Comic Book / The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

aka: The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen Black Dossier

"The British Empire has always encountered difficulty in distinguishing between its heroes and its monsters."

— Campion Bond

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a Genre-Busting serial comic series by writer Alan Moore and artist Kevin O'Neill. It was originally published under Moore's now-defunct America's Best Comics imprint at Wildstorm. After a re-occurrence of creative disputes between Moore and DC (who had purchased Wildstorm in the middle of the run), Moore and O'Neill who owned the series, took the label to Top Shelf and Knockabout Comics, which has published the series from Volume III onwards.

The League was originally envisioned as a Victorian Justice League of America, specifically as a Crisis Crossover of several iconic characters in Victorian-Era English literature teaming up to combat equally iconic villains from the popular fiction of the same era. While initially reading like a Steampunk high adventure story, the later volumes expanded in scope considerably. As Moore clarified in later interviews, the League became less about telling sophisticated adventure stories and became more interested in Deconstruction as a means and an end. The League is set in a parallel universe comprised entirely of characters from different works of fiction, across genres and authors of different styles. It asserts that all fiction is true from the very beginnings of human writing to the future visions dreamed up by science fiction visionaries. It applies Arc Welding to the whole of human literature, theatre, opera, popular music, cinema and television, and of course some odd mentions to comics for good measure.

Published Volumes:

• Volume 1 — The Origins Episode where Campion Bond of MI6 puts together the Team - Mina Murray (formerly Mina Harker from Bram Stoker's Dracula); Allan Quatermain from King Solomon's Mines; Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, twenty years after the events of Robert Louis Stevenson's book; Hawley Griffin, the title character of The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells; and the only character outside of English literature, Captain Nemo, from Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island^note the less renowned sequel where Nemo is revealed to be a Sikh prince, Dakkar of Bundelkhand to combat "The Doctor" of Limehouse. The supplementary story (in the backpages of each issue in the Volume) "Alan and the Sundered Veil" serves as a prequel to the story, following on Quatermain's activities before his encounter with Mina.
• Volume 2 — The gang is still working, and still unhappy about working, with MI6 under the new M - Mycroft Holmes. Their new threat is the Martian Invasion from H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. The supplementary story is The New Traveller's Almanac which serves as a sequel-and-postscript to the story and goes Reference Overdosed like never before, all of literature from Goldfinger to Gormenghast is located here.
• Volume 3: Century — The first Volume published by Moore and O'Neill for Top Shelf. This changed the format from monthly releases to a trilogy of extended issues published annually. It set up an elaborate End of the World as We Know It arc spanning the 20th and early 21st century. Recurring motifs include Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera and Iain Sinclair's Andrew Norton, a time traveler who can visit any part of London's history but only in London. Songs from Brecht and Weill lead to on-panel musical numbers. The supplementary story Minions of the Moons is set in The '60s IN SPACE
  • Chapter 1. What Keeps Mankind Alive? takes place in 1910, where the League investigates a doomsday cult led by magician Oliver Haddo, while simultaneously dealing with a madman killing prostitutes on the waterfront. Meanwhile Janni Dakkar, daughter of Captain Nemo, sets out to pursue a life away from her father's shadow.
  • Chapter 2. Paint It Black goes to The '60s, and features characters from popular music, TV and cinema of the era, as the League pursue Haddo's current scheme and pick up trails from the earlier era. Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll clash against London Gangster and the Occult.
  • Chapter 3. Let It Come Down goes to 2009 and the 21st Century. Millennial culture looks very strange to our heroes who have Seen It All, the Antichrist promised by Haddo is all set to make his mark on the world stage.
• Volume 4: The Tempest — The purported Grand Finale of the entire series. A six-issue series released in 2018 and finally completed in July 2019. A multi-century arc that ties together all the plotlines from the earlier stories and settings, mixed with various obscure superhero comics. Has the distinction of being the last comic Alan Moore will ever write (at least so far according to him).

Spin-Offs, Companion Media and Adaptations

• The Black Dossier — This idiosyncratic book is one part comic, another part Expanded Universe appendix, and an Interquel between Volume 2 and Volume 3. The action shifts from the Victorian Era to the 50s landscape of spy fiction, making references to famous films and TV Shows. The likes of Harry Lime, Emma Peel, Campion Bond's descendant "Jimmy" and other figures from that era make an apperance. The plot concerns an elaborate side-story, which features the titular Dossier as a Framing Device for 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 truly ridiculous level. There's plenty of Genre Shift within the volumes, including an excerpt from a Beatnik novel, 18th Century pornography and a finale rendered in 3D. Disagreements about the release of this comic led to Moore and O'Neill shifting to Top Shelf.
• In March 2013, Moore and O'Neill set-off on a Spin-Off trilogy, revolving around Captain Janni Dakkar, the second Nemo, published in the style of Volume 3, three graphic novels published across three years. Supplementary story involves an interview between Janni and Hildy Johnson, talking about all kinds of adventures in her career as a Science Hero:
  • Nemo: Heart of Ice — Set in 1925, this story features Janni in a race against a team of former Teen Geniuses from the "Edisonades" to a South Pole based on The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and At the Mountains of Madness.
  • Nemo: Roses of Berlin, published in February-March 2014, Janni and her family battle the Berlin of Metropolis ruled by the dictator of Tomania, Adenoid Hynkel. Recurring villains include Ayesha from H. Rider Haggard's She.
  • Nemo: River of Ghosts, published in March 2015, features an 80-year-old Janni going on her final adventure in the Amazon River Basin, to fight the possible resurgence of Ayesha via android duplicates, Hynkel clones and Nazi She-Wolves.
• In addition, there's a film adaption, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or LXG based on the first volume. The film received a mixed reception, proved to be the final appearance of Sean Connery and played a major role in discouraging Alan Moore from all further film adaptations of his works.

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 Nods to British literary tradition and culture, everything from Rupert Bear and other classic Talking Animal characters as Moreau's hybrid monsters, to a Cottingley Fairy in a jar of alcohol at the British Museum. However the League isn't simple adaptations of the original characters and stories. As Moore insists, he is "stealing" these characters, bringing them into fresh contexts and new situations beyond the confines of the original stories, often subject to a Deconstructive Parody and featuring heavy doses of Alternative Character Interpretation. Later volumes often feature controversial depictions and portrayal of famous characters.

Not to be confused with The League of Gentlemen, which is something entirely different. (Although they might be in here somewhere...) Also not to be confused with the Nero Wolfe mystery novel The League of Frightened Men. (Though, again, Wolfe might be in there somewhere too...)

