http://www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20213200_11,00.html
http://www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20213200_10,00.html
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Whereas The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Vol. III): Century [the third installment of Moore's Victorian-sleuthing comic, due out in April 2009] certainly stokes the imagination. Why make it span three different eras — 1910, 1968, and the present?
ALAN MOORE: [Artist] Kevin O'Neill and I realized we had two or three powerful stories. It struck us that we might be able to link them together and make a three-part narrative, so that each would stand on it's own and thus relieve readers from any kind of painful cliffhanger between issues. And yet the three stories would link up into an overarching narrative involving the occult.
How do these three chapters split up?
The first book surrounds the coronation of King George, which was also the time The Threepenny Opera was set, a comet was passing overhead, and there was a general feeling of dread in the air. We're also focusing on the occult fictions written around the time...[like] Aleister Crowley's [1917] book, Moonchild, where the protagonists are attempting to create a magically produced child that is going to usher in a new era. [Protagonist] Mina and her associates are trying to stop this from happening. The second book [revolves around] that sort of peculiar 1960s melding of pop-star psychedelic lifestyles, fashionable interest in occultism, and to some degree, at least in London, crime. We've got it all centered around a big rock concert at Hyde Park. Running all the way through this is the continuing threat of the production of a magical child who, by this time, we are fairly certain, is the Antichrist. That second book ends very badly. And they're not having a lot of luck. The third part is set in 2008 when, basically, the League is in pieces — barely exists anymore — and this turns out to be the time at which the Antichrist project finally pays off, and this magical child finally manifests in quite a terrifying form.
You've moved publishers, from DC Comics to Top Shelf. Do you think that's going to affect your work?
I think it's already affecting it. Both me and Kevin have noticed that this third volume is very different from the first two [published by DC Comics]. It's almost as if, while we were working within the confines of mainstream comics, we were perhaps unconsciously following the basic formulae of mainstream comics. There's sort of an overall ethos in comics, in boys' adventure fiction, that you must keep the action moving, which is not really the standards of serious drama or literature. So for this third volume of League, we're pacing it differently. It's got a lot more depth and resonance, a lot more drama for the money. And I think that the payoff of this first volume is that it will be frightening enough to make the reader forget the slower pace of its opening pages.
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20213004_3,00.html
Pádraig Ó Méalóid: I see. OK, the next thing you have coming out is League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century, volume three of the League?
Alan Moore: The first part should be out later this year.
Pádraig Ó Méalóid: Should it? OK, good.
Alan Moore: Century - that’s the overall title of volume three - is going to be in three books. Now we figured that we wanted to do three seventy-two page issues rather than, say, six twenty-four page comics, because we wanted to be able to tell a complete story in each issue, and they do build up into a narrative arc that spans the century of the title, but they’re each complete and satisfying in themselves. They’re set in three different time periods, so there won’t be a long nail-biting wait because, quite frankly, Kevin [O’Neill]’s going to take as long as Kevin’s going to take, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. When people see the work that he’s doing - the Black Dossier itself was absolutely marvellous, he’s excelling himself, and it’s a very different feel to the other League books. For one thing we’re liberated from working for a mainstream comic company, and that has made some difference. It wasn’t even a conscious decision, it was just that working for Top Shelf is a much more pleasant and inviting experience and so we felt that, at least in this first issue, there’s not so much action as there was in the first couple of volumes and in the Black Dossier. It’s as if we feel freed from the conventions of boys’ adventure comics, and so it’s a lot more atmospheric, it builds to a tremendously bloody climax, it’s a slow build. We’re thrilled with it. It’s got some songs in it, it’s a musical.
Pádraig Ó Méalóid: I’m looking forward to seeing it.
Alan Moore: That’s coming along well, then I’ve got the second one written which Kevin can start as soon as he’s finished this first one, and then I’m going to be probably starting writing the third one, which is set in the present day. That might be… that’ll probably be 2009. So…
Pádraig Ó Méalóid: So we should see the lot of them maybe by the end of 2009?
Alan Moore: It’s possible. It’s possible, that sounds about feasible though I wouldn’t want to promise anything, and it would depend upon how long it takes Kevin to draw them because there’s not many people who actually work in the way that Kevin does anymore. It’s very seldom that you’re going to see just that amount of art - it’s just like with Melinda on Lost Girls. These are handmade things and Kevin doesn’t work on a computer. There are actually pages of Kevin O’Neill original art are around, just like there are pages of Melinda Gebbie art around.
http://forbiddenplanet.co.uk/blog/?p=7895
The Black Dossier is a huge undertaking, featuring an undiscovered Shakespeare playlet, a version of the Daily Mirror's saucy wartime strip Jane in written in 1984's newspeak ("SEXJANE: WORKBELT CRIMEPOKE") and an encounter between Bertie Wooster and HP Lovecraft's extradimensional monstrosities entitled What Ho, Gods Of The Abyss. Can you possibly take the League concept any further?
The Black Dossier should have been even better, actually - there'll be a bigger edition next year with a 7-inch single and, ideally, the Fanny Hill pastiche as a sealed section, in the finest tradition of Victorian filth. Writing the Kerouac pastiche was fantastic fun, although when you re-read him he's not actually as mad and bebop as we remember him. I had to draw on one of his poems, Old Angel Midnight, for the right tone of unpunctuated, freeform Kerouacness.
It's not the end of the League story. We're already working on the next instalment, which will be a three-volume work called Century. The first one takes place in 1910 and is called What Keeps Mankind Alive. It's the Edwardian incarnation of the League, when Raffles the gentleman thief and Virginia Woolf's Orlando were members, and we're going to be doing our version of The Threepenny Opera, complete with Mack The Knife and Pirate Jenny. I've written a new libretto for it.
Part two is set in 1968 and it's called Paint It Black. Everyone knows about the brilliant psychedelic underground of the time but the occult renewal is less well known. We'll be looking at the crossover of swinging London, dodgy Satanism and organised crime, because the Krays were in and out of both worlds. I'm happy to say that we're including no less than six fictional incarnations of Ronnie Kray - Harry Starks from The Long Game, Harry Flowers from Performance, Doug and Dinsdale Piranha... and lots of Aleister Crowley. And then the third part brings us bang up to the present day, 2008.
http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/word-march-issue-extended-edition-more-alan-moore
THE WIZARD Q&A: ALAN MOORE
Alan Moore could lay claim to a lot of what’s good about American comics today if he wanted to. But bearing the mantle of “comics’ greatest writer” may just be the thing that forces the living legend out of the mainstream system of four-color publishing forever.
