Griffin.
* DeconstructionCrossover: One of the most typical examples. Probably, even the TropeCodifier.
* DeliberateValuesDissonance
* DisproportionateRetribution: Janni is the ''Queen'' of this trope. Do ''not'' mess with her unless you want your city itself attacked, the harbour burnt, looted and pillaged, hundreds of people murdered, on top of which [[LaserGuidedKarma you too will get ass-raped]] along the way.
* DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything: In ''Century: 2009'', the [[spoiler: Hogwarts]] school massacre is framed and discussed as if it were Columbine-style school massacre [[FromBadToWorse where the student doing the massacring has magic powers.]]
* TheDragon: "Jimmy" for M in ''The Black Dossier''.
** [[GetCarter "Jackie Boy"]] for Vic Dakin in Century:1969
* EldritchAbomination: The Martians, Lovecraft's own make an appearance. [[spoiler: In a Jeeves and Wooster story.]] As well as in a prequel story concerning Quatermaine's activities just after he faked his death. And lets not forget [[spoiler: The Moonchild]].
** Nyarlathotep [[strike:him]] ''its''elf makes an appearance as a "''respected diplomat''" from Yuggoth to the Blazing World.
* EstablishingCharacterMoment: Fu Manchu is introduced writing on a man's bare skin with caustic paint. Nice guy.
** The first time Oliver Haddo appears on panel in ''Century: 1910'', he blasts Orlando across the room with a magic wand before a word has been uttered.
** The first time the Anti-Christ appears as an actual character in ''Century: 2009'', it is a first person perspective of him committing a school massacre. With magic powers. [[spoiler: And the school happens to be Hogwarts...]]
* EvenEvilHasStandards: While Nemo is a ruthless terrorist vocally committed to killing as many Englishmen as creatively as possible, he draws the line at using [[spoiler: poison gas.]]
** In a 'sort of' example, Hyde does ''not'' appreciate what the Invisible Man has done regarding either Mina or selling everyone out to the Martians... but his response is even ''worse''. Here, it's less because Hyde would never do such a thing (it's suggested he already has, many times), it's because he has some kind of regard for Mina personally.
** Less 'evil' more 'amoral', but while Mycroft Holmes usually acts aloof and impartial towards the quite morally questionable things he and the League get up to, he is visibly disgusted and angered [[spoiler: when the real JackTheRipper gets out of a well-deserved hanging when someone else who couldn't have done his crimes confesses to them solely to get the attention.]]
* EvilCounterpart: ...sort of. The League has counterpart organizations working on behalf of the French (Les Hommes Mysterieux) and German (Der Zweilicht Helden) governments. While The League tends to include atleast a few traditional heroes, the closest thing the French have to a hero is [[MasterOftheWorld Robur the Conqueror]] and ArseneLupin. The Germans are strictly villains, with such monsters as Film/DrMabuse, [[Film/TheCabinetOfDrCaligari Dr Caligari]] and his somnambulist assassin, and Dr Rotwang from Film/{{Metropolis}}.
* FanDisservice: Plenty in volume 2. [[spoiler:Griffin brutally attacks and humiliates Mina]], which is followed by [[spoiler:Hyde raping Griffin before killing him]], and on the side there's [[spoiler:Mina's sex scene. With Allan]]. Then ItGotWorse. [[spoiler:Allan likes Mina's scars. ''A lot'']].
* FatBastard: Campion Bond, Mycroft Holmes, Billy Bunter...
* {{Feghoot}}: Some of the references are nothing but elaborate set-ups for truly awful puns. The suicide of 1950s superhero Jack Flash is probably the most cringe-inducing ([[Music/TheRollingStones he jumped off an apartment building after trying & failing to do the deed with stove gas three times]]).
* FictionalCounterpart: Not just to places and things but fictional representations of people even come into play as well. Most notably [[TheGreatDictator Adenoid Hynkel]] taking AdolfHitler's place in WWII. Also, ''The Rutles'' were the sixties biggest band. Other notable ones include HoratioHornblower taking Nelson's place in British military history, and the identity of JackTheRipper being [[TheThreePennyOpera Mack The Knife]]. Finally, the BigBad of Century, Oliver Haddo, is an expy of real-life mystic AleisterCrowley.
* FiveManBand:
** The 1890s league.
*** TheHero: Wilhelmina Murray.
*** TheLancer: Allan Quatermain.
*** TheBigGuy: Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde
*** TheSmartGuy: Nemo.
*** TheChick[=/=]TokenEvilTeammate: Hawley Griffin.
** The 1900s league.
*** TheHero: Wilhelmina Murray
*** TheLancer: Allan Quatermain
*** TheBigGuy: A.J. Raffles
*** TheSmartGuy: Thomas Carnacki
*** TheChick: Orlando
* FootFocus: Janni is always barefoot.
* FreakinessShame: Mina's scars.
* GenderBender: Orlando, obviously.
* GenreShift: ''The Black Dossier'' brings out of the world of Victorian adventure novels into a mid 20th century spy caper.
** Also happens internally at least once per volume, between the main comic narrative and the supplementary materials. These are usually prose of some sort, whether intelligence report, travelogue, or pulp sci-fi, but they can get... bizarre. ''The Black Dossier'', for example, includes sections sections done in the style of an 18th century satirical broadsheet, an Elizabethan drama, a [[TheBeatGeneration Beat Novel]], and [[RuleThirtyFour a Tijuana bible]] [[RefugeInAudacity based on]] Literature/NineteenEightyFour, among others; Volume Two includes a ''[[BoardGames board game]]''.
* {{God}}: Revealed to be [[spoiler: MaryPoppins]]
* GreatWhiteHunter: Quatermain
* GuideDangIt: One of the few comics to have (and actually need) a guide. Jess Nevins' incredible guidebooks are essential to understanding all the references for anyone who isn't a professor of Victorian literature.
* TheGump: Orlando and as time goes on Mina and Allan as well.
* HellishPupils: The "Chinese Doctor" has semi-rectangular goat-like eyes.
* HereThereWereDragons: All of the magic and sorcery that populate fairy tales and folklore was real in the ''League'' world in one way or another but that magic has been pushed further and further into the background by various forces. The governments of the world have taken it upon themselves to not only keep a tight lid on this fact but also relegate the amazing things that happen in their own time as fiction.
* HeroicSacrifice: [[spoiler: Mr. Hyde dies when defending London from the Martians]].
** [[spoiler:After climbing the leg, ripping the carapace off the machine, then ''eating the Martian inside''.]]
* HumanoidAbomination: The true form of the Antichrist [[spoiler: Harry Potter]] in Century, which resembles a giant, bald man, covered in eyeballs.
* InNameOnly: TheMovie. The comic book is a Victorian era CrisisCrossover, whereas the movie is an AlternateHistory {{Steampunk}} sci-fi thriller whose characters just happen to be lifted from books. Movie!League makes Quartermain the leader/hero instead of Mina, as well as adding Dorian Gray and Tom Sawyer (who weren't even ''mentioned'' in the books), replacing PsychoForHire Hawley Griffin with an invisible GentlemanThief, and making Mina a vampire.
* InvisibleStreaker: Griffin. Not that it helps against Hyde.
* JackTheRipper
* JustForFun/JohnMunch: His father, Pete, appears as an astronaut in the "Minions of the Moon" backup for ''Century: 1969''. Like his son, he also a conspiracy theorist but this being the world of the ''League'' it's possible he's actually right.
* KarmicDeath: [[spoiler:Griffin suffers this. He pisses off Hyde, who as it turns out, can see him despite his invisibility. He then beats and rapes Griffin to death.]]