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Tropes # to M

• 3D Comic Book: Anything in The Blazing World is 3D. Glasses are supplied with the comic.
• Acoustic License: A flashback sequence actually shows the confrontation between Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls, something the original story by Arthur Conan Doyle that it's taken from, "The Final Problem", never bothered with (Watson just finds a letter and signs of a struggle and assumes what happened). Doyle thus sidestepped any problems of two men engaging in dialogue right next to a plunging, roaring waterfall, while Moore forges right through with sesquipedalian flair.
• Adaptational Badass: Several characters have gone up from how they were in their original source material. Some from specific adaptations count as well.
  • Hyde. In the original book, Hyde is a "dwarfish" man who is sometimes comical to look at and whose personality swings between bold and timid. In the comic, he's a towering juggernaut with Super-Strength and Super-Senses as well as a powerful personality. Jekyll admits in the comic that Hyde used to be smaller than him, but that Hyde grew as that personality gained dominance. Both these changes can be somewhat justified based on an interpretation from the original book It is mentioned Hyde grew in "stature" but that can be interpreted in literal size which could make him grow to the comics proportions or just in terms of becoming the more heartier persona. (At first Jekyll was a hearty man, Hyde the sicker smaller man) After the first transformation Stevenson writes: "There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very novelty, incredibly sweet." This could be interpreted as Hyde having somewhat different senses from an ordinary person.
  • The Hither people of Gullivar of Mars are much braver warriors than the original book implied where they didn't much fight being forced to offer tribute to another people.
  • Apparently Don Quixote was this, as he became a member of the original incarnation of the League headed by Prospero, and must have been a fairly accomplished adventurer, rather than the delusional old man he was in his own novel.
• Adaptational Modesty: John Carter is fully clothed as opposed to wearing just a loincloth and sandals like in his book series. Gullivar Jones is a minor example, dressed as Lawrence of Arabia instead of his navy uniform.
• Adaptational Nationality: Apart from having a French-sounding name, there's no indication in the original story that Dr. Moreau is actually from there, as he's said to have lived in Britain before moving to the island. Here he's the uncle of real world French artist Gustave Moreau.
• Adaptational Skimpiness: The Amazon Women on the Moon are portrayed completely nude.
• Adaptational Villainy: Quite a few characters who are Hero of Another Story are presented in a decidedly darker light in the League books. As per Moore's quote in that section for Genre Deconstruction purposes we see elements of how these characters may be interpreted.
  • In general, spies, whether good or bad, are regarded as inherently shifty characters with M, the leader of MI6 and the creator of the league, revealed in Volume 1 to be James Moriarty and his successor, the nominally good Mycroft Holmes shown to be if possible, more ruthless. The Black Dossier takes this even further with a very negative portrayal of Cold War era spy fiction, MI6 pulling The Coup and installing Big Brother from Nineteen Eighty-Four and being led by Harry Lime with characters like Emma Peel shown as little more than an Unwitting Pawn and James Bond a misogynist scumbag who is a traitor to England and working for the CIA and becomes a Karma Houdini Villain with Good Publicity.
  • Boys Adventure Heroes from Charles Hamilton's Greyfriars School stories has the Famous Five's leader Harry Wharton becoming Big Brother with other members of the gang forming the party of Ingsoc, and Billy Bunter shown as a pathetic Manchild who also rats out Mina and Allan Quatermain. Other adventure heroes who are shown as less than noble is Tom Swift or Tom Swyfte who is a racist and Dirty Coward who cares more about his own life than that of his team and whose inventions revolve around developing weapons because he's Only in It for the Money rather than For Science!. In Volume III: Century, Moore builds his climax to a prolonged Take That! on Harry Potter, showing the main character as a whiny Spoiled Brat who is also an Eldritch Abomination who murdered the entire supporting cast of his series. In the same process, Moore name-drops some other magical school boy characters as having been monitored as well. In their own works these characters were generally the heroes and stars. In Moore's League they grew up to be just as villainous as those they fought.
  • Nyctalope appears as a member of the French version of the League; in his own source material he was a genuine hero, but here he is among a team that were genuine villains in their sources or at the very least morally questionable.
  • A whole world is implied to have gotten this treatment. Among the Vril-ya, the word for "evil" or "sin" is "Nania". Though antagonists in the series itself did hold views that maybe Narnians had the whole Black-and-White Morality backwards.
  • In a glimpse of the distant future, the Legion of Super-Heroes are enforcers for a dictatorial Galactic Conqueror called "the Marslord". It's left unclear if they're outright pro-dictatorship or if, like the Victorian League, they're simply willing to put up with a measure of shady politics, but either way it's a bit darker than the usual Legion.
  • American folk hero Paul Bunyan is part of the monstrous horrors in Prospero's apocalypse.
• Adaptational Wimp: Quatermain is imagined here is a timid, strung-out old junkie who is often ashamed of himself. Even when he regains some of his old verve, he's never quite the bold and confident adventurer he is in the original. It was true Quatermain became more vulnerable through his original stories he never sunk to the levels he is here.
  • Emma Peel who was a really over the top level spy in her TV series is presented as more an unknowing pawn in her appearance. Although she may have averted this by the time 2009 came along.
  • "Jimmy" Bond can be easily fooled by a pretty face and his fancy gadgets tend to backfire on him in humorous ways.
  • J-R4 is subject to this in The Tempest, who in the source materiel was secretly the Big Bad. Here, he's just an awkward reserve agent who is unceremoniously killed off by the rejuvenated James Bond.
• All Myths Are True: Or perhaps more accurately, all fiction is true. Or is at least partially true in some cases, like that there was no doctor.
• All There in the Manual: Knowledge of the books of the period (all of them) is very helpful to understanding the subtle goings-on, if not the main plot.
  • The Black Dossier offers a mountain of information on the previous leagues, their activities are chronicled in supplementary stories. You can seriously read a 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 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 "In Which Alan Moore Tries To Kill Me". Said sections have one obscure Victorian reference per sentence.
  • Each Volume ends with a text-only supplement that actually provides clues and Info Dump on the Expanded Universe. In the Spin-Off Nemo trilogy, it takes the form of an interview between Janni Dakkar and Hildy Johnson from Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday.
• Alternate History: Several real-life historical and celebrity figures are replaced by fictional counterparts. The presence of various fictional characters and elements results in accelerated technology, such as Steampunk and Raygun Gothic, and space travel is a lot more advanced and widespread. Extraterrestrials exist elsewhere in the Solar System, and many come or are brought to Earth starting with the Martian invasion.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: invoked Moore shows most of the characters he uses here in a different light than their original works.
• Angels, Devils and Squid: In the League's universe, Elohim are the Angels, and the Great Old Ones function as both the Devils and the Squid.
• Anyone Can Die: By the end of Volume 3 of Century, Mina is the only original member of the league who's still alive.
• Aristocrats Are Evil: These appear with a regularity you'd expect in a universe like this. Of special note is King Jacob, whose puritanical tyranny led to the death of magic in England, and the twisted, degenerate nobles from Silling Castle, whose evil was so horrendous that The Scarlet Pimpernel states that he regrets having ever saved them during the French Revolution.
• Artifact Title: The League was officially disbanded between the events of Century: 1910 and The Black Dossier, whittling the cast of characters down to a Trio of Extraordinary Gentlemen by the final act. Not to mention that the book's original Victorian setting, which the title is meant to evoke, has been out the window since The Black Dossier (which took place in the 1950s), with the last two volumes taking place in the 1960s and the 2000s, respectively.
  • In conventional terms of a group, probably, but Moore has always insisted that the League was more of a metaphorical crossover than a literal superhero story. So the Artifact Title here is a Justified Trope.
• Artificial Gravity;
  • The Amazons on the moon live in areas with air and gravity generated by monoliths.
  • The space Nautilus has generates gravity through its own momentum.
• As You Know: Less so in matters of plot or narrative, and more in terms of the many references to other works in the series. In later volumes especially, when Moore is dealing with more modern creations and so has to work around copyright, meaning he often cannot outright name the character or story being referred to without getting into potential legal trouble, he often has to resort to rather roundabout ways of making the point. This can at times lead to somewhat tortuous and strained examples of the characters essentially telling each other things they should already know or wouldn't really bother explaining out loud, just to include a reference Moore wants to make. For example, this review criticises Century 1969 for this trope by pointing out several panels which basically just boil down to the characters pointlessly discussing street names that happen to be references to Iain Sinclair and Michael Moorcock stories.
• Aside Glance: Parodied when Mr. Apollo winks at the reader but is immediately asked who he's winking at. To which he apologizes saying he has a facial tic that affects a lot of superheroes.
• Asshole Victim:
  • The second volume has Griffin beaten and raped to death by Hyde. Given that Griffin was helping the Martians on top of being a sadistic and sociopathic rapist and had beaten up Mina before Hyde subjected him to this ghastly fate, he really deserved it.
  • Tom Swyfte in the Nemo trilogy ends up irrecoverably driven to madness after escaping from a Shoggoth. He is established as being self-centered, misogynist, and racist, so it's really hard to feel sorry for him.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: Christian disappears into the Blazing World at the end of his affiliation with Prospero's Men, and from there, presumably finds a way to return to his own shining country, as he is never seen again.
• Asshole Victim: Normally, beating and raping someone to death is a Moral Event Horizon, but when the victim is Griffin...
• Author Appeal:
  • The ménage 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 Nineteen Eighty-Four and the various exploits (in more than one way) of the eighteenth-century League courtesy of Fanny Hill.
  • Between Mina and Quatermain in the main books and Jenny Nemo and Broad-Arrow Jack in "Heart of Ice", younger women have a tendency to end up with much older men in this series.
  • On a less sexual note, his deep love of Victoriana is prominent throughout the first two volumes, and his enjoyment of punk and the hippie movements of the 1960s in the third. Of course, this comes with a certain ugly dark side, see Nostalgia Filter.
  • Really, whether a historical or mythological figure lives up to their hype, was more of a dynamo than advertised, or was secretly a useless degenerate is all up to Moore's discretion.
• Author Avatar: Quatermain in the first two volumes (and Vol 3. Part 3), The Duke Of Milan in the third.
• Author Tract: Despite Moore's really impressive reading acumen on witness in this series he also clearly hammered in many of his on view points into the worldbuilding of the series. By the end it can be argued one can't fully understand Moore's intentions without knowing his framework for how he sees the world.
  • Allan Quatermain makes one think that Moore views Britain much as Garth Ennis does America; a skilled, principled Gentleman Adventurer who keeps degenerating into a babbling drug addict when he lacks a clear enemy to fight, only to drag himself to his feet and fight once more whenever his country needs him. Though he claims to be unwilling to fight the Antichrist, he shows up anyway, dies heroically, and dies in Mina Harker's arms while she calls him her hero. Every woman who has loved him over his long life then bear him back to Africa, where he is honorably buried. The final panel of Volume 3 is a respectful shot of his grave as the sun sets.
  • Moore hates spy characters due to his anarchist beliefs against shady authority. 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 in comparison to his film counterpart. Book Bond originally displayed quite a bit of misogyny but did soften as the series went on, but here Moore took it up to eleven and kept it there.
    • President Palmer casts all blame for millennial economic and environmental crises on the "Bartlet administration", claiming its Counter Terrorism Unit will end the recession in just 24 hours.
    • Perhaps in that vein, the one spy he gives a pat is a "disillusioned CIA operative" named Westen, who reveals that the modern League's problems with the British government were caused by American double agents - one of which killed the modern M's father and witch-hunted Murray.