After 20-plus years at the top of the business, the writer of classic comics such as Watchmen, V for Vendetta and the entire ABC line of comics at DC/WildStorm, has upped the intelligence quotient of everything from superheroes to horror stories, blazed a trail for creator independence by declining to work with Marvel or DC and helped draw a creative line in the sand between comics and their movie adaptations with his refusal to receive credit or money from films based on his work.
However, after decades of fighting creative disputes while garnering critical acclaim, the 54-year-old Moore is content to cut himself out of the comics world and cut down on his comics output. “Comics is now, I’m afraid, just going to have to be a corner of my working landscape,” says the writer from his home in Northampton, England. “They’re very dear and it’s a fondly regarded corner, but just one corner of the landscape all the same.”
Luckily for his fans, Moore hasn’t quite hit retirement age yet, as 2008 will see the debut of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century. The new miniseries of three 72-page comics from Top Shelf Productions—moving from DC Comics’ WildStorm imprint—plans to take Moore and artist Kevin O’Neill’s Victorian superteam through the entirety of the 20th century and beyond, leaving behind any talk of new comics or 2009’s “Watchmen” feature film.
WIZARD: With Century, what was the impetus for you to do the three larger volumes instead of doing the standard-format 22-page comic book?
MOORE: Well, I suppose my thinking on it was that if we had the ability to completely rethink the way that we presented The League, then I know that having to keep to that pretend monthly schedule was very wearing and frustrating for both me and Kevin [O’Neill], particularly Kevin, because the truth of The League is that it will take as long as it takes. There is absolutely no point in rushing Kevin O’Neill. I mean, okay, you meet somebody’s largely self-invented and phony deadline and the work isn’t very good because you had to rush it, and in five years’ time no one will care whether you met the deadline or not. They will only care about how good the work is. So me and Kevin always work with that in mind. What we decided that we’d do is to come up with a structure whereby each of the three 72-page issues is a complete story in itself, although it builds up to this larger arc, this sort of century-long narrative.
In The Black Dossier, you covered a lot of the League’s history. What’s left to tell?
MOORE: With [The Black Dossier] we have sketched in an incredibly broad canvas of the fictional world that the League exists in. We’ve given it a chronology that stretches all the way back to the prehistoric period to before the dawn of mankind and brings it up to about 1958, and that kind of gives a fairly complete background to spring other League narratives from the future, the first of which is Century. We start off with 1910, which is always a story that me and Kevin had been intending to write. The first volume is taking off very much from the different range of media that were available as the 19th century changed into the 20th. In the first two volumes of The League we’re more or less completely dealing with purely literary characters. With the 1910 storyline in Volume 3, there are other avenues opening up.
Who are some of the new characters that start showing up in Part 1?
MOORE: We’ve got a fairly rich stew of other characters and the League, as it stands in 1910, is comprised of Mina, Allan, Orlando from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? amongst other places, Thomas Carnacki from Carnacki the Ghost Finder by William Hope Hodgson, and Anthony John Raffles, the Gentleman’s Thief [from author E.W. Hornung’s stories]. So they figure in the first book. Three of those characters are immortals, so they turn up in the second book as well. We thought that if we were going to continue the League into the future then it would probably be a wise idea to make two or three of the main characters immortals.
How would you describe the League’s dynamic this time around?
MOORE: I suppose that it could be argued that the League don’t get on very well in either of these two books [of Century]. In the first chapter they don’t get on very well, in the second chapter it’s absolutely disastrous, and by the third chapter it’s difficult to see how they’re going to be in any condition to actually take part in the kind of narrative that I’ve got planned for them. But I think it’ll work out okay. It’s going to be a very different feel to the League. I mean, we’re moving out of the Victorian period. We’re in the 20th century. Like Bertolt Brecht: There is an incredible moral darkness in Brecht’s work, which was totally appropriate for the time in which he wrote it and which is still very appropriate for today. But that kind of sets the tone for this third volume of The League.
Does the series get progressively darker?
MOORE: Even the second volume [of Century] which is all set in the mid-’60s during the Summer of Love or shortly thereafter, that is a very dark aspect to the 1960s that we’re exploring. We’re looking at some of the cult films of that era and taking characters from them and weaving them together. We’ve got sort of cameos from a lot of interesting 1960s characters—[author] Mike Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius makes an appearance, his second appearance in The League because he does make an appearance as a younger man, shall we say, in The Black Dossier. But we’ve got him turning up in The League in his full 1960s splendor with the non-reflective black skin and the milk-white hair and the panda-skin coat and everything. So that was good fun, and we were able to tie up an awful lot of the supernatural films of the 1960s, which work very well into our overall theme of a burgeoning occult apocalypse which would be probably ready in time for Book 3—which I can’t tell you very much about because I haven’t written it yet. But it will be set in 2008, and we will be trying our best to dance nimbly around the copyright laws and to use contemporary characters. Obviously, I can’t say very much about that and it would spoil the fun anyway.
At this point, it’s fair to say that you could never write another comic book again and we’d all say, “Well, thank you very much, Mr. Moore” and that could be it. But are you really going to be done with comics after this?
MOORE: Well, at the moment the only comic strip material that I plan to continue into the future is The League. Now, the Bumper Book of Magic which I’m currently working on does contain some comic strip material, but not very much. It’s a mixture of things. It’s got board games in there and a complete set of tarot cards that we’re designing, and there are some comic strip pages. But I quite like using comics as we did in The Black Dossier, using them as one element of a mixture. Now there are other things. I’m sure there will be other comics. I mean, we’ve been talking about—me and [artist] Steve Parkhouse—doing another Bojeffries story and perhaps bringing out a collection of the entirety of the Bojeffries series, since that is one of my personal favorites. Me and Steve, I think we’d be happy if Top Shelf would bring out a Bojeffries, but the main thrust of my writing at the moment is all in this second novel Jerusalem.
How is Jerusalem different from your previous work?
