Moore, Alan, and Kevin O'Neill.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume One. La Jolla: America's Best Comics, 2002.
1: “Empire Dreams”
Writer: Alan Moore
Illustrator: Kevin O'Neill
Colourer: Benedict Dimagmaliw
Letterer: William Oakley
**THIS ENTRY CONTAINS SPOILERS, CONTINUE READING WITH CAUTION**
#1. Empire Dreams.
Plot: Mr Campion Bond meets up with Miss Wilhelmina Murray and orders her to recruit a “menagerie” for the safe-being of the British Empire. She is being sent to Cairo to look for the opium-addicted adventurer Allan Quartermain. When found, the adventurer first refuses to join the league, however, after killing two Arabs who try to rape Miss Murray, he needs to flee from his opium shack. Arriving at the dock no one less but Captain Nemo emerges with his submersible ship
The Nautilus and saves the life of Murray and Quartermain.
Immediately after welcoming Quartermain to the league, they head for Paris where they need to find a certain gentleman. With the help of the Chevalier Dupin they find out that the man is a murderer hungering for prostitutes. Miss Murray poses herself as bait in order to catch the man, who turns out to be Dr Henry Jekyll. And also Mr Edward Hyde of course.
Many of the characters come from literary works with Captain Nemo
(Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and
The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne
) and Jekyll and Hyde (“The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” by Robert Louis Stevenson) as the most obvious examples perhaps. Wilhelmina Murray comes from Bram Stoker's
Dracula and Allan Quartermain from the novel
King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard. Even the minor character Dupin comes from the literary work; he's the detective from Edgar Alan Poe's mind in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” to which this Moore's story points as well: “The murders have begun again. … This street here, between the Rue Richelieu and the Rue St. Roch...” and he points at the Rue Morgue.
It appears Campion Bond is not a character from another work.
The comic starts immediately by painting the character of Wilhelmina Murray who refuses to be called by her first name. From this start it appears Miss Murray is a stubborn woman who knows what she wants and how to get it. The audience learns she has divorced her husband, which indicates she is an outcast from society. Campion Bond presumably selected his candidates because of their talents on the one hand and their outcasting from society on the other hand. After all, Murray's first compliance is Captain Nemo. The next two Gentlemen that need to become part of the elite group are similar outcasts with a drug addiction (Quartermain) and a murdered wanted by the police (Jekyll).
Soon the reader ends up with a characteristic that may appear pretentious to the common English reader. While rescuing Quartermain the speech of their adversaries is Arabic and in Paris the prostitutes speak French. This may on the one hand be seen as a way to add realism (Arabs speak Arabic after all, French prostitutes tend to speak French), but most readers will not understand a word of it. Would the story benefit from having footnotes that translate the lines? Probably not. But it can be off-putting to a part of the audience.
It is, by the way, not necessary to have read the original works featuring the characters reinvented by Moore, but it is a rather fun pastime to try and discover who's who and apparently a book has been published revealing this information (
Heroes & Monsters: The Unofficial Companion to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Jess Nevins).
All in all, an enjoyable start of the series (of six). It appears Moore has weaved together his two favourite genres of superhero comics and 19th century adventurers literature into an already classic, hybrid genre.
Buy the Collected Edition
here.