  • Moore also portrays school institutions as seedy places with darker motives. Miss Coote's, Greyfriars, Cliff House and Hogwarts are all portrayed as indoctrination centers for pupils to become what prejudices its leadership desires. Greyfriars and Cliff House for military intelligence. Hogwarts for the Antichrist. This isn't as surprising given Moore has often mentioned school was his first experience with class difference and bullying. Though we should note, while Moore is treating the institutions as shady places the League books do play some concepts used by the real-life institutions rather straight.
  • Century as a whole can be seen as Moore's commentary on other views of magic. Moore, who while embracing his cranky wizard persona, personally takes a more grounded belief that magic is simply ideas that can impact real life. He sees art as a form of spellcasting. His opinion on actual supernatural believers doesn't appear positive. The Aleister Crowley Expy Oliver Haddo is treated as a main antagonist whose plan for a new Aeon (in real life ushering in this new aeon was one of Crowley's main goals however it had nothing to do with an antichrist or moonchild) is made to be a huge failure. His bold plan for an Antichrist gives him an incompetent whiny millennial Harry Potter. It is not a stretch to see that his severed head is taken away into the blazing world, which represents Moore's idea space magic, as a dig at Crowley and his ilk.
  • In Century: 2009, his portrayal of Harry Potter is generally quite mean-spirited and satirical, making fun of its Worldbuilding and cast of characters with the single exception of Severus Snape, who gets a "Facing the Bullets" One-Liner, and whose in-universe dismissal of Harry as the Antichrist; an Entitled Bastard celebrity coasting off better wizards is Moore's own view of the character and its series and influence, an opinion made particularly transparent when he has God appear and destroy him — in the form of Mary Poppins, self-proclaimed guardian of the world's children and their imaginations. Tying into the above Moore's concept of magic also likely plays apart that Moore thinks less of authors who use magic in fiction to be whatever the plot wants it to be. The League book even calls this out as "sloppily defined magical principles".
  • Even further Moore's dislike of fiction for fiction's sake is also clearly evident tied in with his dislike of capitalism's impact on fiction in both Century and Tempest. His direct views against James Bond and Harry Potter as series in plain view many of the popular literary characters from the 1960s onwards aren't featured at all. Moore has directly called out what he perceives as a cultural decline in how fiction is handled. Moore intends art to be able to provoke bigger thoughts and discussions and that ones that don't are shallow escapism for various fantasies. Moore elaborated that even with this he doesn't think ALL of modern literature is as bleak but it is also clear this is an attitude he shares on other modern works that contributed to how he wrote the League world in 2009 and Tempest. See New Media Are Evil for more.
  • In regards to the Nemo Trilogy, attention has been called to an old essay Moore wrote about the contrasting viewpoints of science from the Victorian-age onward. It is not surprising elements of this have influenced the world building of the League. Here the works of Jules Verne or H. G. Wells are held up to a higher standard and played straight for being mostly For Science! or forewarnings with does of Do Not Do This Cool Thing. By contrast the science of the American Edisonaide kids like Tom Swift are mocked for focusing on their desires being far less noble. While it true that both inspired real individuals to invent in their adult lives such the Nautilus inspired Jacques Cousteau to become an oceanographer specifically because he wanted to be partially like Captain Nemo and Edisonade books were eaten up by young kids who wanted to invent things of their own. But on the flipside the sole builder of tasers is Axon; a Predatory Business that goes to extreme extents to protect its monopoly on weapons cops use to torture suspects and named it after Tom Swift. Meanwhile the closest person in real life to Captain Nemo's non scientific goals can be brutally honest said to be Osama Bin Laden (in which Moore made the Bin Laden expy in League a descendant of Nemo).
  • Moore's immaterial concept of the "idea space" crops up as a major plot point in Tempest. Where in Moore's perception we as human society have let our fictions control and transform us into the cultural decline mentioned above. This is portrayed in-universe with Prospero unleashing fictions back on Earth and making more references to real life inside of the fictitious world of the League.
  • Moore even sent one last bullet at superheroes within The Tempest. With none other than Sherlock Holmes offering that maybe the world is better off without people who are more super than another.
• Badass Boast: Mary Poppins AKA God - gives out a string of these as she's facing off with the Antichrist:
  • On their meeting:
  The Antichrist: Who the fuck are you?
  Mary Poppins: I have a great many responsibilities. Foremost among these, however, is my concern for the children. I am concerned regarding their wellbeing, and the healthy development of their imaginations. I am concerned regarding their behavior... And I'm afraid, young man, that I don't care for you at all.
  The Antichrist: I'm well famous, actually. I'm in a book of the Bible!
  Mary Poppins: Tsk. Just one book? I'm on every page. Who did you think you were talking to?
  I rocked the fretful baby gods to sleep before time started... and I am companion to the women who pasted up the stars. The quarters of the world bound unto my compass. I have taken tea with earthquakes. I know what the bee knows... and you really are a dreadful little boy.
• Badass Normal: The majority of the pre-Victorian League count as this, as well as most of those succeeding it, but Mina Murray stands out - a dainty, slightly-built music teacher rubbing shoulders with the likes of Captain Nemo and Edward Hyde! Other noteable ones include Classy Cat-Burglar AJ Raffles who was able to along with Mina go toe to toe with Fantomas and the Nyctalope, and Nathaniel Bumpo and The Scarecrow/Dr Syn/Captain Clegg from the 17th century League.
• Badass Santa: 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 familiars. He also apparently murdered a few employees of the Coca-Cola company when they tried to buy the rights to his image.
• The Bad Guy Wins: In The Tempest, Prospero releases fantastical creatures from the Blazing World back onto Earth, and they begin overriding humanity. Also, he manipulates the Moon's inhabitants into conquering the Solar System, setting up an interplanetary dictatorship that will last for at least a millenia.
• Belated Happy Ending: This happens to Frankenstein's monster. While searching for the North Pole to commit suicide after his creator's death, he instead stumbles across Toyland and its artificial inhabitants, who accept him as one of their own. He even finds love there, with Queen Olympia, a humanoid automaton who sees him as a kindred spirit, if made from flesh rather than machinery.
• Beneath the Earth: Several places in the League's world are this, such as the Vril-ya kingdom, Coal City, and Grande Euscare.
• Big Bad: The only book that doesn't have a specific antagonistic ringleader is Volume II, which features the Martian hordes. In Volume I, the main antagonist is Fu Manchu (only not really, it's Moriarty), in Black Dossier, it's Harry Lime, and in Volume III: Century, it's Oliver Haddo (up until the last book, where he becomes the Greater-Scope Villain to the Antichrist - Harry Potter). Volume IV: Tempest, meanwhile, seems to have James Bond as the central antagonist. However, Bond is later turns out to be a Big Bad Wannabe and Unwitting Pawn to the real antagonist, his predecessor Prospero and Gloriana.
• Bigger Is Better in Bed: Sinbad, according to Orlando. Orlando claims in Century: 1910 that he had a "pego like a stallion's".
• Big Guy Rodeo: Quatermain attempts this against Mr Hyde. It doesn't work, so he feeds him a mouthful of laudanum.
• Bilingual Bonus: 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, Allen sees the titular Yellow Peril torturing a man by writing on him with paint-stripper gel. 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. ^note "We have volunteered. His sex is colossal."
  Mina: She, um, she says they volunteered because of his personality.
• Biological Weapons Solve Everything: It is revealed that the bacteria which killed the Martians during the events of War of the Worlds was in fact a hybrid of Anthrax and Streptococcus developed by Dr. Moreau while working for the British Military.
• Bittersweet Ending: The series ends with Emma killing Jimmy, Mina and Jack Nemo declaring their love for each other, Captain Universe marrying Electro-Girl, and the entire crew of the new Nautilus made immortal so they never have to worry about dying. Although, they had to escape Earth because Prospero had released fantastical creatures from the Blazing World, overrunning humanity and turning Earth into a dystopia, while the Moon's inhabitants had conquered Venus and Mars, setting up a tyrannical empire destined to last for at least a millenium.
• Bizarre Alien Senses: Edward Hyde can see people's body heat - including Griffin's.
• Blood Knight: Orlando really enjoys fighting, with a bit of Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass for good measure.
• Body Horror:
  • 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 the Invisible College.
  • Dr Moreau's hybrids, which are presented not as graceful humanoids, but as twisted, half-insane beastmen whose very existence is a mockery of nature.
  • In the New Traveler's Almanac, this is the fate of the girl who fell into a mirror into a world were the regular laws of physics and logic are not applied and her organs were reversed as well as having the inability to eat our world's food.
• Bolivian Army Ending: Tempest ends with humanity losing a war against fairies. Then a time skip has a Dalek invasion fleet heading our way.
• Borrowed Without Permission: Dr Jekyll once thought he had a terrible evil side because he once stole a book. (And was attracted to men.) According to Hyde, he actually had borrowed it and just never got round to returning it.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: The dinner scene in volume two, in which Hyde reveals some of his origins. And that he'd (Disturbing spoiler, highlight to read:) 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.)
• Break the Cutie: 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?"
• Broad Strokes: Moore takes this approach to much of the fiction he incorporates, which is understandable because of how nigh-impossible it would be to fit so much fiction into one world without needing to adjust somethings.
• Captain Ersatz: Numerous real-life Captain Ersatzes appear in Vol. 4: The Tempest and are confronted by American owners who own the trademark for the American superheroes they are blatantly copying.
• Canon Welding: Moore has done this with the comic, making vague references to the source material for Ozymandias and The Black Freighter. Oh, sure, it's only references to the inspirations for them, and Moore would probably rather have his skin boiled than actually go further than that, but this is Alan Moore, there are no coincidences. As an aside, Moore is a close friend to Moorcock, close enough that Moorcock has allowed Moore to put in some Moorcock characters into the League series free of charge.
• Character Exaggeration: A lot of characters portrayed in a negative light have certain flaws taken to their logical extreme.
  • Pollyanna to the same extent we use The Pollyanna trope. She's still glad even after a near rape, which she was not that oblivious in her source.
  • Bulldog Drummond's racism (the reason the original stories haven't aged well) is turned up to eleven.
  • As is James Bond's misogyny from the original Ian Fleming stories.
  • In the Nemo spin-off Tom Swift can also be called this. In his original stories he was fairly up-to-date for his age. Whether he'd have grown up to be that callous for now questionable activities is a bit of an exaggeration.
  • invokedThe Moonchild's teenage Wangst and obsession with fame and coping with celebrity is likewise an exaggeration of the source character's flaws, in addition to a pastiche of millennial culture in general. Sure, Harry Potter could whine a lot, but he never resorted to a school shooting to solve his problems.
• Chekhov's Skill: Hyde's thermal vision. This being Hyde, he's smart enough not to tell Griffin about it, knowing that it might come in handy sometime. It is actually revealed to the reader in a single panel of a Hyde & Griffin in volume 1 showing Griffin in infrared. It isn't revealed that this was through Hyde's vision until the climax of volume 2.
  'I've always been able to see you'
• Chekhov's Classroom: Very subtly done. In Century: 1969, Norton mentions Helter Skelter and Holden Caulfield - both fictions that inspired real-life killings. By Century: 2009, Harry Potter has become one, too, inspiring school massacres in America.
• 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. It's true she was a Damsel in Distress in her source material, but that situation wasn't entirely on her own fault.
• Clothing-Concealed Injury: Mina Harker always wears scarves to conceal the hideous scars on her neck from Dracula's attack.
• Clueless Aesop: Several reviewers and commentators (such as some members of the discussion panel here) argued that Moore's argument that twenty-first century culture in Century: 2009 is decadent and inferior compared to the culture produced by the generations that came before is weakened by Moore's obvious lack of familiarity with twenty-first century fiction and culture. The issue contained fewer overall references to contemporary fiction than previous volumes had^note There is an argument that for pure comparison it is better to not utilize examples from mediums that have more limitations, ie book vs film. This point however doesn't seem to ever been raised within the comic., and several of these references were themselves questionable, inaccurate or somewhat outdated. For these critics, this had the effect less of the intended searing indictment of modern culture and more of Moore coming across as a bit of a Grumpy Old Man complaining about things he barely understood.
  • In an interview with Padraig O'Mealoid, Moore acknowledged this criticism but defended his viewpoint:
  Alan Moore: I would say, that if you’re talking about a line of progress, if it can be called progress, that runs from Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, to Donald Cammell's Performance, to Harry Potter, I don’t think you can really see that as anything but a decline.
• Colonized Solar System: Humanity developed space travel earlier after reverse engineering Martian technology. By 2010 they had colonies on the Moon, Mars and Venus. Given that various old planetary romance stories are canon in this universe, most of the solar system had breathable air and native aliens.
• Composite Character
  • Orlando is pretty much every fictional character with that name ever or similar names. They are Orlando from Orlando: A Biography, Roland from The Song of Roland, Orlando Furioso, O from The Story of O and Orlando the Marmalade Cat (he claims to have been turned into a cat because of a curse at one point). And at the end of Tempest is revealed to also be Sally Quasar from Moore's own The Ballad of Halo Jones
  • Mr. Hyde may also be the Orangutan that murders people in The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Or people are assuming he is the same killer in a subversion of a Copy Cat Killer.
  • Prospero from The Tempest is also Johannes Suttle from The Alchemist.
  • Here The Mi-Go of the Cthulhu Mythos are also The Morlocks from The Time Machine. They also may be the source (or one of them) for the Yeti.
  • The Famous Five of Greyfriars get this in Black Dossier: Harry Wharton has become Big Brother, and Robert Cherry is Harry Lime (with a dose of Mother and James Bond's M). Johnny Bull's real last name is revealed as "Night" (as in Emma Peel's father) and he apparently makes spy gadgets like cars, so it's possible he's meant to be the founder of Knight Industries.
  • Janni Nemo is a combination of Low-Dive Jenny from The Threepenny Opera and a child of Captain Nemo from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. In Leagues we don't really learn that much of Nemo's family other than that they had existed, so it's fair to count Janni here in that sense.
  • The Antichrist is a combination of Aleister Crowley's Moon Child and Harry Potter. He also spouts a line from Harry Enfield's Kevin the Teenager.
  • Emma Peel of The Avengers (1960s) is also the Judi Dench M from the modern James Bond movies.
• Compressed Vice: Very averted with Quatermain's opium addiction, which he can't kick even after sixty-odd years of immortality.
• Continuity Nod: To a lot of continuity; its Back Story is a distilled mixture of every book written ever, from Dickens to erotica.
  • As time has gone on the comic has engulfed all of fiction, not just written books or written books based on other mediums. For characters that have both a literature and other incarnation it can vary on the character. Moore defied the changing of Nemo from an Indian prince to an Englishmen staying true to the book. On the same token Jack Carter is clearly modeled more after the Get Carter than his literary version. This has been met with both fandom rejoicing and major criticism on Moore's world building.
• Cool Old Guy: C. Auguste 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.
• Crack Pairing: invoked Since the series deals with the relationships between various fictional characters, this happens quite a bit within the series. Most visibly with Quartermain and Murray, but it happens with minor characters as well. Frankenstein's monster and his wife Olympia from Tales of Hoffman come to mind.
• Crapsack World: Particularly by Volume II. Even moreso at the end of Volume 3 where the characters state that 21st Century Anglo-American society isn't so different from the Victorian era.
  • Even ignoring the in-universe perception of the modern period as a Crapsack World by the originally-Victorian protagonists, Moore seems to have gone to great lengths to make the entire setting into a dystopia, re-interpreting many beloved characters are objective, irredeemable villains (case in point: Harry Potter is the Antichrist and the protagonists of Stingray are insinuated to be rapists) and the world in general seems to be much worse-off than real-life, such as Captain Nemo's grandson Jack Nemo being a fictional equivalent to Osama bin Laden and could potentially destroy the world all on his own if he wanted to and Britain having gone through a mercifully short totalitarian regime based on Nineteen Eighty-Four. It borders on flanderization and makes you wonder if this is actually an evil-twin mirror-universe of our own.
  • The world is implied to get worse in the future during The Tempest. Satin Astro warns of numerous horrors being inflicted on the world, including the world being taken over by a dictator on Mars and ravaged by warfare between sentient ape-men and living machines. And when Prospero begins his attack, he ends up unleashing numerous mythical monsters onto the world, triggering a worldwide apocalyptic scenario. By the end, the main characters abandon Earth and just observe as Earth is attacked by the likes of the Romulans and the Daleks.
• Creator Cameo: Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill try to gatecrash Captain Universe and Electrogirl's wedding but get Thrown Out the Airlock by Hugo Coghlan.
• Creator Provincialism: Most of the characters are based off English works, just as the writer and the artist are English. That's fine and dandy for the initial Victorian setting, but it's quite jarring to see how few, say, American and Japanese references appear when the plot travels to 2009. The fact that famous English post-Victorian era characters like James Bond and Harry Potter receive no small amount of Adaptational Villainy hasn't helped either.
  • This is averted however in the supplementary material, especially The New Traveller's Almanac which has references to Colombian, French, Russian literature and other obscurities. Later volumes also make heavy references to German playwright Bertolt Brecht and Jules Verne (whose creations include Captain Nemo) is a French author. Likewise, The Nemo Trilogy makes references to Godzilla and German Expressionism.
    • Amusingly, the Almanac lampshades that most of the significant locations and happenings in North America are along the eastern seaboard, leaving the reader to realize it’s because that’s where the authors of the various source materials lived.
  • One reason why Moore plays this trope straight is that his books are about the darker aspects of culture and the way literary imaginations of certain places and events (such as how English people imagine African, Chinese and Indian writers) coloured real-life visions of these cultures. The motif of a Constructed World Alternate Universe based entirely on fictional depictions of the past is partially a commentary on the limits and virtues of the fictions various cultures dream up. The original volumes set themselves directly in England, though one could make a counterpoint Moore didn't introduce many characters from those cultures actual folklore and early literature.
• Crossover Cosmology: The world of the League has the Great Old Ones, Elohim from The Bible, the various gods from Greek, Norse, Celtic and other mythologies, and a God who happens to be Mary Poppins.
• Crossover Relatives: being a Massive Multiplayer Crossover comic, the League frequently reveals characters from the various works it adapts to be relatives. Especially if they happen to share the same surname:
  • In the prequel story "Alan and the Sundered Veil'', it is revealed that Randolph Carter is a great-nephew of John Carter.
  • Both being spies, Tara King from The Avengers (1960s) is now the sister of Jason King.
  • Captain Universe's alter-ego, Jim Logan is now a brother to Jet-Ace Logan. Short-lived superhero and Captain Space, Defender of Earth! from British comic strips respectively.
  • Dean Moriarty from On the Road by Jack Kerouac is a descendant of James Moriarty from the Sherlock Holmes stories.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Jimmy vs. Emma Peel is so hilariously one-sided it might as well be an execution. She disarms, cripples, and kills him in exactly five moves. He never even lands one on her.
• Darker and Edgier: Everything is portrayed a lot grittier and darker than the source material. The Nautilus gains a new, darker look and a lot More Dakka but a lot less Dakkar in volume three.
• Deadpan Snarker: Griffin tends to make cutting remarks.
• Death by Cameo;
  • Peter Rabbit gets torn apart by foxes in the corner of a Volume II panel.
  • Mr. Toad is later seen preserved in a jar of formaldehyde at the secret annex.
  • Bill and Ben's skeletons can be seen in Greyfriars.
  • Big Vern can be seen shooting himself alongside various other Viz characters in 2010. To be fair most of his strios end with him doing this.
  • Rupert Bear's stuffed corpse is seen aboard the Nautilus in Volume IV alongside a dead Pathetic Shark from Viz preserved in a tank.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: Most of the main characters, see on page.
• Deconstruction Crossover: One of the most typical examples. Probably, even the Trope Codifier. The series shows many different fictional characters coexisting for the purpose of showing the downsides and flaws of what their stories would be like in a more realistic and less idealistic light.
• Deconstructive Parody: Moore freely admits that characters he doesn't like will not be treated very kindly. See the above about worst qualities taken to high levels, these characters get the worst of this treatment.
  • Pollyanna's ceaseless happiness and cheeriness is taken to extremes when, after being nearly raped by Griffin, she is still happy and smiling.
  • James Bond is shown as a rapist thug, who murders Emma Peel's father and is a traitor to England, secretly a CIA agent. Moore believes that the unsavory aspects of Bond in the original Ian Fleming stories were made Lighter and Softer in the movies with Sean Connery giving him Adaptational Attractiveness. The humiliating manner of his death (see above) just rams the point home.
    • Additionally, the presence of "J-series" agents derived from him and his rejuvenation at the Pool of Kor double as a deconstruction of the nature of Long Runner franchises that keep characters around for decades after their debut.
  • Harry Potter is The Antichrist appointed by Oliver Haddo/Tom Riddle/Voldemort to bring the new aeon, whose adventures in Hogwarts was all a ruse to keep him diverted from his real path.^note He has an epic Freak Out and goes on a murder spree at Hogwarts, murdering Ron, Hermione, Draco, McGonagall, Ginny, Dumbledore, Hagrid and Snape (who gives a Defiant to the End speech) before settling at Grimmauld Place for ten years taking anti-depressant pills and procrastinating on self pity. His portrayal as a whiny Spoiled Brat is Moore's Take That! on the millennial culture's obsession with celebrity, riffing on the implications of Harry as The Hero being famous for doing nothing, content to be an Unwitting Pawn while remaining essentially mediocre in skill and knowledge and yet receive unmerited fame and praise, a Character Exaggeration of Harry's original portrayal, the sentiments of which are voiced by Severus Snape.
  • In general, this is part of the parody the "British Adventure Hero". Allan Quatermain gets a Pretender Diss from Moriarty for being a poor replacement for Sherlock Holmes. James Bond is passed the baton of the "diss" from Allan Quatermain and likewise Harry Potter gets clobbered by Mary Poppins, but not before, literally, pissing Quatermain to death. It's a meta-commentary on how the idea of The Hero and what made them heroic has changed — Holmes, Quatermain, Bond and Potter being at various times the most famous heroes of British culture and indeed representative of Englishness as a whole. In the Victorian era, being heroic meant being smart and being an Action Survivor, while later on it involved working as government hitman or being an entitled celebrity who was an Unwitting Pawn all his life.
  • A brief example in the Black Dossier: It is mentioned that in a small U.S. town in the 1950s, Galley-Wag was accused of pimping his Dutch dolls and imprisoned, implied to be because he was seen as "a Negro". The town in question? Mayberry. Yes, Moore quite subtly shows the downside of the idyllic small-town attitudes of The '50s.
• Counter-Productive Warning: Mina demands Haddo tell her everything about his plot involving the "Moonchild", leading to Haddo looking into it and, well, plot something involving the Moonchild, otherwise known as the Antichrist and Harry Potter. Also a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy — Mina only thought Haddo had a plot involving the Moonchild because Carnacki the Ghost-Finder told her that was what he was going to do.
• Deconstructor Fleet: Moore takes full advantage of a world containing all of fiction to deconstruct almost any characters and tropes he can work in.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: As Moore states in the Quotes page, the comics tackle the fact that if characters like Quatermain, Invisible Man, James Bond and others were to be created in the 21st Century, they would not be as well liked as they were in their own time.
• Direct Line to the Author: 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.
• Dirty Commies: The Ingosc government explicitly grew out of a socialist-leaning coterie in the British government. Possibly subverted: post-Ingsoc, the British government abruptly about-faces to being hardcore anti-socialist, with minimal changes in leadership. They scale back only slightly on their oppressive policies, and only because they were getting difficult to maintain rather than out of ethical concerns.
• Disproportionate Retribution: 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 you too will get ass-raped along the way.
• Distant Finale: The end of Tempest skips to 2164 with the characters living as immortals on a Space Station with a resurrected Mr. Hyde.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: In Century: 2009, the Invisible College school massacre is framed and discussed as if it were Columbine-style school massacre where the student doing the massacring has magic powers. In addition, the panels in which the massacre is actually portrayed resemble a first-person shooter video game. Fitting, since video games were blamed for Columbine in real life.
• The Dragon:
  • "Jimmy" serves as the main flunky of M in The Black Dossier.
  • "Jackie Boy" for Vic Dakin in Century: 1969.