MOORE: It’s the biggest thing that I’ve ever attempted. One of the biggest things that probably anyone has ever attempted. [Laughs] I mean, this is going to be an enormous book and it’s a very strange subject matter. I can’t think of anything to compare it to. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I’m currently on chapter 20 out of 35. It’s going to be over a half million words long, which means something like 1,500 pages. I’m hoping that technology will catch up with my vision and they’ll invent quantum glue or something so that you could potentially have million-page books that would all hold together some way or another. I’m going to do the cover for it. I’ve got the pencils for that at least half done. I thought that it’d make more sense to leave it until I’d actually finished the book, before doing the cover. You have to get your priorities in the right order.
I didn’t want to bring up any of the movie stuff, particularly because that’s a horse that’s been beat to death…
MOORE: Is this the Watchmen question?
Well, it’s a Watchmen question. I was just wondering if you had seen the new piece of art that Dave Gibbons had done for the poster?
MOORE: No. I spoke to Dave the other day. I got a piece of paper—they must’ve learned something from the “V for Vendetta” debacle. I got a piece of paper a couple of months ago saying, “I, the undersigned, hereby give you permission to take my name off of the film and to send my money to Dave Gibbons.” So I sent that back to them all signed and sealed, which means that now I don’t have to rant and spew about the film. I’m just simply not interested in it. Dave phoned me up, and it’s always nice to talk to Dave, but he understands that I’m not really interested in “Watchmen.” So when he phoned, he asked me if I was interested in being kept up to date on it, and I was saying, “Well, it’s always nice to talk to you, but not really.” I don’t really know much about it. I believe that it’s going ahead. I won’t be watching it, obviously. I can at least remain neutral to it as long as they’re taking my name off of it and not playing these silly, ultimately futile games like they were doing last time, which worked out so well for them. No, I’m keeping well away from all of that.
http://www.wizarduniverse.com/magazine/wizard/006924458.cfm
ALAN MOORE GETS ANIMATED
The acclaimed writer discusses his upcoming turn on ‘The Simpsons’ and teases a bit about The Black Dossier By Kiel Phegley
After creating a body of work that’s illuminated comics fans on topics from the darker side of Victorian literature to how to be a practicing magician, Alan Moore has discovered a new path to happiness he’s more than willing to share with his fans.
“It is quite nice to see yourself with three fingers and yellow,” laughs the legendary writer. “It’s probably something that everybody should try to do once in their life.”
Moore is, of course, talking about his impending guest spot on Fox’s long-running animated series “The Simpsons,” which airs at 8 p.m. Sunday. In the episode “Husbands & Knives” the writer of comics classics from Watchmen to Lost Girls plays himself arriving in Springfield in the company of fellow renowned comics creators Art Spiegelman and Daniel Clowes when a new, high-end comics shop (run by a character voiced by actor Jack Black) springs up to compete with longstanding shop The Android’s Dungeon.
“I met Art Spiegelman once, but that’s it,” notes Moore of his onscreen chum. “I’ve not actually met Dan Clowes. I guess that, for what it’s worth, that would be some sort of virtual meeting.”
Moore did have an actual meeting with producers from the show when it came time to record the episode’s dialogue in his hometown of Northampton, England. “We’ve got a local recording studio here which I used for two or three of the CDs that I recorded my performances on a few years ago. It’s a little tiny studio that’s been useful for shooting little television interviews and things like that. So I think that I suggested it to the ‘Simpsons’ people when they got in touch with me. We went down there with Tim Long, who’s one of the writers, a very, very nice engaging chap. I’d been sent the script sometime before that and so we just went down to the recording studio and I ran through my lines, and they seemed to be quite pleased with the performance.”
And although the writer has yet to see the final product, he did give approval for his animated counterpart’s look. “I saw the character sketches that they had done of me,” he says with a chuckle. “I think that they showed me my printout on the Net. Yeah, I looked very good. They probably caught my essence, and I shall probably have to get one of those coats that they’ve dressed me in—otherwise my audience will be disappointed when they see me on the streets.”
It’s a busy week for Moore, at least in terms of releases bearing his name and/or likeness: Wednesday finally saw the release of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier—the long-delayed new entry in he and Kevin O’Neill’s series of “Victorian Literature Adventure Comics” although as with anything the writer works on, there’s much more to the book than the base description.
“With The Black Dossier, which is a very bittersweet book for both me and Kevin, in some ways it’s one of the best things we’ve ever done,” explains Moore. “It’s a completely new form. It manages to take the elements that have always been there—the text features and the comic strip sequences—and it adds a few more things to the mix, then puts them together in what I believe is a fairly unique way.”
Despite the complications leading to its release, both Moore and O’Neill are excited at the prospect of the book reaching audiences, particularly so they can show it off. “I suspect that it does make a lot of the other product being put out look a little bit lazy and perhaps a little tiny bit illiterate. But you have to judge for yourself. I might be blowing my own trumpet too much.”
As for his own future and the future of the League, both will be moving to indie publisher Top Shelf in 2008, a move which Moore believes synchs up well with modern trends of publishing comics for a broader audience. “A lot of the big-time, serious, legitimate book publishers are getting in on the act and bringing out a huge number of really entertaining books,” he says. “Increasingly, there’s interesting books in the graphic novel section of the chain bookstores over here along with all the superhero collections. I hope that this signals a general absorption of comic book material into mainstream culture, which would take it away from these little enclaves that have controlled the destiny of comics for the past…goodness, man, can it really be 70 years?
“It would be nice to think that the basic structure of the industry is changing, that the traditional comics industry is perhaps withering and dying. I, for one, am quite interested in seeing what springs up to take its place.”
http://www.wizarduniverse.com/magazine/wizard/006367836.cfm
"The Black Dossier," the long awaited next chapter in the "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" saga, is finally here, and Kevin O'Neill, the London-born artist who has lent his artistic talents to each installment so far, is promoting the book in comics venues up and down the American west coast. This past Saturday, O'Neill headlined a signing at Earth 2 Comics in Sherman Oaks, CA.
In a day and age when sketches typically fetch a pretty penny on the convention circuit, O'Neill treated all comers to gratis sketches and still found the time to talk to CBR News about "Black Dossier."
How did you get involved in the first "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen"?
I rang Alan up about something else; I hadn't spoken to him in a long time. At the end of the conversation, he said, "Oh, I've got this project you might be interested in." And he told me what it was, these iconic characters grouping together, and sort of the origin of all the kind of pulp characters and comic super groups and so on, and I thought, "Yeah, I'm in. That's definitely for me."