* KarmaHoudini: Arguably, the point of joining the League is to become one via the reward of amnesty (ex. Hyde, Griffin, Jekyll, Raffles, Nemo). [[spoiler:Most don't make it though.]] [[spoiler: Mack the Knife]] of Volume Three is a far more straight example. He even sings about it near the end.
** Also, the kids at the festival in 1969? Well, FridgeLogic dictates that they'd be the right age to have lost parents to Big Brother's CulturePolice, and a few must have denounced their parents...
* KickTheDog: Nemo's crew is initially introduced as a group of loyal subordinates who simply follow the man's orders, no matter the morality behind them. In the third book, they not only reveal to have a taste for piracy and murder, but [[spoiler: brutally attack London's docks in maniacal glee.]]
* KickTheSonOfABitch: Normally, [[spoiler:beating and raping someone to death is a MoralEventHorizon, but when the victim is Griffin...]]
* LadyOfWar: Mina
** Janni Nemo as well. Even bruised after being brutally assaulted and even surrounded by the dead and dying as vicious pirates go about the business of an honest day's slaughter, she still looks graceful and beautiful.
* LampshadeHanging: The New Traveler's Almanac does this in regards to the shocking amount of shipwrecked Englishmen involved in discovering previously uncharted isles.
* LaserGuidedKarma: Griffin pisses off the one member of the team who has no qualms about killing him and who can detect him despite his invisibility. It... doesn't end well for Griffin at all.
** Don't worry, [[IncrediblyLamePun "His end was quite comfortable."]]
* LawyerFriendlyCameo: "The Chinese Doctor" (FuManchu). Also [[JamesBond "Jimmy"]], Miss Night ([[Series/TheAvengers Emma Peel]]), and Uncle Hugo (BulldogDrummond) in ''The Black Dossier''.
** The map of "The Blazing World" in ''The Black Dossier'' had a familiar [[Series/DoctorWho phone box]] symbol (positioned [[Recap/DoctorWhoNSS2E13Doomsday over Norway]]), and the Second Doctor appears in a brief walk-on cameo in "Century: 1969"
*** The First and Eleventh Doctors show up in ''Century: 2009''
** The Almanacs have several more, including Coca-Cola's polar bears, ''TheWitchesOfEastwick'', ConanTheBarbarian, and ''GilligansIsland''.
** [[HarryPotter Tom]] in ''Century: 1969''.
*** ''Century 2009'' has an occult school that can only be accessed by taking a train from a hidden platform at Kings Cross Station. The Antichrist was raised there with a certain distinctive mark on his forehead.
* LegionOfDoom: One composed of [[DrMabusetheGambler Dr.Mabuse]], [[Film/TheCabinetOfDrCaligari Dr.Caligari, Cesare]], [[Film/{{Metropolis}} Rotwang, and Fake Maria]] is shown in the Black Dossier.
* LiteraryAgentHypothesis: All stories are true, we just know them as stories because someone else wrote them down and the truth became distorted. In ''The Black Dossier'' we learn that the Big Brother government had a fiction department set up to turn a lot of their cases and biographies into entertainment in order to discredit them.
* LivingForeverIsAwesome: Orlando seems to have few hang-ups or complaints about being immortal. Deconstructed slightly, however; particularly [[GenderBender when male]], he can instead go to the other extreme from WhoWantsToLiveForever and come off as unfeeling and even sociopathic.
* LegacyCharacter: With a bit of GenerationXerox: Macheath from ''Theatre/TheThreepennyOpera'' is apparently descended from the Macheath of ''The Beggars Opera''. Also, Jack Kerouac's characters Doctor Sax and [[OnTheRoad Dean Moriarty]] are the descendants of Fu Manchu and Prof. James Moriarty respectively. Its also revealed in Century that [[spoiler: James Bond]] is a title assigned to different agents of British Intelligence, with two specific agents refered to as J3 and J6 looking an awful lot like [[spoiler: Roger Moore and Creator/DanielCraig]].
* MadScientist: Nemo, Moriarty, Fu Manchu. ''The Black Dossier'' throws in [[Film/TheCabinetOfDrCaligari Caligari]] and C.R. [[Film/{{Metropolis}} Rotwang]].
* MagicCarpet: Gullivar Jones
* MassiveMultiplayerCrossover
* MirrorChemistry: In a text feature in Vol. 2, it is revealed that Alice emerged from the Looking Glass world with her entire body mirror-reversed. As a result, she was unable to eat normal food, and ultimately starved to death.
* TheMole: [[spoiler:Griffin allied with the Martians during their invasion]].
* MoodWhiplash: The Boy's Own Adventure tone of the narrator's text boxes is hilarious, but within two pages of a Gorn scene of [[spoiler: a semi-likeable female character being beaten to the point of passing out with a splat in a pool of her own vomit]], the whiplash [[DudeNotFunny spoils the humor]].
* MusicalEpisode: The first issue of volume three, believe it or not. Features a dockside whore narrating Janni's story with a rendition of "Music/PirateJenny" and no less than ''three'' musical numbers by Jack the Ripper/[=MacHeath=].
** This is clearly a trend for the volume, as there are even more songs in ''Century: 1969''.
* MusicalWorldHypothesis: Briefly touched on in one section of "The New Traveller's Almanac", where we learn that the events of LewisCarroll's poem ''TheHuntingOfTheSnark'' were just an extended hallucination by Dr. Eric Bellman, a psychiatrist who [[GoMadFromTheRevelation went insane]] after trying to lead an expedition to [[Literature/AliceInWonderland Wonderland]]. The dialogue in that poem (arranged in verse) is said to be a side-effect of Bellman's madness, which left him incapable of speaking in coherent prose.
* MyGrandsonMyself: [[spoiler: Allan Quartermain, Junior]]. Mycroft Holmes sees right through it, naturally.
** Humorously, virtually everyone else who caught wind of both "[[spoiler:Allan Quartermain, Jr.]]" and the search for Ayesha's Fire of Eternal Life failed to make the connection spectacularly despite the transparency of the lie.
* NailedToTheWagon: Allan was locked in his cabin to purge the opium from his system, though his addiction would last another issue. Cruelly, his cabin was ''aboard the Nautilus'', so only '''half''' of what he saw were hallucinations.
* NiceJobBreakingItHero: Happens at least once in every volume, but especially Century where Carnacki's visions of the apocalypse [[spoiler: inspire the instigator of Apocalypse to plan accordingly]].
* NoNameGiven: Nemo is Latin for "no one", his true name is never revealed. In [[Creator/JulesVerne Verne's]] ''The Mysterious Island,'' his name was given as Dakkar (Anglicized version of Thakkoor), which was used as a title by some rulers of princely states. It could be a last name, a first name, or just a title.
* NoOntologicalInertia: Griffin's blood.
* NoExportForYou: In Canada, at least, you can't buy the black dossier in stores. You need to get it online.
* OccultDetective: Carnacki
* OneSteveLimit: Averted. When Lieutenant Gullivar Jones appeared at the beginning of Volume 2 as {{John Carter| Of Mars}}'s ally, a few readers were confused by his name and assumed that he was supposed to be [[Literature/GulliversTravels Lemuel Gulliver]]. In fact, Lemuel Gulliver actually ''is'' an important (albeit unseen) character in the ''League'' universe [[note]] He was the leader of a previous incarnation of the League that formed in the 1700s[[/note]], and Gullivar Jones is another character from a fairly obscure book called ''Lieutenant Gullivar Jones: His Vacation''.
* OpiumDen: Quatermain starts the comic in one.
* OutWithABang: A gruesome example in the second volume: Hyde rapes the InvisibleMan Griffin to death.
* PapaWolf: Bulldog Drummond to his goddaughter, Emma [[strike:Peel]] [[LawyerFriendlyCameo Night]].