• Dread Zeppelin: In volume 1, Professor Moriarty and Fu Manchu both have cavorite-powered airships with which they plan to attack London, but only Moriarty gets the chance to actually use his. It's a huge black ship with a batlike gargoyle atop the hull.
• Dysfunction Junction: Maybe this is what happens when you mash characters from writers in different styles and genres but the League never coheres and performs the function that it was created for. Their biggest success was in Vol. 1 whereas Vol. 2 is filled with betrayal and Chronic Backstabbing Disorder and Vol 3. shows the 20th Century as a relentless Trauma Conga Line for all and at the end, the League is unrecognizable in its modern form. Though considering that Alan Moore wanted to narrate a Myth Arc of cultural decline, this seems a deliberate action on his part.
• Dystopia Is Hard: It's specifically shown that not only did the Ingsoc government only cover Britain itself, like some interpretations of Nineteen Eighty-Four speculates, it also didn't last more than a few years, from the end of WW2 to the early 50s. With Big Brother being assassinated in secret by James Bond.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • The theme of deconstruction existed in the early volumes but was more more subdued within the main narrative. Asking more such questions about "can you distinguish the heroes from the monsters" or "how does a team of wildly different people stay together". From The Black Dossier onwards, Moore started more heavily focusing on deconstructive Author Tract that if someone isn't familiar with Moore's personal thoughts, you'd never fully understand why he does what he does on the pages.
  • In The New Traveler's Almanac there were a lot of references to literature in the first half of the 20th century and some from the latter half. However when the timeline of the series actually got to those points of time, next to none of them or their fellows were utilized in the plot proper. Due to clever fan sleuthing it came to light several works referenced in the New Traveler's Almanac were never translated into English and Moore more than likely learned of them from a published encyclopedia of fictional places. More than likely explaining why they would be utilized there but bypassed as the series became more about Author Tract and New Media Are Evil.
• Eldritch Abomination: This series has its fair share of unfathomably hideous and weird creatures.
  • H.G. Wells' Martians.
  • Lovecraft's own make an appearance... in a Jeeves and Wooster story. Quatermain and Mina also comes across one of them when they're investigating the bizarre occurrences in New England, alongside Randolph Carter.
    • They also show up in a prequel story concerning Quatermaine's activities just after he faked his death, where his body is possessed by a nameless Elder Thing while his spirit encounters the Time Traveller, John Carter and Randolph Carter on the astral plane.
    • Nyarlathotep itself makes an appearance as a "respected diplomat" from Yuggoth to the Blazing World.
    • Nyarlathotep and pals also feature in a William Burroughs style novelette, in which they masquerade as Burrough's Nova Mob (a kind of Mind Virus/ interplanetary crime group/ linguistic terrorist organization. Makes Just as Much Sense in Context)
  • And let's not forget the Antichrist.
• Eldritch Location: The Mountains Of Madness, Present Land, and Arkham, all obvious examples of this trope, are all included or mentioned.
  • Mina also describes the Phantoms tunnels beneath the Paris Opera House as this, describing them as "an abysmal place, where the walls still echoed with grief and rage".
  • Castle Dracula in Romania. Mina and Allan explore it in the early 1900's, with Mina half-hoping, half-dreading that Dracula might wait for her there. The castle turns out to be long-abandoned and in ruins, but there is one unsettling find left: someone has left several letters written in blood behind, reminiscing about atrocities committed in the castle when the Count was still living there.
  • The Blazing World is a more positive example of this trope.
• Establishing Character Moment:
  • Fu Manchu is introduced writing on a man's bare skin with acid. 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. And the school happens to be Hogwarts...
  • When Griffin (the Invisible Man) is introduced, he's taking advantage of his invisibility to rape schoolgirls, including Pollyanna
• Even Evil Has Standards: While Nemo is a ruthless terrorist vocally committed to killing as many Englishmen as creatively as possible, he draws the line at using poison gas. Or bioweapons.
  • In a 'sort of' example, Hyde does not appreciate what Griffin 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 when the real Jack the Ripper 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.
• Everybody Has Lots of Sex: To the point where later volumes can at times act more as a chronicle of the sex lives of various fictional characters than their adventures. The Black Dossier, which features a lengthy excerpt from the memoirs of a certain Miss Fanny Hill, particularly reflects this.
• Everyone Is Bi: Chances are, if a character's sex life is mentioned at all, they will have had at least one or two encounters with both sexes.
• Evil Counterpart: ... 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 at least a few traditional heroes, Quatermain and Mina Murray, the closest thing the French have to a hero is Robur the Conqueror and Arsène Lupin. The Germans are strictly villains, with such monsters as Dr Mabuse, Dr Caligari and his somnambulist assassin, and Dr Rotwang from Metropolis and his Robot Maria.^note  Though Fritz Lang admitted that this was Truth in Television, he noted that German audiences in the 20s believed in supervillains more readily than superheroes.
• Evil Versus Evil: Fu Manchu versus Professor Moriarty in Volume 1, with the League caught in the middle.
• The Faceless: Fantomas, to the point where none of the League members can seem to give a matching physical description at ALL, save for his black mask.
• Fairy Tale Free-for-All: The Almanack references the places where Beauty and the Beast, Bluebeard, Sleeping Beauty, and Puss in Boots took place.
• Fan Disservice: Plenty in volume 2. Griffin brutally attacks and humiliates Mina, which is followed by Hyde raping Griffin before killing him, and on the side there's Mina's sex scene. With Allan. Then it got worse. Allan likes Mina's scars. A lot.
• Fantastic Nature Reserve: There's an alien zoo on the Isle of Wight as a nod to one from the Dan Dare comic strip.
• The Fantastic Trope of Wonderous Titles: It's in the series' title, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: The first volume has vampires, invisible men, Mr. Hyde, and steampunk technology. The second adds aliens and (Not So) Funny Animals. From there on, the series includes an insane amount of all kinds of imaginary creatures.
• Fantasy World Map: The New Traveller's Almanack isn't actually a visual map, rather a textual travel-guide, but it fulfills much the same purpose for the League's world. Understandable, as no map could include all the places Moore lists in the Almanack.
  • The Black Dossier has a more traditional map for the Blazing World.
• Fat Bastard: Campion Bond, Mycroft Holmes, Billy Bunter... There are a lot of fat and unpleasant people.
• Faux Action Girl: Mina Murray is introduced as an iron-willed Lady of War. By the end of the first book, she's begging Allan to save her. In the second book, she's nearly raped and serves as little more than Allan's love interest. Any strength she may have had is gone.
• 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 (he jumped off an apartment building after trying & failing to do the deed with stove gas three times).
• Fictional Counterpart:
  • Not just to places and things but fictional representations of people even come into play as well. Most notably Adenoid Hynkel taking Adolf Hitler's place in WWII. Also, The Rutles were the biggest band of The '60s. Instead of Mick Jagger and The Rolling Stones, we have Terner from The Purple Orchestra^note Based on the film Performance which had Mick Jagger in the leading role complete with Alternate Universe Sympathy for the Devil. Other notable ones include Horatio Hornblower taking Nelson's place in British military history, and the identity of Jack the Ripper being Mack The Knife. Finally, the Big Bad of Century, Oliver Haddo, is an expy of real-life mystic Aleister Crowley.
  • While this is usually very well planned out, even Moore can flub sometimes. For example, he made Nevada Smith the League-world's Howard Hughes. Smith is originally from a film (The Carpetbaggers) that does indeed have a character obviously based on Hughes, but it's not Smith himself- it's millionaire filmmaker Jonas Cord.
  • At least a few historical figures in the League world aren't fictionalizations: Orlando mentions Ramses II, Alexander, several real Roman emperors, Charlemagne, and others. Moriarty still has the nickname "Napoleon of Crime". And Pete Munch mentions conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination in "Minions of the Moon". It is notable though despite being a massive Deconstructive Parody Moore never directly touched much on Historical Fiction where plenty of real life historical figures also have these fictional counterparts.
• Fish out of Water: Christian, the protagonist from The Pilgrim's Progress, who finds himself stranded in 17th Century London after getting lost in the City Of Destruction.
• Foreshadowing: An important tidbit is dropped in Volume 1 and only picked up on later, in Volume 2: Hyde lies about being able to see Griffin; While he can't see his normal form, he can see the little bugger's body heat, which is how he corners Griffin in Volume 2 and eventually kills him.
  • AJ Raffles mentions that if a war in Europe does break out, such as Carnacki's visions seem to indicate, he would feel obligated to enlist to make up for his life of crime. The Black Dossier reveals that Raffles is killed during a charge into no-mans land.
• Frankenstein's Monster: Victor Frankenstein's creature is shown to have survived the events of the novel, and is currently ruling over other automatons in Toyland. And he's married to E.T.A. Hoffman's Olympia, one of the first robots in fiction.
• Freakiness Shame: Mina is ashamed of her scars from her encounter with Dracula and always keeps them covered with her iconic scarf, even while otherwise nude.
• Freaky Friday Sabotage: Oliver Haddo waits until he's on his deathbed to Body Surf into his most trusted disciple's body. He also makes no attempt at blending in: the first thing the "disciple" does on leaving the room is grope his wife while announcing the master's last-minute revelations that include the disciple being in charge.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: The Famous Five from Greyfriars school were in their days decent for their school notoriety but afterwards would have probably been rich nobodies at best. All the ones we see here became involved with spy organizations. Harry Wharton became Big Brother, Bob Cherry became Harry Lime (who's also M and Mother), and it's implied that Johnny Bull was Emma Knight's father who designed super spy cars and masterminded The Island.
• Full-Frontal Assault: Hugo Hercules does this to the Demogorgon in Tempest Issue Five.
• Gainax Ending: All relevant characters decide to leave a self-destructing Earth once and for all and the series properly ends with a Shout-Out to Reed Richards and Sue Storm's wedding from the pages of Fantastic Four... Complete with Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill attempting to get in only to get tossed out the airlock. Also, Moore being a magician was just a concept he made up.
• Gender Bender: Orlando periodically changes gender.
• Generation Xerox:
  • Moore will occasionally resort to this if he wants to use a character who wouldn't fit into the time period he's writing in. This can be played for laughs- like Jeff Lebowski's 16th century ancestor learning to bowl from the fairies who abducted Rip Van Winkle.
  • Subverted with Ishmael, whose son (a crusty-looking, short, pudgy sailor) is almost a dead ringer for him... but whose granddaughter (a huge Amazonian Beauty type) is about as unlike him as can be imagined.
• Genre Shift: 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 done in the style of an 18th-century satirical broadsheet, an Elizabethan drama, a Beat Novel, and a Tijuana bible based on Nineteen Eighty-Four, among others; Volume Two includes a board game.
• Gentleman Thief: Two of the originals, AJ Raffles and Arsène Lupin.
• Genre Deconstruction: The Nemo Trilogy with Janni Dakkar is intended to spoof 20th century pulp science fiction and also discuss the overall development of science fiction from the 19th to the 20th Century.
  • Building on an essay he had written for Dodgem Logic, Moore notes how the Victorian optimism in utopian science, represented by H. G. Wells and Jules Verne was replaced by 20th Century science being far more uncertain and dystopian, starting from Lovecraft's ideas of discoveries making observers Go Mad from the Revelation to beings like King Kong and Godzilla regarded as freaks and monstrosities, rather than wonders.
  • Likewise, scientific discoveries are used to serve less than noble aims, with Tom Swyfte wanting to become a weapons manufacturer, German geniuses building machinery for the state of Tomania. Robots likewise become a tool to create consumerist visions of the ideal female body programmed to serve men (as in Metropolis and The Stepford Wives), twisting the progressive ethos of science to perpetuate patriarchy and dominance.
• Genre Roulette: The overall plot goes, in order of publication, from Steampunk thriller to Victorian Alien Invasion to a combination of 1950s spy thriller and Zeerust (with multiple other genre pastiches inside a Book Within a Book) to musical set in the 1910s to psychedelic occult story set in the 1960s to a Black Comedy parody of Harry Potter set in 2009. And we don't even know what all the final volume will get into by the time it's done.
• God: Revealed to be Mary Poppins in the third and final installment of Century.
• Gory Discretion Shot: The aftermath of Hyde's rape of Griffin. Nemo's horrified scream upon investigating and having to be held back to keep him from killing Hyde in rage as a result and Griffin's blood covering both Hyde's shirt and half the table him and Nero were having dinner on are the only major clues that it wasn't pretty.