I didn't know I'd be doing it for so many years. It might have just been the one series, but we both really enjoy it, you know? And we realize now, we can do anything with it. We just have the core of Alan and Mina and we just fit fiction all around it. It makes it exciting.
Tell us about your process for depicting characters that are so iconic?
I always go back to the source material as far as possible. Like on the Drummond character, I re-read the original books, and then I talk it over with Alan, and if the characters are much older like Drummond is, we talk about what kind of state he'd be in. He's not a pleasant character, but he's marginally more likable than the character who's a bit like James Bond. So that's basically it, it's going back to the source, if it's a literature source.
With other things it's just arriving at perhaps a different look that hasn't been done before, like with Nemo. "The Mysterious Island" mentions the Prince Dakkar stuff, and the Indian background. Nemo's always been a white man, or usually has been a white man. Doing an Indian character, going back to the roots of Verne, was much more interesting. That opened up a lot of new stuff for us, even the look of the Nautilus.
There's sometimes a version of what people would expect. Like Sherlock Holmes was only a short sequence in the earlier novel, but I knew people had certain expectations. And I think we carried that off well, and Alan's writing on that sequence was quite beautiful.
I try to be true to the author's intentions. The "War of the Worlds" material, the HG Welles stuff, we did a big timeline of what's happening during the course of the book itself, and where our stuff can fit into it, so we're not really contradicting anything in the book. So that's what it is, and it's fun, it's not like homework, if you know what I mean, it's always enjoyable.
What has been your reaction to Moore's notoriously detailed scripts?
At first it was daunting, they are incredibly detailed. On "The Black Dossier," when I tidied up my studio, it was the first time I'd put all the scripts into one place, because it'd been written over a number of years. And the finished "Dossier" was bigger than a telephone directory, it was a monster of a thing. If that had all arrived at the same time, I doubt if I could've started the book, it would have been so formidable. It's great, Alan's an artist as well, he can draw, so he writes from an artist's perspective, and his sequential continuity is second to none, there's no one else in the world who writes like him.
We talk a little bit. Like for "The Black Dossier," I sent him years ago some stuff about Florence Upton's Golliwog character and the Dutch Dolls, and we said, "Yeah, this will be cool, we'll get them in sometime." And they just happened to fit perfectly into this story. So that was cool. But generally, Alan will write it, and he'll always put a note in saying, "If you see a better way of doing it, change it," but it seldom happens. It's a perfect blueprint in script form.
Do you get all the references Moore puts into his stories?
Believe me, yeah, I'm getting better at it. But some of the obscure 19th century pornography, Alan's got a big collection of that stuff that he'd have to explain to me; who these characters are in the first novel in the Invisible Man sequence when we first meet the Invisible Man. But generally I'm familiar because we were born in the same year; we've got the same reference points, being born in 1953. And this book is set in '58, so it's our childhood we're writing about, really, in a very grim, still post-war Britain, which is interesting and totally different from the American '50s experience.
We understand the pair of you are going to be doing another installment?
Yeah, we're doing a third series for Top Shelf, it's called "Century," it'll be three interlinked books, 72 pages each. The first one is set in 1910, the second is set in the '60s, and the third one will be in the present day, and it will be collected to form a greater story in collected form. And after that, we'll just jump about, we'll do different time periods, whatever strikes our fancy.
Can you say anything about the move from Wildstorm to Top Shelf?
I think it was almost inevitable. Things were becoming a bit fractured and uncomfortable for Alan, and it's one of the rare books that we actually own, so we can move it away if we want to. And [Top Shelf publisher] Chris Staros did a fantastic job on "Lost Girls." "Lost Girls" was not an easy sell in America, and the way he supported the book, promoted the book, and the production values are absolutely stunning. So it's an honor to work with them.
http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=12423
"The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier" is the latest book in the series from Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, and the last in the series to be published by DC/Wildstorm. At first glance, the book seems like a transition between the end of the second book and the next volume, which will be published by Top Shelf in 2008. "The Black Dossier" serves as a prelude to the next stage of the story. With "The Black Dossier" shipping to comic shops today, CBR News presents an interview with its author conducted on Halloween Eve from his house in Northampton, England.
The path to final publication for the book has not been a smooth one, as Alan explained at length with his customary dry humor and sense of frustration at the unnecessary interference it encountered.
BIRTH PAINS
"At a time when I started 'The Black Dossier,' I was still happy to continue publishing the 'League' under the auspices of DC/Wildstorm. At that time, it was just after Kevin had finished the additional pages of Book Two. I remember talking to him on the phone and we were joking about how he was going to be out of work starting the following morning. And I was just so moved by the image of Kevin having to turn up at the local Job Centre to learn new skills that I thought, maybe I could think of some project that could gainfully occupy Kevin without requiring a huge amount of work. That turned out to be a stupid idea, because if it was going to be up to the standard that we were accustomed on 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,' then it was obviously going to require a huge amount of work."
"I initially thought about this sourcebook, but that wasn't a good idea because all sourcebooks are rubbish," Moore continued. "The main reason for that is they don't have any narrative element, and we started to think of a narrative in which the sourcebook could be enclosed. This started to take off because we started to realize that we were practically handling a new form. It would be something that wouldn't be quite a comic, it wouldn't be quite a text with the other elements we were planning to include like the vinyl single, the Tijuana Bible and the 3D section. It would start to be an unprecedented beast in many respects. We just started with the books and as it developed, we realized what a splendid thing it was turning into. It was at that point that it did provide a wonderful transition point to anything that we might want to do in the future.
"It was around this time that I became alienated from DC over the debacle regarding the 'V For Vendetta' movie. And when we decided that we were going to publish with Top Shelf, since I had previously given notice that if there was any unpleasantness such as, I don't know, the pulping of that issue of 'League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' with the Marvel vaginal douche, anything that even reminded me that I was being published by an off-shoot of DC Comics, then we would be withdrawing the book. And straight away, the business with 'V For Vendetta' came up. At this point, we said we would finish this book, because once we started something, we wouldn't dream of leaving it uncompleted. So we carried on work on the book. I finished it quite quickly, but it was still a couple of years' work for Kevin, because by this point it had grown into a very, very big project, something that is almost as large as the proceeding volumes of the League."
The ensuing chaos pushed back the publication of the book for a year after its announced publication date.