* ParodyCommercial: As extras in each issue, along the lines of "Our cigarettes will cure asthma!"
* PimpedOutDress: Mina has worn a few, given what was expected of high ladies at the time.
* PirateGirl: Janni, a.k.a. "Music/PirateJenny".
* PoliticallyIncorrectVillain: Most of the villains of the series have some sort of un-PC behaviour played up, especially misogyny, which is shared by several.
** Except for the Martians who are far too busy commiting genocide to bother with such things.
** And the ''heroes'' aren't exactly the most PC bunch either - though interestingly, Nemo (the only actual minority on hand) is probably the most openly prejudiced.
* PsychoForHire: Hyde, Griffin, and to an extent Nemo. The entirety of Les Hommes Mysterieux, as well, save perhaps Lupin. And then there's Die Zweilichthelden...
* PsychoSidekick: ''Everyone'' except Mina and Allan.
* ThePsychoRangers: Les Hommes Mysterieux, the French government's answer to the League, form a 1-1 match with its counterpart organization.
* PublicDomainCharacter: All of them, pretty much, save for those mentioned under LawyerFriendlyCameo above.
* PunkRock: The epilogue of Century 1969 sees Allan and Orlando hip-deep in the scene, as their underground club has kept up with the times in the eight years since [[spoiler: Mina disappeared.]]
* RagtagBunchOfMisfits
* RapeAsDrama: [[spoiler: Janni's personality reversal from rebelling against her father's ideals to eagerly embracing them after being gang-raped contains more than a hint of this trope.]]
* RaygunGothic: The prominent {{Steampunk}} aesthetic of the first two volumes is largely replaced by this in ''The Black Dossier'', which shifts the action from the late 1800s to the 1950s.
* ReferenceOverdosed
* RefugeInAudacity: ''Century'' ends with a climactic battle against [[spoiler:HarryPotter. Who, in addition to being the Antichrist, is also a stupid, psychopathic chav who ejaculates lightning on people.]]
* ReplacementScrappy: In-universe, even. The government tries at one point to form a League with a SuspiciouslySimilarSubstitute for every member of the Murray Group. They end up disbanded after one unsuccesful mission.
* ScheduleSlip: A regular enough occurrence that there's actually a backup strip in the v2 trade about it.
* ScrapbookStory: The Black Dossier.
* SherlockHolmes: He has a sort of cameo in a flashback sequence.
* [[SheIsAllGrownUp She/He/It/They Are All Grown Up]]: The Artful Dodger in V2, Billy Bunter in Black Dossier, Baz Thomas in Century. Rather more disturbingly, there's the revelation that Robert Cherry and Harry Wharton of [[BillyBunter the Famous Five]] grew up to be [[spoiler: [[Film/TheThirdMan Harry Lime]] and [[NineteenEightyFour Big Brother]], respectively]].
* ShoutOut: They may as well have called it Shout Out: The Comic Book.
* SkyPirate: Robur and Captain Mors
* SociopathicHero: Hyde and Griffin.
* TheSpymaster: 'M'
* StealthPun: The Reverend Dr. Syn is described as "a mild-mannered clergyman from Kent". "Clark" is regional slang for clergy. That's right, he's a [[{{Superman}} mild-mannered Clark from Kent]].
** In ''Black Dossier'', the XL series of rockets are named for the fate suffered by the previous incarnation; the one used by Allan and Mina is named "Pancake". At the end of their adventure, it explodes. Its successor, naturally, is the ''Series/FireballXL5''.
** Appropriately enough, ''Century: 19'''69''''' seems to have most sex and exploration of sexual mores of any of the League books thus far.
* SteamPunk: Fancy whiz-bang devices everywhere! -- in the first two volumes and ''Century: 1910'' at least.
** The ''Black Dossier'' has several segments that could probably be better labeled RaygunGothic.
* SubmarinePirates: Captain Nemo and his crew.
* TakeThat: ''The Black Dossier'' has several. The [[Series/FireballXL5 X-L]] series of spacecraft are named for an abbreviation of extra-large and it's noted by Mina they could only ever be American because "who else would think that 'extra' starts with an 'X'?" This is in all likelihood a partial dig at the movie, which abbreviated its title as "LXG".
** Also, James Bond's grandpa was a perverted little coward. Bond himself appears in The Black Dossier, and he seems to have retained his ancestor's qualities as, two pages into his appearance, he [[spoiler:tries to rape Mina. She beats him up]], and when Allan shows up, he knocks Bond's pansy ass to the ground, kicks him in the 'nads and mocks him. Further, the Bond in this version is specifically stated to be one who defeated Dr. No - the version played by Sean Connery, who also portrayed Quatermain's character in the movie. And then Moore proceeds to take this UpToEleven in the climax, in which it is revealed that [[spoiler:there never even ''was'' a Dr. No in the first place, Bond had betrayed England to the U.S, and [[MoralEventHorizon murdered one of MI5's own agents]]]].
** A slightly gentler one is directed at "a maker of phosphate drinks" (Coca Cola). The polar bears from their commercials show up in one of the Almanacs, as well as Santa Claus who accidentally killed a representative from the company.
** In ''Century: 2009'', Moore's portrayal of [[spoiler: the Harry Potter world]] is less than flattering. Of the [[spoiler: Hogwarts Express]], he has Andrew Norton declare: [[spoiler: "it runs on sloppily-defined magic principles"]].
* ThatManIsDead in ''The Black Dossier'':
--> '''M''': "Jim, you can call me M. Behind my back, you can even call me [[Series/TheAvengers Mother]]. But [[Film/TheThirdMan Harry]]... Harry died a long time ago in the sewers under Vienna. Let's leave it like that, shall we?
* TheFantasticTropeOfWonderousTitles
* TheyCallMeMisterTibbs: Inverted -- Ishmael prefers Nemo to call him by his first name, rather than "Mr. Mate". [[spoiler:On his deathbed, he does.]] Janni calls him "Mr. Mate", but he lets it slide.
* ThoseWackyNazis: Acording to ''The Black Dossier'', in the[= LOEG=] universe, Hitler is replaced by Adenoid Hynkel from (get ready for this)... the 1940 anti-Nazi film ''TheGreatDictator'' starring Creator/CharlieChaplin; thus ensuring that the same type of facial hair is hated in both worlds.
* TotallyRadical: Mina's efforts to keep up with the times in "Century: 1969" take on this edge, as is noted (and made fun of) by Allan and Orlando; deconstructed, as it's her way of trying to cope with the [[WhoWantsToLiveForever crushing psychological implications of being forever young and immortal]].
* TripodTerror: Lampshaded
* TuxedoAndMartini: The basis of the mockery around James Bond.
* TheUnfettered: Mr. Hyde, increasingly.
* UnreliableNarrator: Orlando, mainly because s/he has been around so long s/he can't remember which historical battles s/he was and wasn't present at.
** WordOfGod also says that s/he is a pathological liar.
* VerbalTic: Griffin has a memorable low chuckle, typically spelled out "Aheheh", with which he punctuates his sentences. It is often also used to inform the reader that Griffin is in a panel (as he is invisible).
* VillainSong: Jack the Ripper himself gets two in the third volume, one about how little things have changed since his killing spree, the other deriding the ruling class and the law for creating a world where people like him exist. He may be a nutter but he can carry a tune.
** Of course he can, ''he's [[spoiler: [[Theatre/TheThreepennyOpera Jack Macheath.]]]]''
* VillainTeamUp: At the end of the 1969 installment, [[spoiler: Haddo possesses [[HarryPotter Tom Riddle]]]].
* WhatKindOfLamePowerIsHeartAnyway: Mina and Allan set alongside the original Victorian League are underwhelming. Much of Mina's second League suffer from this and are relegated to defending themselves with pistols and swords.