• Grand Theft Me: This is how Oliver Haddo has been keeping himself alive throughout the 20th century as his original body and subsequent ones aged and died. Among his more notable victims were Cosmo Gallion, the villain from The Avengers (1960s) episode "Warlock", and Tom Riddle AKA Voldemort. He planned to take over the body of Turner from Performance but was stopped when Jack Carter killed Cosmo's body mid-transit, forcing him to improvise.
• Gratuitous German: "Der Zweilicht Helden" is complete bullshit in German. Later, whole sections in Nemo: Heart of Berlin are conducted in untranslated German.
• Great Gazoo: The Seven Stars meet theirs while travelling through the Fifth Dimension. Captain Universe has Captain Loonyverse, Electrogirl has Electro-Elf and Marksman has MarsMite. Zom the Zodiac seems sad the he doesn't have one.
• Great White Hunter: Quatermain is a Caucasian hunter of amazing prowess.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Above Moriarty, above the Moluscs, above Oliver Haddo, and above the Antrichrist are the Lovecraftian horrors that lurk in the cosmos of the League universe. Alan and the Sundered Veil reveal that such creatures are currently invading their universe through a hole in space-time, with seemingly nobody save the Time Traveller and anybody who is willing to help him to stop it.
• Guide Dang It!: One of the few comics to have (and actually need) a guide. Jess Nevins's incredible guidebooks are essential to understanding all the references for anyone who isn't a professor of Victorian literature.
• Hellish Pupils: The "Chinese Doctor" has semi-rectangular goat-like eyes.
• Here There Were Dragons: 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, essentially disappearing completely due to the puritanical King Jacob's purge of magical creatures after Queen Gloriana's death, which caused the Fairy Realm to seal itself off from Earth. 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.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Two characters give their lives to save others.
  • Mr. Hyde dies when defending London from the Martians. After climbing the leg, ripping the carapace off the machine, then eating the Martian inside.
  • Alan dies saving Mina and Orlando from the Moonchild.
• Humanoid Abomination: Several of these. The true form of the Antichrist (Harry Potter) in Century, which resembles a giant, bald man, covered in eyeballs is definitely one. Dracula is also implied to have been this, in line with the original novel. The Galley-Wag is a benevolent version of this trope.
• Incorruptible Pure Pureness: The main trait of Christian, a member of Prospero's League. Justified in that he is the main protagonist from the allegorical christian novel The Pilgrim's Progress, and hails from a spiritual realm described in the book.
• Insistent Terminology: Alan Moore has firmly grounded himself against critics with saying there is a firm difference between his "stealing" of literary characters to put into a new story versus adapting an already existing story into a new medium. Though some argue that while this logic holds up with Moore on sequels to the original work without the original author's intent or involvement, adaptations in other mediums are themselves derivative and stealing from the original rather than continuations.
• Invisible Streaker: Griffin, as in the source material, has to undress to be truly invisible. The second Invisible Man was also this, but his chain smoking and coughing fits made him almost useless as an operative.
• Jar of the Bizarre: One of the many strange things kept at the League's secret base is a dead Cottingley fairy preserved in a jar of formaldehyde.
• Karmic Death: 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.
• Karma Houdini: Arguably, the point of joining the League is to become one via the reward of amnesty (ex. Hyde, Griffin, Jekyll, Raffles, Nemo). Most don't make it though. 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, Fridge Logic dictates that they'd be the right age to have lost parents to Big Brother's Culture Police, and a few must have denounced their parents...
• Karmic Rape: The Invisible Man's rape by Mr. Hyde is treated as a fitting punishment, given that he himself was a rapist and it was done in retaliation to harming Mina. May overlap with Pay Evil unto Evil depending on whether you consider Hyde an Anti-Hero or just another villain.
• Kick the Dog: 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 brutally attack London's docks in maniacal glee.
• Kite Riding: Fu Manchu's men use war kites to attack Moriarty's airship in the climax of the first story.
• Lady of War:
  • Mina will go into battle when she needs to.
  • 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.
• Lampshade Hanging: The New Traveler's Almanac does this in regards to the shocking amount of shipwrecked Englishmen involved in discovering previously uncharted isles.
• Large and in Charge: Mycroft Holmes as M. (This follows common theories about the character and his "Diogenes Club".)
• Laser-Guided Karma: 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. ^note And is something of a bookend, considering how he was introduced to the comic.
  • Don't worry, "His end was quite comfortable."
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: Some copyrighted characters appear in the series, many of them given slightly altered names or only referred to by their given name or their surname to avoid lawsuits.
  • "The Chinese Doctor" (Fu Manchu) in Volume 1.
  • "Jimmy" (James Bond), Miss Night (Emma Peel, née Knight), and Uncle Hugo (Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond) in The Black Dossier.
  • The map of "The Blazing World" in The Black Dossier had a familiar phone box symbol (positioned 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, The Witches of Eastwick, Conan the Barbarian, and Gilligan's Island.
  • Tom in Century: 1969 and in Century 2009 has an occult school that can only be accessed by taking a train from a hidden platform at Kings Cross Station, never referred to as anything besides "the Invisible College." The Antichrist was raised there with a certain distinctive mark on his forehead from Tom.
• Legacy Character: With a bit of Generation Xerox: Macheath from The Threepenny Opera is apparently descended from the Macheath of The Beggar's Opera. Its also revealed in Century that 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 Roger Moore and Daniel Craig. The Tempest takes this a bit further and reveals that there's an entire "J-series" of agents based on the various iterations of the character, all of whom are working for the aged original Bond.
• Legion of Doom: One composed of Dr. Mabuse, Dr. Caligari, Cesare, Rotwang, and Fake Maria is shown in the Black Dossier.^note And then they turn up in person in Roses Of Berlin, aiding Adenoid Hynkel.
• Lighter and Softer: Perhaps surprisingly, this is the case with some of the adapted works, such as Ingsoc from Nineteen Eighty-Four not being as big or lasting as long as they claimed in the novel, and Frankenstein's Monster getting a happier ending.
• Literary Work of Magic: One of Shakespeare's fictional plays (Faerie's Fortunes Founded) is basically the minutes for the meeting in which the first League was founded.
• Living Forever Is Awesome: Orlando seems to have few hang-ups or complaints about being immortal. Deconstructed slightly, however; particularly when male, he can instead go to the other extreme from Who Wants to Live Forever? and come off as unfeeling and even sociopathic.
• The Load: Randolph Carter to his teammates in the story Allan and the Sundered Veil, much to his great-uncle John's dismay.
  • Allan Quatermain starts off as this for the League and sometimes slips back into it.
• Lost in Imitation: Moore contends that many elements from the original works he uses have been forgotten. He uses deconstruction in this series to try and return some of these elements back to characters he feel have been made Lighter and Softer in adaptations. You can see many of these and their counterpoints on the YMMV page.
• Mad Scientist: Eccentric scientists of questionable sanity in this series include Nemo, Moriarty, Fu Manchu, Moreau. The Black Dossier throws in Caligari and C.R. Rotwang.
• Magic Carpet: Gullivar Jones has a flying carpet.
• The Magic Comes Back: At the end of Vol. 4, Prospero leads Blazing World's armies against the nations of humankind, bringing wonders and fantasies back into the world in full force. It was apparently Gloriana's plan all along.
• The Magic Goes Away: This happens when King Jacob succeeds the throne from Queen Gloriana, and purges almost all magical beings from the British empire. This apparently gets more pronounced throughout the 20th century, with various creatures retreating into the Blazing World. By 2009, most people dismiss the more fantastic elements of their world as mere fiction.
• Masculine, Feminine, Androgyne Trio: Mina Murray, Allan Quatermain and Orlando eventually start living as a threesome, with Orlando cursed by the Gods to change sex from male to female involuntarily.
• Massive Multiplayer Crossover: There are quite a lot of characters from literature and other fiction who are at least referenced in this comic.
• Mating Season Mayhem: While visiting Dr. Moreau, the heroes encounter a bear-man hybrid, and learn that he has violent sexual instincts which are calmed by sending him to an old gypsy woman. Not to calm him with drugs or potions, but have sex with her until his aggression drops.
• Meta Origin: Has two major ones:
  • Moreau's experiements with man/animal hybridsleads to the creation of several Funny Animal characters, such as Mr. Toad, Rupert Bear, Puss in Boots, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and more.
  • The Great Old Ones from the Cthulhu Mythos are said to have come to Earth from another dimension and clashed with the native pantheon, the Eloim. Their clashes and struggles eventually gave birth to the various gods, monsters and magical beings of human myth over the course of millions of years.
  • Additionally, it's implied that Hugo Hercules's "sewing wild oats" is responsible for America's disproportionate amount of metahumans.
• Mind Screw: It starts with the back-up story in Volume One, but the series really gets trippy with The Black Dossier and Century: 1969.
  • The journey in Nemo: Heart of Ice has pretty trippy elements which is justified since the crew of the Nautilus are heading towards the Mountains of Madness though it's also much more straightforward than Century.
• Mirror Chemistry: 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.
• Mix-and-Match Creatures: Dr Moreau's creation H-142 is a hybrid bacterium of anthrax and streptococcus.
• Mocky Mouse: A strange fusion of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck is among the creatures seen during Mina's drug trip in Century: 1969.
• The Mole: Griffin allied with the Martians during their invasion in Volume II.
• Monster Mash: Mister Hyde and The Invisible Man are main characters, while Frankenstein's Monster, Literature/Dracula, Gill-men, The Phantom of the Opera, various Kaiju, and many other monsters are referenced as minor characters.
• Mood Whiplash: The Boy's Own Adventure tone of the narrator's text boxes is hilarious, but within two pages of a Gorn scene of 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 spoils the humor.
• Musical Episode: Volume III: Century has a running motif of The Threepenny Opera as reflection of changes in music style and on-panel numbers to illustrate the volume a la Brecht and Weill. Vol 1, features variations of "Mack the Knife", has a Whole-Plot Reference to "Pirate Jenny" and ends with a rendition of "What Keeps Mankind Alive?"(also the title of the Vol 3, Part 1). Part 2, ends with a Punk version of "The Ballad of Immoral Earnings" and Part 3 features a rap version of the Canon Song.
  • Century: 1969 features an Alternate Universe version of "Sympathy for the Devil" as performed by Terner, a character played by Mick Jagger in Performance and his Purple Orchestra with replacement lyrics that scan in perfect alignment to the original.
  • Of course, the mostly non-musical Vol 2, ends with Mr. Hyde facing the Tripods while singing "Did You See Me Dance the Polka?" a reference to Victor Fleming's adaptation starring Spencer Tracy, which uses it as a recurring motif.
  • The Black Dossier was originally supposed to feature a Vinyl LP featuring in-universe variants of real-life popular songs, with Moore supplying lyrics and also vocals under various pseudonyms. Issues with DC ultimately led to the Vinyl not being featured in the original release and was a factor in Moore moving to Top Shelf. The final panels of LOEG has Mina and a resurrected Hyde aboard the Nautilus spaceship in 2164 AD dancing to the recording "Immortal Love", which is sung to the tune of "These Foolish Things" and refers to Mina's entire adventures from her time with Dracula to Quatermain to her Lunar adventures and so on.
• Musical World Hypothesis: Briefly touched on in one section of "The New Traveller's Almanac", where we learn that the events of Lewis Carroll's poem The Hunting of the Snark were just an extended hallucination by Dr. Eric Bellman, a psychiatrist who went insane after trying to lead an expedition to 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.
• My Grandson, Myself: Allan Quartermain, Junior. Mycroft Holmes sees right through it, naturally.
  • Humorously, virtually everyone else who caught wind of both "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.
• My Nayme Is: A few copyrighted characters have their names subtly altered (when they would be too hard to recognize without names) to make them Lawyer Friendly Cameos. A pre-marriage Emma Peel is named "Emma Night" instead of "Emma Knight", Tom Swift is renamed "Tom Swyfte", and Amber St. Clare (a member of Prospero's Men) is renamed Amber St. Clair.
• Myth Arc : Applies one to the whole of literature but there are specific ones in the issues.
  • Volumes I and II, have the Central Theme of the British Empire finding it difficult to separate its heroes and monsters, exploring famous Victorian creations in the political context of Imperialism, with little difference between Heroes and Villains.
  • Century is a trilogy focusing on the 20th Century, the proliferation of mediums, movies, TV and Rock & Roll music and by 2009, dealing with what Moore feels is an overall decadence of culture.
  • The Nemo trilogy starring Janni Dakkar has its own myth arc about Janni's career of continuing her father's legacy and her battles with her enemy Ayesha.