When we started the project, the publishers were so excited by the sound of it, and they were assuring us that it would be published as a complete large-scale volume, the record included and everything else," said Moore. "Kevin was assured that it would not be solicited until he had the last page drawn. This was more or less how things went until we said that this would be the last thing that would be published by DC/Wildstorm. At that point, there began a year or so of petty interference and very irritating behaviour - Kevin was getting phone calls demanding that he hurry through the remainder of the pages, because it 'had to be out' by San Diego last year. Kevin was explaining that that wasn't the way he did things. Things were going to take as long as they were going to take. By this time I wasn't speaking to anybody at Wildstorm or DC other than necessary business phone calls that were very brief and to the point. But I believe it was somebody from the marketing department who was behaving very much like a kind of jilted girlfriend, who was saying, 'Well! Will you be drawing faster when you're being published by someone like [Top Shelf's] Chris Staros?' That was like saying, 'Go to him! Go to your whore!' It was very much a kind of jilted bride. And Kevin explained that the work would take as long as it took, he was drawing it as quickly as possible, and when anybody had seen the final result, they would agree that it was much better than hurrying it and spoiling what I believe is, for Kevin at least, a masterpiece. Around about last Christmas, they were demanding that he fly out there, that the book could be published immediately if he flew out there. This was after we planned this spectacular 3-D section for the finale. We thought originally there was only one person who could accomplish this, let alone understand this, and that is, of course, Ray Zone. We'd approached Ray. He was very eager and interested in the project. And then there was a kind of baffling silence about how well the 3-D section was getting on. Because Kevin had done that earlier, the final bits of the thing, because he had figured it would take a certain amount of time to do the 3-D process. We later found out that apparently there'd been a decision made that the 3-D work should be taken away from Ray and moved in-house. Now, we hadn't been told about this, but what actually happened was that once they got it in-house, they looked at it and thought, 'We don't understand any of this! It's much too complicated a 3-D process for us to even grasp!' So after a couple of months of dicking around, they decided there was only one person for the job, and that was Ray Zone. So they gave him the work to process with, and he has done a shattering job on it. We'd been told that Ray enjoyed it, it was one of the most challenging things he'd ever done, and the end result is spectacular. But this was all delaying the publication of the book, which if they had let it go to press, it could have been published last spring, easily. However, they looked it over and decided it was more of a Christmas book, since they noticed the little sprigs and holly that me and Kevin had put in the lettering. And so there was a lot of back-and-forth, which Kevin took a lot of the brunt of, since I was out of the loop, which is a shame on Kevin's behalf, really, because he's had to get messed around like this. I think finally there was some intervention.
"I'd been told that now they weren't going to put the vinyl single in with the first edition of the book, that they were going to bring out a cheaper, normal-sized edition first without the vinyl single, and then perhaps a year later would bring out an Absolute edition containing it, which is not the way the book had been planned. At that point when we stressed our disapproval, there was a mad scheme to bring out the cheap edition and the Absolute edition at the same time, which was ludicrous. So now I believe the Absolute edition will be coming out sometime quite early next year, and that will include the single. Kevin has seen a proof copy of the thing and he said that it does look wonderful. The only thing that was missing is that it wasn't realized on the scale and the single wasn't included. So I believe the 3-D section is intact, and I may be wrong on this, but from everything I've been told, Kevin seems very, very pleased with the end result. It's just a pity that it couldn't have come out earlier and in the way that it had originally been imagined, since it seemed that with this plan to bring out both of them at the same time that that was always completely possible, it was just that a decision had been made, which... I don't know, at the end of the day, it could be an almost unbelievable pettiness and malice that was behind this, or it could be an equally unbelievable incompetence. Or it could be some heady and dizzying blend of the two. Whatever the reason, I felt that if I was going to continue to do works of the complexity of "The Black Dossier," and I do, then probably the mainstream American comic book industry is not the place for them. I don't know if it has ever been the place."
ON THE CONTINUING EVOLUTION OF THE LEAGUE
By the time readers are halfway through "The Black Dossier," they might start to get a sense that the story is growing into something more than just a period adventure thriller - it aims to cover the entire history of popular fiction. "It's more in retrospect that 'The Black Dossier' has turned out to be an excellent transition from the kind of material that we found in the first two books into the boundless reaches that we have planned for the future," said Moore. "When [LoEG] started, it was purely a 'Justice League of Victorian England.' Within an issue or two, we realized that this was actually a fantastic opportunity to map the entire world of fiction. With 'The Black Dossier,' we thought we could take this basis and build upon it still further and provide a timeline for our fictional world. We could fill in details about previous incarnations of the League. And in the wraparound narrative, we could show what had happened to the League since 1898, since what had happened in the past sixty years, with our narrative being set in the London of 1958, turned out to be every bit as fascinating and exotic as the Victorian period has been, at least for Kevin and me. I've no idea whether the previous readership will share our enthusiasm for the 1950s. When we looked at the fictional landscape around that time, it seemed every bit as marvelous and revealing as the Victorian landscape had been."
The 1950s were a transitional period in itself as it moved from the early 20th Century to the decade after the Second World War, and the book offers a commentary on the period more barbed than works from the time ever could.
"During the fifties, there were a lot of things that were happening. There was the beginning of espionage fiction, there were still the popular 'Billy Bunter' schoolboy novels being published, and interestingly, since 1898, with the first incarnation of the League, we more or less only had access to the fiction icons of that time," said Moore. "We were able to draw on the literature of that period. Now as we move up through the centuries, more things became available. In the book that Kevin and me are working on now, "Century," volume three, which is to be published by Top Shelf, we've incorporated things from theatre and the very early silent films. By 1958, we were able to draw on elements from Film and Television, which we have done. So although it is very Anglo-centric, there are American elements to the plot, shall we say, and I think there are characters and wonders in there to make up for the absence of Mr. Hyde, Captain Nemo and The Invisible Man, and for the Victorian decor.
"The first two volumes were Kevin and my vision of a parallel Victorian universe, if you like, and that's the same approach we've taken for the 1950s. Britain in the 1950s did not have a space program in the real world. However, in the fictional world, we did have a space program. It would have begun with Professor Cavil's journey to the moon in 1901. So if the technology was around in 1901, then you could presuppose how it might have developed and evolved. So by 1958, there might be a spaceport just outside Birmingham, perhaps."
