Adrift in a Blazing World
Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill take readers on a most fantastic voyage

The League Of Extraordinary Gentleman: The Black Dossier
By Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill
Americas Best Comics
Cover price: $29.99; Available now
suggested for mature readers

One of the most intriguing parts of the second League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen series was the “New Traveller’s Alamanac” stories in the back of the comics.

While our Victorian Age heroes and heroines valiantly battled a Martian invasion in the main story, a text story afterward described, among other things, Captain Nemo meeting Captain Hook and Long John Silver; an encounter between The Nautilus and The Yellow Submarine (yes, the one in The Beatles cartoon movie); and references to the League members visiting America and passing by Zorro’s villa in California, the logging town of Twin Peaks, and visiting the New England community of Stepford with its “proverbially pretty and agreeable womenfolk.”

In this “almanac” feature, writer Alan Moore skillfully and humorously combined and juxtaposed dozens of famous literary and movie characters, making the fantasy world of the League even more amazing and inclusive.

If you liked those Almanac text features, you will absolutely LOVE Moore and artist Kevin O’Neill Black Dossier. You thought the first two League volumes were filled with delightful literary and pop-culture references? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

The Black Dossier begins with Mina Murray (from Bram Stoker’s Dracula) and a now-young Allan Quatermain (from H. Rider Haggard’s book series) stealing The Black Dossier containing classified League information from James Bond in 1958.

We soon learn that the events described in George Orwell’s 1984 occurred in England in 1948. England became dominated by “Big Brother” shortly after World War II, which, we learn, was triggered by the insane dictator Adenoid Hynkel (the character Charlie Chaplin played in his classic movie The Great Dictator).

In the rest of the book, we are treated to the contents of the actual Black Dossier, as Murray and Quatermain try to stay one step ahead of the British Secret Service (an agency where Harry Lime, from Graham Greene’s novel — and Orson Welles’ film — The Third Man, is the new “M”).

The Dossier contains not only references to the team we were introduced to in the first two League Of Extraordinary Gentleman stories, but to earlier “Leagues”; a treatise on the supernatural by Oliver Haddo (the central character of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel The Magician); a sequel to Gulliver’s Travels; postcards written by League members after the Martian invasion; a comic strip biography of Orlando (from Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando about a person whose gender shifts between male and female over several centuries); an excerpt from the novel The Crazy Wide Forever by Sal Paradyse (Sal “Paradise” was Jack Kerouac’s alter-ego in Kerouac’s classic novel On The Road), plus lots of other goodies.

There is even a special section rendered in 3-D (with a pair of 3-D “glasses” generously provided).

If you are looking for substantial amounts of action and a tightly woven plot in The Black Dossier, you will undoubtedly be disappointed. The bulk of the book contains the “documents” of the dossier. Sandwiched in-between are Mina and Allan on the run from James Bond, Bulldog Drummond (the British detective created by Herman Cyril McNeile, who appeared in novels, movies, and TV shows), and a young Emma Night (known to all fans of the English spy series The Avengers as “Emma Knight,” whose married name was Mrs. Peel).

Part of the fun of Moore’s League stories is looking for all the obscure references. If you look carefully you will find references to the movie Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? (in a comic strip “They’re Hollywood’s pearls — Those Hudson Girls”); Jules Verne’s Robur the Conqueror; P.G. Wodehouse’s Wooster and Jeeves stories; the town of Mayberry (and a quote from a deputy that would have to be Barney Phyfe); the silent Film Metropolis; Sir Percy Blakeney and Lady Marguerite Blakeney (from Baroness Emmuska Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel); Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Thirty-Nine Steps, and too many other references to mention.

But be warned, there is plenty of sex in The Black Dossier (including a richly illustrated New Adventures Of Fanny Hill and a entire “Tijuana Bible” style comic that looks like what state-produced pornography would look like in Orwell’s book 1984.

And then there’s The Golliwog….

Golliwog was created by Florence Kate Upton in The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwog (1895), and several sequels by Upton and other authors. The Golliwog was a children’s book character in England for several generations that will, unfortunately, look to American readers like the worst, most racist caricature of an African-American ever depicted in a modern comic book. Golliwog comes in at the end of the story to rescue some of the other characters.

Although the doll was not portrayed in a racist manner in the children’s books or in The Black Dossier, his appearance will disturb a lot of people who don’t understand Moore’s reference. I do not believe Mr. Moore or Mr. O’Neill to be racists, and have not seen any indications of bigotry in their other material (and I’ve read plenty of Moore’s comic book stories), but if you’re a reader sensitive to such things, you might want to know about this before buying the book.

Overall, The Black Dossier is a lot of fun in the same way that playing an incredibly difficult game of trivial pursuit can be fun. Even if the reader can’t figure out every single reference (and I imagine there are countless British pop culture jokes I know that I’ll NEVER understand), you’ll feel very satisfied at all the great references you can pick out and all the new stuff you find each time you reread the story.