The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier
Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill

So it's finally out. DC first announced that this was due out in October 2006, then pushed it back, and back, and back. It came out this week. Turns out that DC wasn't supposed to solicit until it was finished, which took a while. And looking at the finished product, that's not surprising. And it's still not really complete - there was supposed to be a 45 included containing two 1950s style pop songs that will be included in next year's pricey Absolute Edition, which will most likely find their way online in one way or another.

Anyway. I first started reading The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen at the end of the first six issue volume. It's a great concept, though not necessarily an original one (Google "Wold Newton" for more info.) -- the heroes of Victorian literature all exist in the same world and team up to fight for the British government. Every speaking character in volume one either previously exists in literature, or has been retro-engineered from from another character, such as Campion Bond, 007's grandfather. Many of the characters are familiar, such as Dracula's Mina Murray or Doctor Jeckyll, but there's obscure ones in there too, like Rosa Coote, who appeared in Victorian "stroke pamphlets."

Which is where the fun begins.

One of the best things about the series is reference-spotting, which has been made considerably easier by Jess Nevins, who has annotated the whole thing online, and in a series of books.

Which makes volume two considerably easier to digest. When volume two was orignally published, each issue had a section at the end called "The New Traveller's Almanac." This was purportedly a report compiled from various sources that served as a travel guide to the earth of literature. It's mind-blowing. Page after page of dense Victorian style prose with the occasional reference that you get (there;s a mention of a nine-pins loving sailor named Lebowsky who gets stranded in California in the early 1900s) and other that, well, make you thankful that someone like Nevins exists.

"The New Traveller's Almanac" expands the world of the League and The Black Dossier builds on that. Volume one and two are set in 1898 and cover a battle with Professor Moriarty and Fu Manchu, followed by the Martian invasion of War of the Worlds. The Black Dossier jumps forward sixty years to a post Big Brother Britain and finds the surviving heroes from the first two books, Mina Murray and Alan Quatermain, stealing the title documents from MI5 and then being chased by James Bond and Emma Peel, though for copyright reasons those two are never called directly by those names. That's it. It's a simple plot, but throughout the book we get what's in the dossier, which is being read by our heroes as they're on the run and includes:

• A history and integration of gods from HP Lovecraft, the Bible, and every religion you can think of.
• The life of Orlando
• The first act of a lost Shakespeare play
• The New Adventures of Fanny Hill
• A PG Wodehouse story by way of Lovecraft, involving Jeeves, Wooster, and monsters
• The first chapter of a Beat Generation novel

There's other stuff too and what's great is that Moore does a perfect pastiche of each style that he attempts, though I must admit that I have a hard time slogging through most Beat Generation stuff and haven't quite finished "The Crazy Wide Forever" yet.

So is it any good? As a whole? Well, frankly, after three years since volume two, and hearing Moore say that it's the best thing ever, initially it's a bit of a letdown. Initially. Yes, it's overstuffed and loaded with the trademark references, but the impression is there that Moore wants to do something more with the series than have it be just a funny little collection of adventure stories that comes out every few years. We seem to be headed into something a bit grander than what's come before and if nothing else, The Black Dossier serves as a bridge to that, which is probably the main reason that it's not called The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume Three. That's officially due next year and is set to cover the entire 20th Century.

So, it should be fun to see where we're headed with this. The Black Dossier's a nice stopgap release, almost like an annual in the world of traditional comics, and I can't wait to see what's next.