ORWELL'S LEGACY
It shouldn't be a surprise that the presence of George Orwell, author of "Animal Farm" and "1984," would lurk in the shadows of "The Black Dossier." "It's been very interesting to think through all the developments to the characters and the country since 1898," said Moore. "Obviously they'd been through a couple of world wars, the most recent of which would have been the Second World War, and we charted a very interesting parallel world history around the finish of the Second World War, when in this country, the Conservative government of Winston Churchill was voted out in favour of a Labour government. What we have done is, since this is fictional world, we weren't actually at war with Adolf Hitler, we were at war with Adenoid Hynkel, the character played by Charlie Chaplin in 'The Great Dictator.' So after the disastrous war with Herr Hynkel, we voted out the wartime Conservative government and voted in a socialist Labour government led by a military strong man figure who was known by the name of 'Big Brother,' because '1984' was published in 1948 and I believe that was originally going to be the date of the title until Orwell's publisher asked him to rethink all this. So we assume to have commenced at the end of the war, in 1945, and there are a lot of interesting little threads that we worked off from that. I mean, Orwell had said that he had based his secret state apparatchiks upon the vicious Public School prefects of his youth. So there was always an interesting thing where Frank Richards, the author of the 'Billy Bunter' stories, was having to turn out so many Bunter stories because of his gambling addiction. These were mentioned in an essay that George Orwell wrote, that were basically talking about how the Billy Bunter stories were just holding up the traditional British Empire values of racism and class consciousness in an approving light with the author apparently finding all foreigners amusing, and being very patronizing towards foreigners and women. Orwell wrote a very capable essay decrying all this, and foolishly, Frank Richards, stung by this review, decided to retaliate in a little letter where, in very wounded terms, went through all of Orwell's points and tried his best to dismiss them. But he said, 'As for Mr. Orwell's point about me depicting foreigners as being comical, well, they are!'
"There are little undercover threads throughout our story with connections like that," continued Moore. "The film 'The Third Man' was written by Graham Greene, who based the character of Harry Lime on his lifelong friend Kim Philby, a very famous British spy who turned out to be a double agent for the Russians. And weirdly enough, there had previously been two Russian agents exposed, Guy Burgess and Anthony MacLean, and there was a rumour there was a third double agent in MI5. I remember there was a headline back in the Sixties that said, 'KIM PHILBY IS THE THIRD MAN,' which were written completely unaware that he was the third man. So he was the basis for 'The Third Man.' All of these obscure facts are woven into the fabric of 'The Black Dossier.' It's been very interesting, with some surprising inclusions."
AFTER THE LOST GIRLS
Moore had finished writing "Lost Girls" long before he began writing "The Black Dossier," and it could be said that the theme of using popular fictional characters to comment on cultural and political mores has been carried over to "The Black Dossier" and the next volume of "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen." However, that is what authors do: they explore the themes that interest them most, even unconsciously, as they and their work evolve. "Los Girls" does not take place in the same cross-referential universe as "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," but Moore's meditations on the frank treatment and representation of sexuality present in "Los Girls" has carried over into "The Black Dossier," even if it isn't as explicit or pornographic as the former.
"There is a kind of connection. When I finished "Lost Girl," I was in quite an ambivalent mood as to how I would be treating sex and sexuality in my work in the future, and I decided I would probably never again do any work of pure erotica, because there didn't seem to be very much point after having completed "Lost Girls." At the same time, I remain interested in the erotic in Art and Storytelling, because the erotic is a part of life. So it struck me that the best way to proceed would be to kind of fold in my approach to sex and erotic into the general fabric of my work so that when a sexual scene was required, then I could bring the proper erotic sensibilities to play upon it. 'The Black Dossier' was probably the first application that represents that kind of thinking. We are constantly learning with each work and we apply it to anything else that we're doing."
"In 'The Black Dossier,' we take a frank approach to sex and nudity right from the start, because it wasn't going to be coming out as a comic, which granted us a certain amount of liberty. Also, we were no longer fixed in the somewhat prudish Victorian era. We were no longer attempting to ape a Victorian tone, where in the first two volumes, any swear words or expletives were replaced by a line of asterisks as they might have been in the literature at the time. Whereas we're a lot more frank and open in 'The Black Dossier.' Interestingly, there is one direct descendent of the 'Lost Girls' in the sealed section - in the Victorian manner where the edges of the pages have not been cut. This is printed on a special sort of paper, or at least, it should be. This is a sequel to 'Fanny Hill,' subtitled 'The Further Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.' That is a series of beautiful, almost Bayros-like illustrations from Kevin, because it was Bayros who illustrated the first illustrated edition of 'Fanny Hill,' with chunks of text underneath. It is a continuation of 'Fanny Hill,' but it is also a description of the 18th Century League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the Gulliver group, told in a series of quite amusing (hopefully) erotic tableaus. That was kind of reminiscent of 'Lost Girls,' because we were back in the Bayros groove, and it was erotic writing in the Cleland style, which has not a trace of obscenity. It's all mainly conveyed by euphemism, so it's a very clean piece of writing. Kevin's drawings - I wouldn't say they were entirely chaste - on their own, they're not too scandalous, but the combination of Kevin's drawings and the text, it's pretty frank, and I think quite funny."
WHAT IT'S REALLY ALL ABOUT
On a deeper level, "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" series is a covert history of the popular imagination. "The planet of the imagination is as old as we are. It has been humanity's constant companion with all of its fictional locations, like Mount Olympus and the gods, and since we first came down from the trees, basically. It seems very important, otherwise, we wouldn't have it. Fiction is clearly one of the first things that we do when we stand upright as a species - we tell each other stories. Now, Nature doesn't do things for decorative purposes, except like giving peacocks wonderful plumage so they can attract a mate, but since there seems to be little point to telling each other stories all the time — except there must be. We have depended upon them and to some degree the fictional world is completely intertwined and interdependent with the material world. A lot of the dreams that shape us and, presumably, our world leaders, are fictions. When we're growing up, we perhaps base ourselves on an ideal, and even if that ideal is a real living person, there is every chance that living person may have based themselves on a fictional ideal. This is actually ground that we do cover in 'The Black Dossier,' and in the final soliloquy, which is delivered by Duke Prospero. We're talking about this very thing: the interdependence between the world of fiction and the world of fact. It is something that interests me, and has come to dominate my thinking on the series. I'm not exactly sure why, but it feels as if it might be important."
