The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is Moore’s re-telling of the adventure/horror/pulp genre, a sort of “Justice League of Victorian England” in Moore’s own words.  Assembled by Campion Bond (presumably an ancestor of James ) and working for the mysterious M (hinted to be Mycroft Holmes), the League comprises several of the pulp world’s famous characters:  Mina Murray (formerly Harker), Captain Nemo, Allan Quatermain, Dr. Jekyll (and/or Mr. Hyde) and Hawley Griffin, the Invisible Man.  The League has been pressed into service to recover the stolen cavorite, a compound which can be used to power an aeronautical warship and which will be used against London if not recovered.

If you have read my review of Planetary, you know that I love this kind of playing around with the pulps.  Having demolished the superhero genre in Watchmen, Moore goes back to the beginning to bring the superhero sensibility to its origin.  League remains true to its pulpy genre, but brings in the superhero action and traces of steampunk, gives backstory to the original characters (Nemo under Moore is far more interesting then Verne) and otherwise kicks ass.  The visuals by O’Neill are perfectly done.  They have a thin line which evokes the turn-of-the-last-century style, and also give the feeling of simplicity, which also gives the feeling of age.

All in all, I am a fool to have missed this.  Volume 2 is on my “to be read” list, and hopefully I get to it before we hit the next decade.

Hypothetically related posts:

1. Planetary, Vol. 2: The Fourth Man
2. Planetary, Vol. 1: All Over the World and Other Stories
3. Planetary, Vol. 3: Leaving the 20th Century

Enter a series of retcons, whole universes of superheroes reorganized and reshuffled, personal lives given human foibles and emotional lives given complex flaws.  Robin dies.  Superman dies.  Kicking the status quo in the teeth becomes the status quo.

And then along comes Planetary.  It does the impossible – “How can we look at all that stuff we created,” it says, “and make sense of it all?  And how can we do it while not making ourselves look like the same kind of stuff?”  For while Planetary is a great story, it is really a story about stories.

In the first issue, we meet the Planetary team:  Elijah Snow, born Jan. 1, 1900, able to freeze things, usually testicles; Jakita Wagner, a leather-clad super-strong, super-fast woman; Drums, a young man who can communicate with information by tapping out a rhythm on it; oh, and the mysterious Fourth Man, the financial backer of the whole deal.  They are “archaeologists of the impossible,” and their first mission together is to investigate a mysterious cavern located in the heart of the Adirondacks (literally – the cavern is carved into one of the mountains and hidden with a hologramatic door).

Here they find the destroyed clubhouse of a group of pulp-aged heroes.  The trophy room sets the tone (”The Vulcanian Raven God,” “The Hull of the Charnel Ship,” “The Murder Colonels”[!?!]), and then they meet Axel “Doc” Brass.  He is wounded, and has been lying here guarding the place for 50 years.  But no worry; he eliminated the need for sleep and food in ‘42, stopped aging in ‘43 and learned to heal himself with mind power in ‘44.  He describes how he and his compatriots – analogues of Doc Savage, Tarzan, Fu Manchu, The Spirit, etc. – created a quantum computer in 1945 and started it running to create a perfect version of the world.  In doing so, it opened a Bleed into the quantum calculating space, giving access to, and FROM, the 196,833 versions of the universe being used to solve the equation.

The pulp heroes fight off a thinly-disguised version of the Justice League of America, leaving everyone dead but old Brass, and our thematic journey is off and running.  The series starts with a bang, and doesn’t slow down; further stories in this volume deal with an island in the Japanese archipelago which is home to the carcasses of massive monsters; a ghost cop haunting the streets of Hong Kong, waiting for revenge; the “fantastic” origin story of four completely dysfunctional super-powered beings; and the story of a scientist who is radically transformed during an experiment with gamma radiation.

These stories are demand re-reading.  They operate on a couple of levels – the naive reading, the meta-reading, and so forth – and the art is fantastic, giving just the right amount of homage or clue as to what we are dealing with this time.  This is a fantastic series, and I really can’t recommend it enough.

Hypothetically related posts:

1. Planetary, Vol. 2: The Fourth Man
2. Planetary: Crossing Worlds
3. Planetary, Vol. 3: Leaving the 20th Century