Tropes N to Z

• Nailed to the Wagon: 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.
• New Media Are Evil: This trope has had a profound impact on the worldbuilding of the series. It’s easily noticeable how in later volumes there’s less focus on the modern literary output and lines of dialog come off that works like Harry Potter are poorly defined and stealing from older, better literature. It’s clear Alan Moore perceives older literature was more challenging and had higher purpose, and Moore in interviews has maintained he sees modern culture as a decline into shallow escapism. As noted in Early-Installment Weirdness in the second volume, Moore was using literature written at least through the 1960s. However when the volumes came that a lot of these stories could have been used or referenced, they were not. It also appeared that most of the literary characters that do show up are ones created by authors Moore himself knows. Moore has also stated he doesn't find all modern works as examples of the decline, but exactly which works from at least the mid 20th century onward that Moore would not classify as inferior is a very good question.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Happens at least once in every volume, but especially Century where Carnacki's visions of the apocalypse inspire the instigator of said Apocalypse to plan accordingly. Carnacki's visions of a war in Europe leads to the League fighting their French counterparts in Paris, not realizing that BOTH sides are being played, and that the fight ensures that the German Twilight Heroes are free to plot the war with no one the wiser.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Terner and The Purple Orchestra are quite obviously Mick Jagger and The Rolling Stones.
• No Historical Figures Were Harmed: As a Deconstruction and Pastiche of literary fiction, it portrays many fictional characters in the past as substitutes for historical figures:
  • Black Dossier argues that John Dee, the Elizabethan Occultist, was the inspiration for both Prospero from The Tempest and Johannes Subtil in Ben Jonson's The Alchemist.
  • Moore also argues that Harry Lime from The Third Man was based on Kim Philby, the leader of the Cambridge Soviet spies, while Horatio Hornblower replaces Admiral Nelson on the Column on Trafalgar Square.
  • Likewise the third volume explores the many versions of Aleister Crowley: Oliver Haddo, Macato, Karswell, Cosmo Gallion, many of them being occultists interested in sex and drugs as a means to access the higher mysteries.
• No Name Given: Nemo is Latin for "no one", his true name is never revealed. In 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.
• No Ontological Inertia: Griffin's blood becomes visible on Hyde after he dies.
• Nostalgia Filter: The third volume drips with the sentiment that things in general and fiction in particular were better back in Ye Goode Olde Days even when they weren't so great, and consistently depicts the modern world as a grey and gloomy hell of delusion and misery.
  Mina Harker: "People were desperately poor in 1910, but at least they felt things had a purpose. How did culture fall apart in barely a hundred years?"
  Orlando: "By becoming irrelevant, same as always."
  • This trope is also described when describing the Counterculture of The '60s which Moore was very much a part of and doesn't spare from criticism either. Mina Murray notes that the young 60s children were modern and advanced and creating something new, Orlando being as long lived as he is, retorts:
  "No, they're just nostalgic for their childhood."
  • As a result Moore appears to construct that each generation slowly longs back to how it was before bringing in the continual decline of fiction Moore believes in today.
• Nothing but Skulls: 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.
• Nothing Is Scarier: We don't know just how Hyde killed Griffin, but given the amount of blood on display and the fact that it drove Nemo into a murderous rage, we can assume it was not only gruesome, but agonising.
• Occult Detective: Carnacki is a detective of the occult.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: We never get to see the full exploits of the Second League of the Extraordinary Gentlemen, and their very-much-indeed awesome-sounding encounter with Les Hommes Mysterieux is only described in text on the Black Dossier. Also sideway referenced in text are the missions of Prospero's Men, The Third League of the Extraordinary Gentlemen, Der Zwielicht-helden and Les Hommes Mysterieux themselves.
  • We also see far too little of the League of the 1780s, featuring Lemuel Gulliver, the Scarlet Pimpernel and wife, the Scarecrow, Fanny Hill, and Natty Bumpo. Most of what we do see when they appear is when they've largely retired from adventuring and are touring the world indulging their more hedonistic tendencies.
• Old Superhero: In Tempest, America has hundreds of retirement homes for superheroes who tend to live a lot longer than normal humans but are just as susceptible to dementia. The bills are mostly paid by media companies who hope their TV and movie franchises become popular again.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted. When Lieutenant Gullivar Jones appeared at the beginning of Volume 2 as John Carter's ally, a few readers were confused by his name and assumed that he was supposed to be 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, and Gullivar Jones is another character from a fairly obscure book called Lieutenant Gullivar Jones: His Vacation.
• Only You Can Repopulate My Race: 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. Who ends up supplying the necessary genetic material? The frozen body of Professor James Moriarty, still in orbit around the moon where the Cavorite carried him. Mina herself ponders just what future incidents the progeny of Moriarty might bring about
• Opium Den: Quatermain starts the comic in an opium den.
• Original Generation: Campion Bond and William Samson Senior are a partial example, as they were created by Alan Moore but are relatives of other characters, the former being the grandfather of James Bond (the first one, anyway) and the latter being the father of World of Kabul, a character from several adventure stories serialized in The Wizard and The Hotspur magazines.
  • Janni, Moore's daughter of Captain Nemo, could also possibly be seen as this.
• Our Presidents Are Different:
  • Stray comments indicate that, in this world, the United States government has been headed by communist Mike Thingmaker from the works of Soviet writer Marietta Shaginyan (President Mary Sue), hippie fascist Max Frost (President Lunatic), Middle East interventionist Josiah Bartlett (apparently Buffoon), and David Palmer.
  • Meanwhile UK Prime Ministers have included Big Brother, Wilson the Wonder Athlete (of Wizard comics), and Margaret Brunner.
• Out with a Bang: A gruesome example in the second volume: Hyde rapes The Invisible Man Griffin to death.
• Papa Wolf: Bulldog Drummond is fiercely protective of his goddaughter, Emma Night.
• Parody Commercial: As extras in each issue, along the lines of "Our cigarettes will cure asthma!"
• Pastiche: Made much use of throughout the series. The first two volumes imitate Victoria pulp serials and periodicals, and with The Black Dossier many more styles are pastiched.
• Pet the Dog: Hyde, otherwise portrayed as a 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.
  Hyde: I believe you do not hate me. I believe you have perhaps met someone worse than me. Would that be right?
  Mina (softly): Yes.
  • Nemo rescuing a young Jimmy Grey during the invasion of London after his parents are killed when the Martians attacks the railway bridge. He even tries to comfort him, apparently even Nemo can't quite hate English children, no matter how much he despises the nation itself. Grey would eventually build his own underwater vessel as an adult, which was part of the abysmally failed 1950's version of the League, though he had more success on his own.
• Pimped-Out Dress: Mina has worn a few, given what was expected of high ladies at the time.
• Pinball Protagonist: By Century, Mina and the others have effectively become glorified scouts that scope out situations and find threats to tattle to their Blazing World bosses on. In The Tempest, Mina doesn't do anything too substantial in spite of being revealed to be an Unwitting Pawn and Apocalypse Maiden that was planned centuries in advance.
• Pirate Girl: Janni, a.k.a. "Pirate Jenny", ends up leading her father's crew and pillages cities.
• Polar Madness: Nemo sees Janni Nemo and her crew running to Antarctica in order to get away from a trio of bounty hunters sent by her nemesis Ayesha. In the process, she, her crew, and their hapless pursuers all blunder into the Mountains of Madness and nearly lose their sanity and their lives in the process.
• Politically Incorrect Hero: Various members of the League aren't exactly PC. Hyde refers to Captain Nemo as "darkie", Captain Nemo has a strong hatred of the English, and Raffles and Carnacki express contempt toward Orlando for being a "he-she".
• Politically Incorrect Villain: 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.
• Posthumous Character: Dracula is already dead by the time the story takes place, but his influence has far-reaching effects on Mina, decades and even centuries after the events of the novel. In the Travellers Almanack, Mina and Quatermain return to his castle in Romania. It is abandoned, but someone has left a few letters written in blood there
• President Evil: Two rather unusual leftist examples, as it's mentioned in passing that Mike Thingmaker (from the Soviet novel Mess Mend) became President after World War 2, and Max Frost (from Wild in the Streets) in 1968, both of them committing horrific atrocities in their attempts at reforming the United States to their vision.
• Proto-Superhero: Several of them appear, and it was partially this trope that gave Alan Moore the idea in the first place. The most proto of them all, Hugo Hercules, is implied to be responsible for the large amount of American metahumans due to his sleeping around in his youth.
• Psycho for Hire: Hyde, Griffin, and to an extent Nemo. The entirety of Les Hommes Mysterieux, as well, save perhaps Lupin. And then there's Die Zweilichthelden...
• Psycho Sidekick: Everyone except Mina and Allan, as well as possibly AJ Raffles and Carnacki, is an ally of questionable sanity.
• The Psycho Rangers: Les Hommes Mysterieux, the French government's answer to the League, form a 1-1 match with its counterpart organization.
• Public Domain Canon Welding: This comic does combines characters from classic literature, film, theatre, television and even comics ranging from the Victorian period all the way to the 20th century and beyond. And this is not counting specific Lawyer Friendly Cameos from characters not yet in the public domain but are recognizable nonetheless.
• Public Domain Character: Just about every character featured in this comic is in the public domain, save for those mentioned under Lawyer-Friendly Cameo above.
• Punk Rock: 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 Mina disappeared. It features a Punk cover of a Brecht-Weill song, The Ballad of Immoral Earnings.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: It's a miracle any of the members of the League manage to function as a group.
• Random Events Plot: Not much of a story ultimately happens in The Tempest beyond all relevant "good" characters abandoning Earth once Prospero and Gloriana's plan goes into fruition. The plotline concerning Jimmy is even dealt with quickly by Emma with little to no issues.
• Rape as Drama: 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.
• Raygun Gothic: 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.
• Reality Has No Subtitles: Used in early issues, where Chinese people were given dialog in Chinese with no translation for this reason and the arabian in the very first issue not being translated. This is extended to Captain Nemo speaking Bundeli without subtitles and large sections of Nemo: Roses of Berlin features dialogue in German.
• Reference Overdosed: There are quite a lot of references to various works of fiction.
• Related in the Adaptation: Given the nature of the series this has cropped up for some characters from wholly seperate works now being related.
  • In general characters from The Three Penny Opera are descedants of characters from The Beggar's Opera.
  • Low-dive Jenny of The Three Penny Opera is now the daughter of Captain Nemo.
  • Emma Peel of The Avengers (1960s) is the daughter of Johnny Bull of Greyfriars.
  • Jack Kerouac's characters Doctor Sax and Dean Moriarty are the descendants of Fu Manchu and Prof. James Moriarty respectively.
  • HP Lovecraft's Randolph Carter is now a descendant of John Carter of Mars.
  • While the League's Orlando is a Composite Character of many characters any of them can now be called the son/daughter of Tiresias of Greek Mythology.
  • In a rare place example in the world of League, Hyde Park is named in honor of Mr. Hyde.
• Replacement Scrappy: In-universe, even. The government tries at one point to form a League with a Suspiciously Similar Substitute for every member of the Murray Group. They end up disbanded after one unsuccessful mission.
• Robotic Reveal: In River Of Ghosts, it turns out that the feared resurrected Ayesha are actually just android copies of the original.
• Rule 34: Played for Laughs with the Ingsoc Tijuana Bible in Black Dossier, which does this to Orwell's 1984. Yes, really.
• Scrapbook Story: Black Dossier has Quatermain and Mina read several documents detailing the history of the League and British intelligence.
• Sex Is Interesting: Later volumes of the series often focus just as much, if not more, on the sex lives of the characters as on their adventures. Black Dossier in particular devotes a lot of space to the unrecorded sexual exploits of Fanny Hill.
• Setting Update: The movie Metropolis takes place in the year 2026, almost 100 years after the movie's release. Here, it events take place in 1926. Also the setting of 1984 appear to happen closer to the original publication date of 1948 rather than, well, y'know.
• Self-Deprecation: The series ends with Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill themselves showing up in the comic only to be tossed out the airlock by Hugo. They also get some jabs at themselves in for good measure, including it turning out that O'Neill was under the impression that he and Moore created some of the more obscure literary characters they used for the story as well as Moore admitting that his whole "ceremonial magician" schtick was just a gimmick he made up.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: This becomes a general theme of the overall quest narrative after Vol. 1. In Vol. 2, The Martian Invasion is ultimately stopped by biological warfare with the heroes essentially sent by the government to collect package for use and hold off invaders until it can be deployed. Century makes this a recurring theme since the attempt to prevent The End of the World as We Know It is halted because of wrong conclusions, Self-Fulfilling Prophecy and ultimately occurs regardless only for the villain to realize that Victory Is Boring and that his Evil Plan was a stupid idea anyway.
• She/He/It/They Are All Grown Up: The following child characters are shown as adults. 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 the Famous Five grew up to be Harry Lime and Big Brother, respectively.
• Shout-Out: They may as well have called it Shout Out: The Comic Book, since the series is chock full of references to various works of fiction.
• Show, Don't Tell:
  • Black Dossier and Century: 2009 are Anvilicious with the message about how reality and fiction inspire each other, but nothing of the sort is ever directly shown or explained (besides the implication that the Antichrist's rampage was inspired by school shootings).
  • Throughout The Tempest, characters do a lot of griping about how detrimental superheroes and other extraordinary beings are to human society, but we never see any of the supposed social damage they've caused. Heck, the climactic apocalypse is caused by extraordinary beings who haven't affected humanity for centuries, and all extraordinary humans who could have at least tried to save the Earth instead abandon it.
• Silly Brain Diagram: The first issue of Vol. 2 has the credits page structured like this, with different "parts" of the brain being named after Alan Moore ("The Hypothalamoore: Think it be all that, but it ain't!"), Kevin O'Neill, et al.
• Skinny Dipping: Captain Nemo's daughter Janni Dakkar is first seen swimming naked in Century: 1910.
• Sky Pirate: Robur and Captain Mors are pirates who take to the skies.
• Smart Animal, Inconvenient Instincts: This seems to be a recurring problem for the hybrids on The Island of Doctor Moreau; A tiger-man is seen getting on all fours to lap up some water, and is cuffed by his bear-man companion telling him not to drink like an animal.
• Sociopathic Hero: Hyde and Griffin both have no problems hurting and killing people to accomplish their goals.
• Solar System Neighbors: Having Planetary Romances as canon, a lot of the solar system is inhabited;
  • Mercury has Jack Flash's race of Human Aliens.
  • Venus has the Treens.
  • The Moon has Amazon Women on the Moon at war with the Selenites with gravity and air generated by Monoliths. The Clangers and the Soup Dragon live there as well as Lucien and Uatu The Watcher
  • Green and Red Martians, Sorns, Hither People and the Martian Manhunter. The War of the Worlds Martians appear as extraplanetary invaders before giving up and turning to Earth.