THE POLITICS OF THE LEAGUE
There is a political dimension to "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen." The story involves the state's attempts to control the fiction characters, which creates a subtext of the State trying to control the people's imagination and the popular imagination. "We detail the relationship, amongst many other things, between the group and the state since Elizabethan times, commencing with a Shakespeare play and we have the 'Fanny Hill' piece, and the relationship between the group and their MI5 paymasters is changed drastically, even before 'The Black Dossier' commences. It is clear that all is not what it used to be."
Since Book One, there has been an anti-authoritarian strain in the story where the paymasters of the League were not to be trusted, and in Book Two, this becomes more explicit with the government using the League to unleash a virus that kills the invading Martians and then covering up the human casualties of the virus.
"This is something we continue in 'The Black Dossier' to its inevitable conclusion," explained Moore. "With relation to the political dimension of the book, we're not making any heavy-handed political analogies with the War Against Terror or the situation today. I think we touched upon both of those things in Book Two anyway. With the third book of the League, the one which Kevin and I are working on now, tn its structure, these three standalone volumes are each set in a different time period and built up into an overarching story, which is called 'Century.'
"I worked out with Kevin that one of the subtexts in Volume Three is not the government control of the imagination, but more the decline, whether intentional or otherwise, of the imagination, the popular imagination. We start out in the first episode in 1910, which has still got the kind of grandeur of the Victorian and Edwardian imagination on display. We go through 1968, which although a different period, very electrified and psychedelic, that we still have examples of the culture from that period which is very exciting. When we get to the third volume, which is set in 2008, it will become plain that the current landscape of fiction in comparison with what has gone before is a very sparse and relatively dull place. Orwell was almost exactly wrong in a strange way. He thought the world would end with Big Brother watching us, but it ended with us watching Big Brother. And it's that kind of culture and the popular imagination that is a very strong subtext in Book Three. However, I think that although we're talking about an increasing dullness in the fictional landscape, we do that very entertainingly and very excitingly.
"That's for the future. With 'The Black Dossier' there's been a lot of grief in the production of this book, so my feelings are kind of conflicted. I still think it is a wonderful book and probably the most progressive and genuinely original pieces of work that are going be coming out of the mainstream comics industry anytime this century. I'm very excited to see what people think of it, because both me and Kevin are at the absolute top of our game. One of my favourite bits is the Kerouac piece, 'The Crazy Wide Forever.' Even if I say so myself, I think it's a pretty good Kerouac pastiche, and it's presented with a proper creased paperback cover which has very little to do with the actual narrative in the way that the first editions of William Burroughs and Kerouac books were actually packaged, with the lurid exploitation pulp covers and the bebop interior. I'm thrilled with the Shakespeare and the Bertie Wooster story."
LOOKING TOWARDS BOOK THREE AND BEYOND
Moore said with book three of "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," readers can expect a more savage tale with a marked difference in tone. "It's a lot darker in the same way that the 20th Century raised a lot of issues that were a lot darker than the century preceding it," said Moore. "I decided relatively early on that there was no reason we couldn't continue 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' into the far future, except for the fact that if we wished to keep any realism to the series, the central characters would get old and die. Now that meant that I would either have a continually changing roster to the League, or we'll have to come up with something else. We basically came up with the 'Orlando' solution, by making Allan and Mina immortal. It was because if we kept any of the more colourful characters, I just didn't see them working in any mortal context. Mr. Hyde: there was a character with such a death wish, making him an immortal would just be cruel. We see the death of Captain Nemo in the first chapter of Volume Three, around 1910, on his base down there in the South Atlantic. By the end of the first chapter, there is a new Nemo, and at the end of the third chapter, which is set in the best part of another century later, there is another new Nemo, who is quite like his great-grandfather, but this being the 20th Century, a lot more terrifying. That is stuff we are saving for volume three of Book Three.
"It's a very pared-down League that we see in Volume Three. The first book starts out with five or six characters in the League. By the time the second book comes around, that's been pared down to three. By the time of the third book, there's nobody. The third book is a catalogue of increasing disasters. We're quite enjoying it. "Despite the fact that the third section is very black indeed, it ends on a note where the League can be continued in any form that we want. We brought them into the present as much as we could. We just wanted to see if we could do that, bring the League right up to date, that future books would probably be jumping back and forth over a two or three-hundred-year history. The sky is the limit. We can do stories set at the beginning of time and to the furthest reaches of the future. We've got enough energy and enough stories in us for a good while yet. I'm going to be very interested in what the response is, because the League has got a very intelligent readership. Even if people don't get all of it, even if they don't pick up Jess Nevins' annotated volumes which explain everything or visit his website, it's still an exciting story. Even if you don't know who the characters are, people are still going to get caught up in the suspense of a fairly simple chase story, with all the thrills and spills that such stories entail, which build to a genuinely spectacular conclusion. The final section of the 'Dossier,' set in the Blazing World, is the first time that I can remember 3-D being used in context to this degree. There is a reasoning behind the inclusion of the 3-D - all the characters are wearing red-and-green goggles in the final section of the book. It's because our three-dimensional world is depicted usually in comics as a two-dimensional world. So if I wanted to depict a four-dimensional world, then in comic book terms it would be good to depict that in 3D. So there's a logic there which plays delightfully with the Blazing World finale, which Kevin has gone to town on. I really have to say that he has stunned me with the sheer array of styles with "The Black Dossier." I can't emphasize that enough. You've suddenly got him imitating Hogarth or Gillray one minute, imitating woodcutting the next, imitating the Marquis von Bayros. it really does show what an incredible artist Kevin O'Neill is, even more than the first two volumes did. There's going to be a few surprises there."
http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=12376
below as images -- I got fed up with the speed of loading the pdfs, so converted them into images
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20152452,00.html
http://watchmencomicmovie.com/092407-comics-britannia-alan-moore-video-03.php
There has been quite the fallout since last week's column broke the "League" story. DC responded releasing what must be their shortest press release ever, citing international copyright issues and "related issues" as to the book's limited distribution to the USA only.
There can be no more legal issues outside the USA than there were in the first two League volumes, which featured extensive characters from the library of HG Welles and others, out of copyright in the US but still in copyright in much of the rest of the world.
And there are plenty of other works that have taken classical in copyright characters and used them to their own ends without legal issues. "League's" reinterpretation and recontextualisation is both an artistic and legal defence.
In the recent Tripwire Annual, Alan Moore mentions that he is unsure if the solicited Tijuana Bible section will be published. May there be some customs considerations regarding this section?
