Alan Moore is a genius of a kind that is very rare and scarce. We are all fortunate that he's still alive and writing in these times. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a strange beast, unlike anything done before in comics though it has a lot of the same concerns as Kurtzman's MAD and the biographies in Spiegelman and Griffith's Arcade, Moore's two favorite magazines of all time. It takes some chutzpah for an English artist to retake English culture from James Bond and Harry Potter and reclaim popular culture as a whole, which Moore says was mostly an English invention.
I think the main thing about League is how it dramatizes concepts in literary criticism and theory. It's one thing to read up on semiotics and another to see it in comics, with all the signs and acquired meanings separated and identified as distinct. This is Moore's great achievement. My favorite volume so far is Century, especially 1910 and 1969, 2009 is a weak conclusion but that's by intention and it works beautifully. The art by Kevin O'Neill is some of the richest in contemporary comics, especially in its capacity to make the ugly beautiful and vice versa. I hope there are more League books, I for one want to see Moore give us a solo Don Quixote adventure...
League of His Own...
Alan Moore is a genius of a kind that is very rare and scarce. We are all fortunate that he's still alive and writing in these times. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a strange beast, unlike anything done before in comics though it has a lot of the same concerns as Kurtzman's MAD and the biographies in Spiegelman and Griffith's Arcade, Moore's two favorite magazines of all time. It takes some chutzpah for an English artist to retake English culture from James Bond and Harry Potter and reclaim popular culture as a whole, which Moore says was mostly an English invention.
I think the main thing about League is how it dramatizes concepts in literary criticism and theory. It's one thing to read up on semiotics and another to see it in comics, with all the signs and acquired meanings separated and identified as distinct. This is Moore's great achievement. My favorite volume so far is Century, especially 1910 and 1969, 2009 is a weak conclusion but that's by intention and it works beautifully. The art by Kevin O'Neill is some of the richest in contemporary comics, especially in its capacity to make the ugly beautiful and vice versa. I hope there are more League books, I for one want to see Moore give us a solo Don Quixote adventure...