** To be fair to Mina, she's more competent than the rest of the League combined because unlike them, she isn't insane.
* WhatCouldHaveBeen: At one point Simon Bisley was considered for regular art duties on the book. It boggles the mind...
* WhoWantsToLiveForever: Initally averted; while the consequences of Orlando's immortality are delved into, it's never a cause for {{Wangst}} and s/he certainly has fun. Likewise, [[spoiler: Mina and Allan]]'s biggest problem with immortality so far is ''keeping sex interesting''. WordOfGod promises that the new book, ''Century'', [[spoiler: will tediously explore Mina and Allan's burnout as they survive to 2010.]]
* YellowPeril: Fu Manchu.
* YouAreACreditToYourRace: Invoked in one of the letter columns in regards to Nemo.
* YouCantFightFate: Done with Janni in Volume Three, wherein fighting fate apparently leads to getting [[spoiler: gangraped]] for your defiance.
----
Not to be confused with ''Series/TheLeagueOfGentlemen'', which is something entirely different. (Although they might [[LoadsAndLoadsOfCharacters be in here]] ''[[LawyerFriendlyCameo somewhere]]''...)
Writer AlanMoore and artist Kevin O'Neill's vision of a SuperHero team, like the Comicbook/{{X-Men}} or the JusticeLeagueOfAmerica, set in the world of Victorian English penny-dreadful adventure stories. Moore combined {{public domain character}}s from the period, hundreds in total, into a coherent whole. The first volume of the series was published from March, 1999 to September, 2000.
The League's members:
* Allan Quatermain: The GreatWhiteHunter from ''Literature/KingSolomonsMines'', now an old, ailing opium addict. He doesn't function too well. [[spoiler: That is, until he gets rejuvenated. He's much more effective sixty years later.]]
* Mina Murray: Formerly Mina Harker, she re-takes her maiden name following the events of Bram Stoker's ''Literature/{{Dracula}}''; the reader has only her unsubstantiated word as to why she and her husband divorced. Her red scarf conceals a brutal set of slashing scars very unlike a traditional vampire's bite, because of Dracula's actually bat-like teeth. She was the first member recruited, and unequivocally the leader. Her position was decided by the team's first "M" [[spoiler: Professor Moriarity]] who believed her gender would prevent the men of the group from feeling a "territorial" desire for her position. Instead they all have deep seated misogynistic resentment.
* Dr. Jekyll: Or, more accurately, Mr. Hyde; as some 20 years of time have passed, he grew from his diminutive size as depicted in [[Literature/TheStrangeCaseOfDrJekyllAndMrHyde Robert Louis Stevenson's book]] into a powerful giant, and the SuperSerum was no longer needed to bring him out. He's also a psychopath of the grandest type, and prone to every excess. Both Jekyll and especially Hyde have a soft spot for Mina, who is apparently the only person Hyde never wanted to hurt (this is because she does not hate him for what he is) [[hottip:*.: Hyde is the ''evil'' side of Jekyll without any of his good qualities, and every person he meets doesn't know why, but immediately recognizes him as evil. He will never be loved or even accepted--but she has met [[{{Dracula}} worse]].
* Hawley Griffin: The title character of ''Literature/TheInvisibleMan'' by HGWells, a scheming transparent criminal megalomaniac first introduced in ''League'' raping teenage girls in a dormitory. (His on-page victim was {{Pollyanna}}, who decided not to let being brutalized get her down.)
* Captain Nemo: Returning to a depiction introduced in Creator/JulesVerne's sequel to ''[[TwentyThousandLeaguesUnderTheSea 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea]]'', Nemo is a disenfranchised Indian prince, a Sikh, whose mortal enemy is the British Crown. His Nautilus is a newly-constructed replacement that invokes the appearance and functionality of the giant squid atop a giant whale; Technical drawings suggest the sections can separate. His first mate is Ishmael, late of ''Moby-Dick''. One notable crewman is [[http://lxg.wikia.com/wiki/Broad_Arrow_Jack Broad Arrow Jack]], the star of an eponymous 1866 "penny dreadful" written by E. Harcourt Burrage.
Later members of the team include Orlando, an immortal man/woman whose gender periodically changes (from [[OrlandoABiography the very odd novel by Virginia Woolf]]), famous gentleman thief {{Raffles}} and occult investigator [[Literature/CarnackiTheGhostFinder Thomas Carnacki]].
Other notable characters include Professor Moriarty and Mycroft Holmes from the [[SherlockHolmes Holmesian canon]]. (The great detective himself only appears in a {{Flashback}}, as he would overshadow the other figures; at the time of the story, he's off faking his death around Europe.) A proposed ancestor to a certain [[JamesBond superspy]] is introduced in the person of Campion Bond: a priggish, rotund, cowardly, sanctimonious schemer with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. His family's got quite the reputation; quite the ''bad'' one.
The LiteraryAgentHypothesis is used as a plot point; the authors of the original stories are depicted as biographers, and the "real" events surrounding the league's members are often far more disturbing than the tales would have us believe. For instance, all the members except Murray are believed dead, having faked their own demises years before.
Volume 1 follows the tale of the league's formation, and a battle against the forces of the mysterious "Chinese Doctor" (actually Fu Manchu) and the machinations of Moriarty. In the second volume, the Martian invasion from ''TheWarOfTheWorlds'' is explored, featuring appearances by Dr. Moreau and John Carter of Mars. The "Black Dossier," an elaborate side-story, features the titular Dossier as a FramingDevice for [[ScrapbookStory the history of all the different iterations of the League, from the one in Shakespeare's time through to World War II]], and brings the references to a [[ReferenceOverdosed truly ridiculous level]]. The Black Dossier signalled a change in style for the comics; where the initial idea was "Justice League of Victorian England", the ambition evolved into creating a shared universe for ''all'' fictional places and characters. ''All of them''.
The first part of the third volume, "Century" was published in 2009, setting up an EndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt arc spanning the 20th and early 21st century. In 1910, the League investigates a doomsday cult led by magician Oliver Haddo, while simultaneously dealing with a madman killing prostitutes on the waterfront. New members of the League include psychic detective [[Literature/CarnackiTheGhostFinder Thomas Carnacki]], who has been having visions of what's to come, [[GentlemanThief high-class cracksman]] [[{{Raffles}} A.J. Raffles]], and League veteran [[OrlandoABiography Orlando]], as headstrong, omnisexual, and perpetually bored as ever. As this is going on, the dying Captain Nemo's daughter Janni has come to London to escape her father's plan to make her his successor, taking up work at a tavern on the waterfront. [[TheMusical And there are musical numbers. Lots of them.]]
The second volume of Century, published July 2011, finds the league back in swinging London in 1969. The team is down to just Orlando, Mina and Allan, but they get a ride from the octogenarian Janni on the Nautilus. They must seek out and stop the cult founded by the late Oliver Haddo and prevent him from using popular musicians for dark purposes.
The third and last volume of Century came in June 2012 and sees the League try to pick itself up in a rather dystopian year 2009. The Moonchild, barely sane after being carefully groomed by Haddo in the incarnation he assumed at the end of the previous volume, appears at last, and a final confrontation with the Moonchild is made.
The sheer number of sly references to Victoriana that are found in the pages of ''League'''s first two volumes astound many scholars; each page includes subtle and overt {{Continuity Nod}}s to British literary tradition and culture, everything from ComicStrip/RupertBear and other classic TalkingAnimal characters as Moreau's hybrid monsters, to a Cottingley Fairy in a jar of alcohol at the British Museum. On the other hand, they usually take these references in so horrifying a direction that it's sometimes more insulting if you recognize them. The trend continues with more contemporary fiction in the later volumes, often with clever WritingAroundTrademarks, as these works aren't public domain.