• Space Pirates: When visiting Captain Universe's space-base, Satin Astro says by the year 3000, the Port Cloud is a haven for space pirates.
• Spanner in the Works: Oliver Haddo's plan to transfer his mind into Terner Purple's body fails when he is shot in the head by Jack Carter, whose investigation into his cult had flown under everyone's radar, leaving Allan and Orlando baffled when they find his current body dead in his shop.
• Spies Are Lecherous: Deconstructed with the series' version of James Bond, who is presented as a boorish lecher whose obsession with sex often makes him incompetent and ultimately results in MI6 forcing him into a quiet retirement when he becomes riddled with venereal diseases. Alan Moore is rather notorious for his hatred of the character.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • To Moore's Lost Girls. Both feature characters from English literature with dark, deconstructionist takes on classic stories. The difference being that while sex features here, it's nowhere near as prominent as in Lost Girls, which was a porn comic.
  • 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.
• Spring-Heeled Jack: Spring-heeled Jack's body (or possibly a suit) can be seen as one of the exhibits found in the British Museum where the League are headquartered.
• The Spymaster: Every character who assumes the identity of 'M' is the head of British intelligence and pulls several strings throughout the series.
• Spy School: Greyfriars and Bessie Bunter's Cliff House are schools for training spies here.
• Starfish Aliens: The Martians.
  • Starfish Robots: The Martians' tripod vehicles.
• Stealth Pun: 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 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 Fireball XL5.
• 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 Raygun Gothic.
• Stupid Jetpack Hitler: The Nazi-run Berlin Metropolis is full of advanced technology and machinery.
• Submarine Pirates: Captain Nemo and his crew run a submarine. Janni and her crew follow suit in Heart of Ice.
• Sub Story: Much of the first two volumes takes place in the Nautilus.
• Suddenly Speaking: Mina recounts her nearly fatal encounter with Fantomas deep in the caverns below the Paris Opera House, where he uttered only a single line, in a deep, terrifying voice. "I win". He then detonates several charges of explosives he had wired throughout the caverns, causing the entire Opera House to cave in, killing hundreds of people and trapping Mina underneath.
• Superhero Episode: Tempest focuses on Mina's time in a Super Team called the Seven Stars and shows what the surviving members are doing in the modern day.
• Super Team: Arguably, every version of the League is this, but the most traditional one is the Seven Stars, a team of superheroes from The '60s.
• Take That!:
  • The Black Dossier has several.
    • The 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 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 up to eleven in the climax, in which it is revealed that there never even was a Dr. No in the first place, Bond had betrayed England to the U.S, and murdered one of MI5's own agents. By Century: 2009, while "James Bond" has become a Legacy Character 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.
    • 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 the Harry Potter world is less than flattering. Of the Hogwarts Express, he has Andrew Norton declare: "it runs on sloppily-defined magic principles", and refers to it as the "franchise express".
  • Many in The Tempest:
    • In the first issue, Fantippo's current political climate is a mix of Brexit supporters and the Trump administration's goal of building a wall to keep immigrants out, both remarked as being utterly stupid.
    • A subversion of Moore's hatred of spies appears in the form of a rejuvenated Jimmy Bond handing a Take That! towards modern spies, with an acknowledgement that while Tuxedo and Martini spies of the 60s were problematic and Designated Heroes, they were at the very least fun compared to the gritty, "realistic" ones of the latter 2000s and 2010s.
    • The Tempest itself is full of jabs against modern pop culture's infatuation with superheroes. It begins by featuring a retirement home for elderly supers, and among them is Captain America ... with a Swastika tattoo on the back of his head, likely meant to be a jab at the infamous 2016 storyline in which he became a Nazi in all but name as a brainwashed agent of HYDRA.
    • The volume has all its issues begin with spotlights on relatively unknown but otherwise highly influential comic creators called "Cheated Champions of Your Childhood". All of these generally discuss the lives and careers of these creators...and how they are often victims of the comic industry fucking them over much like how Moore himself was, but some of whom never managed to gain fame like Moore and disappeared into obscurity in spite of how much they had contributed to the medium. ]
    • Moore's hatred of Sean Connery is embodied in J1 (the film-version Bond played by Connery), an over-the-top Scottish stereotype who is killed when Jimmy uses him as a human shield.
    • A particular deep-cut, somewhat affectionate and self-critical, is there in the final page of The Tempest before the epilogues, at the wedding of Captain Universe and Electrogirl, Hugo Hercules throws two guests out of an airlock. The guests are more or less Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill. The scene is a Shout-Out to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's cameo appearance at the wedding of Reed and Sue in the pages of Fantastic Four. Moore throws in digs at Stan Lee (gloating to Kev that when the artist dies, he will take credit and make cameo appearances in the Pink Child spinoffs) and also himself (admitting that his whole "ceremonial magician" thing is a concept).
    • The faux letter page at the end of The Tempest includes a letter from one Hiram J. Comicsgate III from Oklahodahio asking as a self-described "middle-aged conservative incel sitting wedged between [his] keyboard, trolling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with [his] Batman t-shirt covered in Pringles" why Moore and O'Neill are leaving the comics business.
• That Man Is Dead in The Black Dossier:
  M: "Jim, you can call me M. Behind my back, you can even call me Mother. But Harry... Harry died a long time ago in the sewers under Vienna. Let's leave it like that, shall we?
• Terminator Impersonator;
  • With Dr Rotwang helping the Nazis, his Machine Man is a parody of the terminator. Having her skin burned off by fire and having a Robotic Reveal.
  • Satin Astro says that in the future there will be a war between a rogue A.I. and Blazing World descended Beast Men. We see an image of robots from the future scenes in the Terminator fighting Planet of the Apes gorillas.
• They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!: Inverted — Ishmael prefers Nemo to call him by his first name, rather than "Mr. Mate". On his deathbed, he does. Janni calls him "Mr. Mate", but he lets it slide.
• Those Wacky Nazis: 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 The Great Dictator starring Charlie Chaplin; thus ensuring that the same type of facial hair is hated in both worlds.
• Thrown Out the Airlock: Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill try to gatecrash Captain Universe and Electrogirl's wedding but get chucked out an airlock by Hugo Coghlan.
• Tiger by the Tail: Volume 1 ends when the volume's Big Bad Moriarty, impulsively grabs onto the cavorite powering his flying ship after its container ends up shattered. He has just enough time to horrifiedly realize what he's just done before the anti-gravity metal shoots up into the sky and he finds himself too high up in the air to let go without falling to his death. But since the released cavorite only continues going up and up all the way into space, his frozen corpse is later found floating aimlessly through space while still holding onto the cavorite in a later volume.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: Invoked with Christian, who is literally too good for this Earth, as he is the allegorical pilgrim from The Pilgrim's Progress, and hails from a highly symbolical spiritual realm. He eventually disappears into the Blazing World and is never seen again.
• Totally Radical: 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 crushing psychological implications of being forever young and immortal.
• Tripod Terror: Lampshaded by Hyde in Volume II as he brings down one of the Tripods by tearing out a leg.
  Hyde: God made a lot of stupid, useless creatures on this planet too, but he didn't see fit to make any of them three legged. Can you guess why?
• Truer to the Text: Moore has long considered this to be one of his focuses in the series to restore elements to characters that have had their fiction adapted and regurgitated far away from the darker and harsher context of the originals. In this regard there are several examples where he has kept elements from the original work that other adaptations did not. But on the YMMV page you may read many counterpoints where Moore has deconstructed the characters to the point he ends up making just as many alterations to them as he restored.
  • Mina Murray is presented as a hero for her part as the protagonist of Dracula rather than the Count, Van Helsing and other elements which have supplied the cottage industry of vampire films, who by contrast are barely referred to and alluded to. Likewise, unlike more modern neo-victorian takes like Penny Dreadful or the film adaptation, Moore makes it clear that Mina did not retain any powers from Dracula's bites after his death. In the original source she wasn't turned into a full vampire and was cured completely of it by Dracula's death.
  • Captain Nemo's background as a Sikh Prince and a N.G.O. Superpower ruler of his own island nation gets restored from The Mysterious Island, in a sharp departure from the European and White Captain Nemo played by James Mason which was previously the most influential take on the character.
  • Even his take on the Antichrist/Moonchild is a lot more accurate in one of his arcs from the books that was excised from the movies. Harry Potter's more angsty appearance here reflects his arc in Book 5 which also had sections where he was worried he would be possessed by the Big Bad and felt resentment at his mentor for manipulating him, much of which was removed in the movies. In addition, the character has green eyes which the movies removed, because the actor complained about the contacts. Like where the movies made Ron Weasley into an Adaptational Wimp, his brief on-panel appearance in ''Century: 2009, shows him alongside Severus Snape, to be the only one to be brave enough to talk to Harry and reason with him where everyone else is cowering in fear or crying in anguish.
  • Likewise, "God" as in Mary Poppins is much closer to the book character by P. L. Travers than the Disney version. The book version of Mary Poppins was a woman who was strange and otherworldly and had adventures in multiple dimensions, and her harsh, unsentimental, and even cold demeanor in her appearance at the end of Century: 2009 was closer to the book character, and was the true source as to why she disliked the Disney version.
• Tuxedo and Martini: The basis of the mockery around James Bond is to lampoon and mock every aspect of the franchise.
• The Unfettered: Mr. Hyde, increasingly, doesn't let any moral concerns deter him from his actions.
• Unreliable Narrator: 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.
  • Word of God also says that s/he is a pathological liar.
• Utopia: The Utopia original one is mentioned in the Alkmanack.
• Vampire Hickey: Subverted, Mina's vampire bites left her neck a mass of scar tissue (she wears a ribbon to hide them, which slips when she and Allan sleep together). She flees from Allan, but he chases her and manages to explain that one of his previous wives had similar scars from a fire, and that it was the coincidence that surprised him. Doubles as Vampire Bites Suck
  Mina: Not quite the two discreet puncture marks of legend, are they?
• Verbal Tic: 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).
• Viewers Are Geniuses: So...many...obscure literary references...
• Villain Song: 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 Jack Macheath.
• Villain Team-Up: At the end of the 1969 installment, Haddo possesses Tom Riddle before he becomes Voldemort.
  • Queen Ayesha and Adenoid Hynkel also team up in Nemo: Roses of Berlin.
  • See also the entry for Legion of Doom above.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: In Volume 2, Mina is given a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown by The Invisible Man, climaxing in him kicking her so hard in the stomach she vomits on the floor, which Griffin then proceeds to shove her face into.
• Wardrobe Flaw of Characterization: Mina continues to keep her neck heavily wrapped, even as her fashion sense evolves to fit with the times, in order to cover up the many scars that she got from Dracula.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The real reason is obvious, but from a Watsonian perspective, what happened to almost every major literary character since the middle of the twentieth century? Indeed, it is worth noting that in the older volumes Moore dove deep into many literary sources in building the world of the league, from the major players to the background characters. But by the time of 1969 and 2009, the number of literary sources takes a severe nosedive, and indeed references are made to generally obscure cult films like Performance^note Which did receive a Novelisation though. or Get Carter^note Which did have a literary version but this version paid more attention to the film version and the main cultural symbol of The Oughties that Moore focuses on is You-Know-Who. As a result, it can be jarring, regardless of how many of us feel about the individual characters, that a lot of popular literary characters aren't referenced at all.
• What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: Mina and Allan set alongside the original Victorian League are underwhelming, as they are normal people in comparison. Much of Mina's second League suffer from having no remarkable abilities and are relegated to defending themselves with pistols and swords.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: Initially 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, Mina and Allan's biggest problem with immortality so far is keeping sex interesting. But Mina has more difficulties in Century and Alan eventually loses his grip on his drug addiction and becomes a homeless vagrant again. Its implied that Orlando also suffers from this to some degree since 5000 years of war and bloodshed occasionally drives him into a killing frenzy.
• Whole-Plot Reference: Some of the stories are retellings of specific works: Volume 2 is a Darker and Edgier (if the original wasn't grim enough) retelling of The War of the Worlds, Century: 1910 is heavily based on elements of The Threepenny Opera, and Century: 1969 is a joint Prequel to Get Carter and Performance.
• Women Are Wiser: Mina is generally the calm, sane, rational one in contrast to the messed-up Jerkass male heroes. Embodied with Orlando, a Gender Bender, who is depicted as a lot less of a Jerkass when a woman than when a man.
• Worldbuilding: Moore does this extensively as time goes on, using elements and pieces from a good bit of all fiction to create the world the League inhabits. This is particularly evident in backup material to Volume II, The New Traveller's Almanack, which details the locales of the League's world.
• World of Weirdness: How could a world containing all of fiction be anything else?
• Writing Around Trademarks: For characters that are not yet in the public domain, Moore resorts to cunning disguises while leaving essential clues.
  • "Jimmy" is never addressed as James Bond by any character on-page or in the background. He's referred to be a grandson of Campion Bond, he looks and dresses like James Bond does, but he remains Only Known by Their Nickname.
  • For the Harry Potter characters, Voldemort and Harry Potter are never referred to by name. The former introduces himself to Mina at the Hyde Park 60s concert by stating, "Well, my first name’s Tom, my middle name’s a marvel, and my last name’s a conundrum" echoing a famous anagram that alludes to Voldemort.
  • Harry is never quite portrayed directly since his overall look is too distinct and overexposed so Moore introduces him in first-person as he mows down his supporting cast with doubles of Draco, Neville, Ginny, Ron, Hermione, McGonagall, Snape and Dumbledore, after which he breaks his glasses and shaves his head and puts a bandage across his forehead where the scar was, with only his green eyes left from his original visual cue.
  • And sometimes, when the characters are too obscure to be recognizable any other way, Moore puts in the names, but spells them differently. For instance, there's Tom Swyfte instead of Tom Swift and Terner instead of Turner.
• Yellow Peril: Fu Manchu is a Chinese villain.
• You Are a Credit to Your Race: Invoked in one of the letter columns in regards to Nemo.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Done with Janni in Volume Three, wherein fighting fate apparently leads to getting gangraped for your defiance.
• You Shall Not Pass!: In Nemo: Heart of Ice, Ishmael stays behind to delay the pursuit of Janni and the others. He takes one of the ice schooners into the crevasse with him in a Heroic Sacrifice.

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