----
!!Provides Examples Of:
* AllMythsAreTrue: Or perhaps more accurately, all ''fiction'' is true.
* AllThereInTheManual: Knowledge of the books of the period (all of them) is very helpful to understanding the subtle goings-on, if not the main plot.
** And then there's stuff like the previous leagues, whose activities are chronicled in supplementary stories. You can seriously read a [[Creator/WilliamShakespeare Shakespearean]]-style play about Prospero and Caliban and their ilk forming the first League, complete with Shakespearean jokes like guards named Mr. Shytte and Mr. Pysse.
** There are also [[TheAnnotatedEdition books of annotations by Jess Nevins]] which point out some of the really obscure references, though even Nevins can sometimes get overwhelmed. When cataloguing one of the back-up "world tour" sections from the second volume, he subtitled it [[InWhichATropeIsDescribed "In Which Alan Moore Tries To Kill Me"]]. Said sections have one obscure Victorian reference ''per sentence''.
* AnythingThatMoves:
** Fanny Hill.
** Orlando, too.
** Hyde in his crazier moments.
* AssholeVictim: [[spoiler:Griffin]] to Hyde.
* AuthorAppeal: [[spoiler: The mÃnage à trois between Quatermain, Mina and Orlando.]]
** Alan Moore's fondness for old-time forms of pornography also tends to come through, to the point where later volumes can focus just as much, if not more at times, on the sexual exploits of the characters as much as their adventures. In particular, the first volume features characters and settings from Victorian pornographic journal ''The Pearl'', and ''Black Dossier'' gives us, among others, a ''Jane''-style Tijuana Bible from the world of ''Literature/NineteenEightyFour'' and the various exploits (in more than one way) of the eighteenth century League courtesy of Fanny Hill.
* AuthorAvatar: Quatermain in the first two volumes, The Duke Of Milan in the third.
* AuthorTract: Moore is usually respectful of the fictional characters he appropriates and is fairly faithful to their original representations. In ''Century: 2009'', however, his portrayal of [[spoiler: Harry Potter]] is not only unflattering but also inconsistent with how that character appears in their original source material. Moore makes his opinion of that work of fiction particularly [[{{Anvilicious}} transparent]] when he has [[spoiler: Mary Poppins appear and destroy him, in her role as 'guardian of the world's children and their imaginations']].
* BadassGrandpa: [[EdgarAllanPoe Auguste]] [[Film/MurdersInTheRueMorgue Dupin]] is Mina and Allan's liaison in Paris, and despite being in his late ''90s'' if not early ''100s'', he looks Mr. Hyde straight in the face and blasts his ear off with his pepperbox pistol. Mina is impressed.
* BadassNormal: There are technically a few of these, but Mina Murray stands out - a dainty, slightly-built ''music teacher'' rubbing shoulders with the likes of Captain Nemo and Edward Hyde!
* BadassSanta: In the ''League'' universe, Santa is an elderly shaman who lives alone in a hut at the North Pole, uses astral projection to travel around the world spreading good cheer every Christmas, and commands an army of malicious sprites (his "little helpers") as his {{familiar}}s. He also apparently murdered a few employees of the Coca-Cola company when they tried to buy the rights to his image.
* BechdelTest: In the first volume, set in 1899, Mina is the TokenGirl. By the final scene of ''Century'' set in 2009 just about all surviving characters are women, or both in the case of Orlando.
* BigBadEnsemble: [[spoiler: Moriarty, the Martians, Harry Lime, Oliver Haddo]]
* BiggusDickus: Sinbad, according to Orlando.
* BilingualBonus: Frequently enough that some of what you read will completely go over your head if you don't speak Arabic or Chinese. For example, in Fu Manchu's lair a man is being tortured by having words written onto his body in molten metal. The Chinese script translates as, "A man who does not know pain is like a book whose pages have not been written."
--> '''Peg''': Wij hebben ons vrijwillig aangeboden. Zijn geslacht is kolossaal. [[hottip:note:"We have volunteered. His sex is colossal."]]
--> '''Mina''': She, um, she says they volunteered because of his personality.
* BiTheWay: In Century 1969, Mina "tortures" a woman for information regarding a cult, and Quatermain and Orlando tend to share a bed regardless of Orlando's current gender.
* BodyHorror: Plenty of it to go around, but most notable is probably the true form of the Antichrist, as well as the still living severed head of Oliver Haddo in the third chapter of Century and the remains of the victims from the massacre at [[spoiler:Hogwarts.]]
* BloodKnight: Orlando, with a bit of CrouchingMoronHiddenBadass for good measure.
* BreadEggsMilkSquick: The dinner scene in volume two, in which Hyde reveals some of his origins. And that he'd (Disturbing spoiler, highlight to read:) [[spoiler:brutally beat and sodomized Griffin to near-death a few minutes previous. (The blood on his clothes, hands, and teeth becomes visible as Griffin finally dies in another room. Which happens to be above them, so that the blood is revealed to be dripping through the ceiling as well.)]]
* BreakTheCutie: Nemo's daughter Janni, oh so much. Ironically her gang rape by her employer and the customers of the bar she works in makes her willing to accept the role of Nemo, the very thing she ran away from home to avoid, in order to have her revenge. And she does. By the end of the volume Ishmael reckons she's more of a monster than her father. "Ain't it bleeding wonderful?"
* CelebrityParadox: Averted, see LiteraryAgentHypothesis
* CharacterExaggeration: Bulldog Drummond's racism ([[ValuesDissonance the reason]] the original stories haven't aged well) is turned up to eleven.
* ChekhovsSkill: Hyde's thermal vision. This being [[DangerouslyGenreSavvy Hyde]], he's smart enough not to tell Griffin about it, knowing that it might come in handy sometime.
* {{Chickification}}: Mina is a lot more vulnerable in ''Century 1969'' than we've seen her before. Explained as a result of the strain of being immortal finally starting to catch up with her. To be fair, Alan is a complete mess by the end as well, but that's mostly a consequence of losing her.
* {{Columbine}}: And with [[OhCrap magic]] too.
* ContinuityNod: To a lot of continuity; its BackStory is a distilled mixture of every book written [[strike:in the 1880s and 90s]] ''ever'', from Dickens to erotica. And includes a distant ancestor of the Dude from ''TheBigLebowski''.
* CrapsackWorld: Particularly by Volume II.
* DarkerAndEdgier: Everything. The [[spoiler: Nautilus]] gains a new, darker look and a ''lot'' MoreDakka [[spoiler: [[KilledOffForReal but a lot less]] [[IncrediblyLamePun Dakkar]]]] in volume three.
* DeadpanSnarker: Griffin.
* DeconstructionCrossover: One of the most typical examples. Probably, even the TropeCodifier.
* DeliberateValuesDissonance
* DisproportionateRetribution: Janni is the ''Queen'' of this trope. Do ''not'' mess with her unless you want your city itself attacked, the harbour burnt, looted and pillaged, hundreds of people murdered, on top of which [[LaserGuidedKarma you too will get ass-raped]] along the way.
* DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything: In ''Century: 2009'', the [[spoiler: Hogwarts]] school massacre is framed and discussed as if it were Columbine-style school massacre [[FromBadToWorse where the student doing the massacring has magic powers.]]
* TheDragon: "Jimmy" for M in ''The Black Dossier''.
** [[GetCarter "Jackie Boy"]] for Vic Dakin in Century:1969
* EldritchAbomination: The Martians, Lovecraft's own make an appearance. [[spoiler: In a Jeeves and Wooster story.]] As well as in a prequel story concerning Quatermaine's activities just after he faked his death. And lets not forget [[spoiler: The Moonchild]].
** Nyarlathotep [[strike:him]] ''its''elf makes an appearance as a "''respected diplomat''" from Yuggoth to the Blazing World.
* EstablishingCharacterMoment: Fu Manchu is introduced writing on a man's bare skin with caustic paint. Nice guy.
** The first time Oliver Haddo appears on panel in ''Century: 1910'', he blasts Orlando across the room with a magic wand before a word has been uttered.
** The first time the Anti-Christ appears as an actual character in ''Century: 2009'', it is a first person perspective of him committing a school massacre. With magic powers. [[spoiler: And the school happens to be Hogwarts...]]
* EvenEvilHasStandards: While Nemo is a ruthless terrorist vocally committed to killing as many Englishmen as creatively as possible, he draws the line at using [[spoiler: poison gas.]]
** In a 'sort of' example, Hyde does ''not'' appreciate what the Invisible Man has done regarding either Mina or selling everyone out to the Martians... but his response is even ''worse''. Here, it's less because Hyde would never do such a thing (it's suggested he already has, many times), it's because he has some kind of regard for Mina personally.
** Less 'evil' more 'amoral', but while Mycroft Holmes usually acts aloof and impartial towards the quite morally questionable things he and the League get up to, he is visibly disgusted and angered [[spoiler: when the real JackTheRipper gets out of a well-deserved hanging when someone else who couldn't have done his crimes confesses to them solely to get the attention.]]
* EvilCounterpart: ...sort of. The League has counterpart organizations working on behalf of the French (Les Hommes Mysterieux) and German (Der Zweilicht Helden) governments. While The League tends to include atleast a few traditional heroes, the closest thing the French have to a hero is [[MasterOftheWorld Robur the Conqueror]] and ArseneLupin. The Germans are strictly villains, with such monsters as Film/DrMabuse, [[Film/TheCabinetOfDrCaligari Dr Caligari]] and his somnambulist assassin, and Dr Rotwang from Film/{{Metropolis}}.
* FanDisservice: Plenty in volume 2. [[spoiler:Griffin brutally attacks and humiliates Mina]], which is followed by [[spoiler:Hyde raping Griffin before killing him]], and on the side there's [[spoiler:Mina's sex scene. With Allan]]. Then ItGotWorse. [[spoiler:Allan likes Mina's scars. ''A lot'']].
* FatBastard: Campion Bond, Mycroft Holmes, Billy Bunter...
* {{Feghoot}}: Some of the references are nothing but elaborate set-ups for truly awful puns. The suicide of 1950s superhero Jack Flash is probably the most cringe-inducing ([[Music/TheRollingStones he jumped off an apartment building after trying & failing to do the deed with stove gas three times]]).
* FictionalCounterpart: Not just to places and things but fictional representations of people even come into play as well. Most notably [[TheGreatDictator Adenoid Hynkel]] taking AdolfHitler's place in WWII. Also, ''The Rutles'' were the sixties biggest band. Other notable ones include HoratioHornblower taking Nelson's place in British military history, and the identity of JackTheRipper being [[TheThreePennyOpera Mack The Knife]]. Finally, the BigBad of Century, Oliver Haddo, is an expy of real-life mystic AleisterCrowley.
* FiveManBand:
** The 1890s league.
*** TheHero: Wilhelmina Murray.
*** TheLancer: Allan Quatermain.
*** TheBigGuy: Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde
*** TheSmartGuy: Nemo.
*** TheChick[=/=]TokenEvilTeammate: Hawley Griffin.
** The 1900s league.
*** TheHero: Wilhelmina Murray
*** TheLancer: Allan Quatermain
*** TheBigGuy: A.J. Raffles
*** TheSmartGuy: Thomas Carnacki
*** TheChick: Orlando
* FootFocus: Janni is always barefoot.
* FreakinessShame: Mina's scars.
* GenderBender: Orlando, obviously.
* GenreShift: ''The Black Dossier'' brings out of the world of Victorian adventure novels into a mid 20th century spy caper.
** Also happens internally at least once per volume, between the main comic narrative and the supplementary materials. These are usually prose of some sort, whether intelligence report, travelogue, or pulp sci-fi, but they can get... bizarre. ''The Black Dossier'', for example, includes sections sections done in the style of an 18th century satirical broadsheet, an Elizabethan drama, a [[TheBeatGeneration Beat Novel]], and [[RuleThirtyFour a Tijuana bible]] [[RefugeInAudacity based on]] Literature/NineteenEightyFour, among others; Volume Two includes a ''[[BoardGames board game]]''.
* {{God}}: Revealed to be [[spoiler: MaryPoppins]]
* GreatWhiteHunter: Quatermain
* GuideDangIt: One of the few comics to have (and actually need) a guide. Jess Nevins' incredible guidebooks are essential to understanding all the references for anyone who isn't a professor of Victorian literature.
* TheGump: Orlando and as time goes on Mina and Allan as well.
* HellishPupils: The "Chinese Doctor" has semi-rectangular goat-like eyes.
* HereThereWereDragons: All of the magic and sorcery that populate fairy tales and folklore was real in the ''League'' world in one way or another but that magic has been pushed further and further into the background by various forces. The governments of the world have taken it upon themselves to not only keep a tight lid on this fact but also relegate the amazing things that happen in their own time as fiction.
* HeroicSacrifice: [[spoiler: Mr. Hyde dies when defending London from the Martians]].
** [[spoiler:After climbing the leg, ripping the carapace off the machine, then ''eating the Martian inside''.]]
* HumanoidAbomination: The true form of the Antichrist [[spoiler: Harry Potter]] in Century, which resembles a giant, bald man, covered in eyeballs.
* InNameOnly: TheMovie. The comic book is a Victorian era CrisisCrossover, whereas the movie is an AlternateHistory {{Steampunk}} sci-fi thriller whose characters just happen to be lifted from books. Movie!League makes Quartermain the leader/hero instead of Mina, as well as adding Dorian Gray and Tom Sawyer (who weren't even ''mentioned'' in the books), replacing PsychoForHire Hawley Griffin with an invisible GentlemanThief, and making Mina a vampire.
* InvisibleStreaker: Griffin. Not that it helps against Hyde.
* JackTheRipper
* JustForFun/JohnMunch: His father, Pete, appears as an astronaut in the "Minions of the Moon" backup for ''Century: 1969''. Like his son, he also a conspiracy theorist but this being the world of the ''League'' it's possible he's actually right.
* KarmicDeath: [[spoiler:Griffin suffers this. He pisses off Hyde, who as it turns out, can see him despite his invisibility. He then beats and rapes Griffin to death.]]
* KarmaHoudini: Arguably, the point of joining the League is to become one via the reward of amnesty (ex. Hyde, Griffin, Jekyll, Raffles, Nemo). [[spoiler:Most don't make it though.]] [[spoiler: Mack the Knife]] of Volume Three is a far more straight example. He even sings about it near the end.
** Also, the kids at the festival in 1969? Well, FridgeLogic dictates that they'd be the right age to have lost parents to Big Brother's CulturePolice, and a few must have denounced their parents...
* KickTheDog: Nemo's crew is initially introduced as a group of loyal subordinates who simply follow the man's orders, no matter the morality behind them. In the third book, they not only reveal to have a taste for piracy and murder, but [[spoiler: brutally attack London's docks in maniacal glee.]]
* KickTheSonOfABitch: Normally, [[spoiler:beating and raping someone to death is a MoralEventHorizon, but when the victim is Griffin...]]
* LadyOfWar: Mina
** Janni Nemo as well. Even bruised after being brutally assaulted and even surrounded by the dead and dying as vicious pirates go about the business of an honest day's slaughter, she still looks graceful and beautiful.
* LampshadeHanging: The New Traveler's Almanac does this in regards to the shocking amount of shipwrecked Englishmen involved in discovering previously uncharted isles.
* LaserGuidedKarma: Griffin pisses off the one member of the team who has no qualms about killing him and who can detect him despite his invisibility. It... doesn't end well for Griffin at all.
** Don't worry, [[IncrediblyLamePun "His end was quite comfortable."]]
* LawyerFriendlyCameo: "The Chinese Doctor" (FuManchu). Also [[JamesBond "Jimmy"]], Miss Night ([[Series/TheAvengers Emma Peel]]), and Uncle Hugo (BulldogDrummond) in ''The Black Dossier''.
** The map of "The Blazing World" in ''The Black Dossier'' had a familiar [[Series/DoctorWho phone box]] symbol (positioned [[Recap/DoctorWhoNSS2E13Doomsday over Norway]]), and the Second Doctor appears in a brief walk-on cameo in "Century: 1969"
*** The First and Eleventh Doctors show up in ''Century: 2009''
** The Almanacs have several more, including Coca-Cola's polar bears, ''TheWitchesOfEastwick'', ConanTheBarbarian, and ''GilligansIsland''.
** [[HarryPotter Tom]] in ''Century: 1969''.
*** ''Century 2009'' has an occult school that can only be accessed by taking a train from a hidden platform at Kings Cross Station. The Antichrist was raised there with a certain distinctive mark on his forehead.
* LegionOfDoom: One composed of [[DrMabusetheGambler Dr.Mabuse]], [[Film/TheCabinetOfDrCaligari Dr.Caligari, Cesare]], [[Film/{{Metropolis}} Rotwang, and Fake Maria]] is shown in the Black Dossier.
* LiteraryAgentHypothesis: All stories are true, we just know them as stories because someone else wrote them down and the truth became distorted. In ''The Black Dossier'' we learn that the Big Brother government had a fiction department set up to turn a lot of their cases and biographies into entertainment in order to discredit them.
* LivingForeverIsAwesome: Orlando seems to have few hang-ups or complaints about being immortal. Deconstructed slightly, however; particularly [[GenderBender when male]], he can instead go to the other extreme from WhoWantsToLiveForever and come off as unfeeling and even sociopathic.
* LegacyCharacter: With a bit of GenerationXerox: Macheath from ''Theatre/TheThreepennyOpera'' is apparently descended from the Macheath of ''The Beggars Opera''. Also, Jack Kerouac's characters Doctor Sax and [[OnTheRoad Dean Moriarty]] are the descendants of Fu Manchu and Prof. James Moriarty respectively. Its also revealed in Century that [[spoiler: James Bond]] is a title assigned to different agents of British Intelligence, with two specific agents refered to as J3 and J6 looking an awful lot like [[spoiler: Roger Moore and Creator/DanielCraig]].
* MadScientist: Nemo, Moriarty, Fu Manchu. ''The Black Dossier'' throws in [[Film/TheCabinetOfDrCaligari Caligari]] and C.R. [[Film/{{Metropolis}} Rotwang]].
* MagicCarpet: Gullivar Jones
* MassiveMultiplayerCrossover
* MirrorChemistry: In a text feature in Vol. 2, it is revealed that Alice emerged from the Looking Glass world with her entire body mirror-reversed. As a result, she was unable to eat normal food, and ultimately starved to death.
* TheMole: [[spoiler:Griffin allied with the Martians during their invasion]].
* MoodWhiplash: The Boy's Own Adventure tone of the narrator's text boxes is hilarious, but within two pages of a Gorn scene of [[spoiler: a semi-likeable female character being beaten to the point of passing out with a splat in a pool of her own vomit]], the whiplash [[DudeNotFunny spoils the humor]].
* MusicalEpisode: The first issue of volume three, believe it or not. Features a dockside whore narrating Janni's story with a rendition of "Music/PirateJenny" and no less than ''three'' musical numbers by Jack the Ripper/[=MacHeath=].
** This is clearly a trend for the volume, as there are even more songs in ''Century: 1969''.
* MusicalWorldHypothesis: Briefly touched on in one section of "The New Traveller's Almanac", where we learn that the events of LewisCarroll's poem ''TheHuntingOfTheSnark'' were just an extended hallucination by Dr. Eric Bellman, a psychiatrist who [[GoMadFromTheRevelation went insane]] after trying to lead an expedition to [[Literature/AliceInWonderland Wonderland]]. The dialogue in that poem (arranged in verse) is said to be a side-effect of Bellman's madness, which left him incapable of speaking in coherent prose.
* MyGrandsonMyself: [[spoiler: Allan Quartermain, Junior]]. Mycroft Holmes sees right through it, naturally.
** Humorously, virtually everyone else who caught wind of both "[[spoiler:Allan Quartermain, Jr.]]" and the search for Ayesha's Fire of Eternal Life failed to make the connection spectacularly despite the transparency of the lie.
* NailedToTheWagon: Allan was locked in his cabin to purge the opium from his system, though his addiction would last another issue. Cruelly, his cabin was ''aboard the Nautilus'', so only '''half''' of what he saw were hallucinations.
* NiceJobBreakingItHero: Happens at least once in every volume, but especially Century where Carnacki's visions of the apocalypse [[spoiler: inspire the instigator of Apocalypse to plan accordingly]].
* NoNameGiven: Nemo is Latin for "no one", his true name is never revealed. In [[Creator/JulesVerne Verne's]] ''The Mysterious Island,'' his name was given as Dakkar (Anglicized version of Thakkoor), which was used as a title by some rulers of princely states. It could be a last name, a first name, or just a title.
* NoOntologicalInertia: Griffin's blood.
* NoExportForYou: In Canada, at least, you can't buy the black dossier in stores. You need to get it online.
* OccultDetective: Carnacki
* OneSteveLimit: Averted. When Lieutenant Gullivar Jones appeared at the beginning of Volume 2 as {{John Carter| Of Mars}}'s ally, a few readers were confused by his name and assumed that he was supposed to be [[Literature/GulliversTravels Lemuel Gulliver]]. In fact, Lemuel Gulliver actually ''is'' an important (albeit unseen) character in the ''League'' universe [[note]] He was the leader of a previous incarnation of the League that formed in the 1700s[[/note]], and Gullivar Jones is another character from a fairly obscure book called ''Lieutenant Gullivar Jones: His Vacation''.
* OpiumDen: Quatermain starts the comic in one.
* OutWithABang: A gruesome example in the second volume: Hyde rapes the InvisibleMan Griffin to death.
* PapaWolf: Bulldog Drummond to his goddaughter, Emma [[strike:Peel]] [[LawyerFriendlyCameo Night]].
* ParodyCommercial: As extras in each issue, along the lines of "Our cigarettes will cure asthma!"
* PimpedOutDress: Mina has worn a few, given what was expected of high ladies at the time.
* PirateGirl: Janni, a.k.a. "Music/PirateJenny".
* PoliticallyIncorrectVillain: Most of the villains of the series have some sort of un-PC behaviour played up, especially misogyny, which is shared by several.
** Except for the Martians who are far too busy commiting genocide to bother with such things.
** And the ''heroes'' aren't exactly the most PC bunch either - though interestingly, Nemo (the only actual minority on hand) is probably the most openly prejudiced.
* PsychoForHire: Hyde, Griffin, and to an extent Nemo. The entirety of Les Hommes Mysterieux, as well, save perhaps Lupin. And then there's Die Zweilichthelden...
* PsychoSidekick: ''Everyone'' except Mina and Allan.
* ThePsychoRangers: Les Hommes Mysterieux, the French government's answer to the League, form a 1-1 match with its counterpart organization.
* PublicDomainCharacter: All of them, pretty much, save for those mentioned under LawyerFriendlyCameo above.
* PunkRock: The epilogue of Century 1969 sees Allan and Orlando hip-deep in the scene, as their underground club has kept up with the times in the eight years since [[spoiler: Mina disappeared.]]
* RagtagBunchOfMisfits
* RapeAsDrama: [[spoiler: Janni's personality reversal from rebelling against her father's ideals to eagerly embracing them after being gang-raped contains more than a hint of this trope.]]
* RaygunGothic: The prominent {{Steampunk}} aesthetic of the first two volumes is largely replaced by this in ''The Black Dossier'', which shifts the action from the late 1800s to the 1950s.
* ReferenceOverdosed
* RefugeInAudacity: ''Century'' ends with a climactic battle against [[spoiler:HarryPotter. Who, in addition to being the Antichrist, is also a stupid, psychopathic chav who ejaculates lightning on people.]]
* ReplacementScrappy: In-universe, even. The government tries at one point to form a League with a SuspiciouslySimilarSubstitute for every member of the Murray Group. They end up disbanded after one unsuccesful mission.
* ScheduleSlip: A regular enough occurrence that there's actually a backup strip in the v2 trade about it.
* ScrapbookStory: The Black Dossier.
* SherlockHolmes: He has a sort of cameo in a flashback sequence.
* [[SheIsAllGrownUp She/He/It/They Are All Grown Up]]: The Artful Dodger in V2, Billy Bunter in Black Dossier, Baz Thomas in Century. Rather more disturbingly, there's the revelation that Robert Cherry and Harry Wharton of [[BillyBunter the Famous Five]] grew up to be [[spoiler: [[Film/TheThirdMan Harry Lime]] and [[NineteenEightyFour Big Brother]], respectively]].
* ShoutOut: They may as well have called it Shout Out: The Comic Book.
* SkyPirate: Robur and Captain Mors
* SociopathicHero: Hyde and Griffin.
* TheSpymaster: 'M'
* StealthPun: The Reverend Dr. Syn is described as "a mild-mannered clergyman from Kent". "Clark" is regional slang for clergy. That's right, he's a [[{{Superman}} mild-mannered Clark from Kent]].
** In ''Black Dossier'', the XL series of rockets are named for the fate suffered by the previous incarnation; the one used by Allan and Mina is named "Pancake". At the end of their adventure, it explodes. Its successor, naturally, is the ''Series/FireballXL5''.
** Appropriately enough, ''Century: 19'''69''''' seems to have most sex and exploration of sexual mores of any of the League books thus far.
* SteamPunk: Fancy whiz-bang devices everywhere! -- in the first two volumes and ''Century: 1910'' at least.
** The ''Black Dossier'' has several segments that could probably be better labeled RaygunGothic.
* SubmarinePirates: Captain Nemo and his crew.
* TakeThat: ''The Black Dossier'' has several. The [[Series/FireballXL5 X-L]] series of spacecraft are named for an abbreviation of extra-large and it's noted by Mina they could only ever be American because "who else would think that 'extra' starts with an 'X'?" This is in all likelihood a partial dig at the movie, which abbreviated its title as "LXG".
** Also, James Bond's grandpa was a perverted little coward. Bond himself appears in The Black Dossier, and he seems to have retained his ancestor's qualities as, two pages into his appearance, he [[spoiler:tries to rape Mina. She beats him up]], and when Allan shows up, he knocks Bond's pansy ass to the ground, kicks him in the 'nads and mocks him. Further, the Bond in this version is specifically stated to be one who defeated Dr. No - the version played by Sean Connery, who also portrayed Quatermain's character in the movie. And then Moore proceeds to take this UpToEleven in the climax, in which it is revealed that [[spoiler:there never even ''was'' a Dr. No in the first place, Bond had betrayed England to the U.S, and [[MoralEventHorizon murdered one of MI5's own agents]]]].
** A slightly gentler one is directed at "a maker of phosphate drinks" (Coca Cola). The polar bears from their commercials show up in one of the Almanacs, as well as Santa Claus who accidentally killed a representative from the company.
** In ''Century: 2009'', Moore's portrayal of [[spoiler: the Harry Potter world]] is less than flattering. Of the [[spoiler: Hogwarts Express]], he has Andrew Norton declare: [[spoiler: "it runs on sloppily-defined magic principles"]].
* ThatManIsDead in ''The Black Dossier'':
--> '''M''': "Jim, you can call me M. Behind my back, you can even call me [[Series/TheAvengers Mother]]. But [[Film/TheThirdMan Harry]]... Harry died a long time ago in the sewers under Vienna. Let's leave it like that, shall we?
* TheFantasticTropeOfWonderousTitles
* TheyCallMeMisterTibbs: Inverted -- Ishmael prefers Nemo to call him by his first name, rather than "Mr. Mate". [[spoiler:On his deathbed, he does.]] Janni calls him "Mr. Mate", but he lets it slide.
* ThoseWackyNazis: Acording to ''The Black Dossier'', in the[= LOEG=] universe, Hitler is replaced by Adenoid Hynkel from (get ready for this)... the 1940 anti-Nazi film ''TheGreatDictator'' starring Creator/CharlieChaplin; thus ensuring that the same type of facial hair is hated in both worlds.
* TotallyRadical: Mina's efforts to keep up with the times in "Century: 1969" take on this edge, as is noted (and made fun of) by Allan and Orlando; deconstructed, as it's her way of trying to cope with the [[WhoWantsToLiveForever crushing psychological implications of being forever young and immortal]].
* TripodTerror: Lampshaded
* TuxedoAndMartini: The basis of the mockery around James Bond.
* TheUnfettered: Mr. Hyde, increasingly.
* UnreliableNarrator: Orlando, mainly because s/he has been around so long s/he can't remember which historical battles s/he was and wasn't present at.
** WordOfGod also says that s/he is a pathological liar.
* VerbalTic: Griffin has a memorable low chuckle, typically spelled out "Aheheh", with which he punctuates his sentences. It is often also used to inform the reader that Griffin is in a panel (as he is invisible).
* VillainSong: Jack the Ripper himself gets two in the third volume, one about how little things have changed since his killing spree, the other deriding the ruling class and the law for creating a world where people like him exist. He may be a nutter but he can carry a tune.
** Of course he can, ''he's [[spoiler: [[Theatre/TheThreepennyOpera Jack Macheath.]]]]''
* VillainTeamUp: At the end of the 1969 installment, [[spoiler: Haddo possesses [[HarryPotter Tom Riddle]]]].
* WhatKindOfLamePowerIsHeartAnyway: Mina and Allan set alongside the original Victorian League are underwhelming. Much of Mina's second League suffer from this and are relegated to defending themselves with pistols and swords.
** To be fair to Mina, she's more competent than the rest of the League combined because unlike them, she isn't insane.
* WhatCouldHaveBeen: At one point Simon Bisley was considered for regular art duties on the book. It boggles the mind...
* WhoWantsToLiveForever: Initally averted; while the consequences of Orlando's immortality are delved into, it's never a cause for {{Wangst}} and s/he certainly has fun. Likewise, [[spoiler: Mina and Allan]]'s biggest problem with immortality so far is ''keeping sex interesting''. WordOfGod promises that the new book, ''Century'', [[spoiler: will tediously explore Mina and Allan's burnout as they survive to 2010.]]
* YellowPeril: Fu Manchu.
* YouAreACreditToYourRace: Invoked in one of the letter columns in regards to Nemo.
* YouCantFightFate: Done with Janni in Volume Three, wherein fighting fate apparently leads to getting [[spoiler: gangraped]] for your defiance.
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