Jess Nevins, author of "League" commentary works, wrote on the DC message boards "There's a lot more going on here than you know about…"
I understand that a number of UK shops have already been arranging their own personal deliveries for customers, and that international orders for the standard hardcover and next year's Absolute edition at Amazon.com have been rapidly rising.
I understand that the long awaited "The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier," described once by author Alan Moore in this column as "not my best comic ever, not the best comic ever, but the best thing ever," will not be published outside of the USA by America's Best Comics, an imprint of Wildstorm/DC Comics, or distributed in those territories by DC's distributor Diamond Comics.
DC sources inform me that the reasons for concern are over issues concerning copyright and trademark of certain literary characters referred to in the book, some that are public domain in the USA but not in other territories who have different copyright laws.
The US states that if a work was published before 1923, or it is 70 years since the death of the author, then it is in public domain. The UK has a similar rule, without the 1923 proviso, leading to a number of creations published before 1923 but not yet out of copyright. Canada, New Zealand and Australia also have no 1923-style ruling, but wait till 50 years after the author's demise, although Australia now has a 70 year policy for work created since 2005.
It was this difference that led to the suspension of the publication of "Lost Girls" until January 2008 in the UK, as only then will it be 70 years after the death of Peter Pan author Barrie.
However, previous "League" books have used characters and creations that are not yet in the UK public domain, such as HG Wells' Martians and The Invisible Man, and Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, Mycroft Holmes and Moriarty.
I understand that the new book goes at length to disguise or hide contentious characters, such as a British spy in the fifties who reports to "M" goes by the name "Jimmy."
However, just as with "Lost Girls," it is unlikely that the book will remain within the US shores, and that UK and other territories will be able to acquire copies through the "grey" market, distributed not illegally but not through official channels. Comic stores in the US will order on behalf of comic book stores in contested territories, even though this action is not permitted under Diamond's terms.
It is unlikely, however, that any of these copies will be distributed outside of the direct sales market, officially or otherwise. DC's redistributor to the UK bookstore market, Titan Books, will not be able to publish or distribute the book.
The book will be distributed in the USA as scheduled.
"Here's a listing of things I'm working on now — subject to change, of course. ."
http://kleinletters.com/CurrentProjects.html
http://www.comp.dit.ie/dgordon/League/loeg0029.html
with thanks to Steven Ford for pointing me to this page...
"Oh, I think you'll see something about the School of Night in the next League book..."
http://ratmmjess.livejournal.com/169583.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Night
Co-Published By Top Shelf Productions & Knockabout Beginning In 2008
The third volume detailing the exploits of Miss Wilhelmina Murray and her extraordinary colleagues is a 216-page epic spanning almost a hundred years and entitled Century. Divided into three 72-page chapters, each a self-contained narrative to avoid frustrating cliff-hanger delays between episodes, this monumental tale takes place in three distinct eras, building to an apocalyptic conclusion occurring in our own current twenty-first century.
Chapter one is set against a backdrop of London, 1910, twelve years after the failed Martian invasion and nine years since England put a man upon the moon. With Halley's Comet passing overhead, the nation prepares for the coronation of King George V, and far away on his South Atlantic Island, the science-pirate Captain Nemo is dying. In the bowels of the British Museum, Carnacki the ghost-finder is plagued by visions of a shadowy occult order who are attempting to create something called a Moonchild, while on London's dockside the most notorious serial murderer of the previous century has returned to carry on his grisly trade. Working for Mycroft Holmes' British Intelligence alongside a rejuvenated Allan Quartermain, the reformed thief Anthony Raffles and the eternal warrior Orlando, Miss Murray is drawn into a brutal opera acted out upon the waterfront by players that include the furiously angry Pirate Jenny and the charismatic butcher known as Mac the Knife.
Chapter two takes place almost sixty years later in the psychedelic daze of Swinging London during 1968, a place where Tadukic Acid Diethylamide 26 is the drug of choice, and where different underworlds are starting to overlap dangerously to an accompaniment of sit-ins and sitars. The vicious gangster bosses of London's East End find themselves brought into contact with a counter-culture underground of mystical and medicated flower-children, or amoral pop-stars on the edge of psychological disintegration and developing a taste for Satanism. Alerted to a threat concerning the same magic order that she and her colleagues were investigating during 1910, a thoroughly modern Mina Murray and her dwindling league of comrades attempt to navigate the perilous rapids of London's hippy and criminal subculture, as well as the twilight world of its occultists. Starting to buckle from the pressures of the twentieth century and the weight of their own endless lives, Mina and her companions must nevertheless prevent the making of a Moonchild that might well turn out to be the antichrist.
In chapter three, the narrative draws to its cataclysmic close in London 2008. The magical child whose ominous coming has been foretold for the past hundred years has now been born and has grown up to claim his dreadful heritage. His promised aeon of unending terror can commence, the world can now be ended starting with North London, and there is no League, extraordinary or otherwise, that now stands in his way. The bitter, intractable war of attrition in Q'umar crawls bloodily to its fifth year, away in Kashmir a Sikh terrorist with a now-nuclear-armed submarine wages a holy war against Islam that might push the whole world into atomic holocaust, and in a London mental institution there's a patient who insists that she has all the answers.
Drawing from the fiction, theatre, film and television culture of the twentieth century as artfully as the preceding volumes drew upon the literature of the nineteenth, this first installment of the League's adventures to be co-published by Top Shelf Productions and Knockabout takes our familiar cast of characters … plus several previously unfamiliar … and propels them into a new age, a new world every bit as strange and savage as the colourful Victorian era they were born to. More than this, with its third volume the League's exploits move into a different realm of format, artistry and story-telling as this remarkable series sets out to explore the full limits of the vast fictional cosmos that it has marked as its territory. A unified field theory of fiction as much as a comic-book story, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Volume III): Century is sure to be like nothing you have ever read, and will be co-published in three lavish, full-color individual volumes by Top Shelf Productions and Knockabout, commencing in 2008.
Published as three deluxe, 72-page, full-color, perfect-bound graphic novellas, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Kevin O'Neill. SHIPPING IN 2008! ISBN 978-1-60309-000-1
http://www.topshelfcomix.com/catalog.php?type=13
Bill Baker: How would you describe The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier?
Alan Moore: Imagine a source book that has got lots of interesting snippets from here and there in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen's three or four hundred year history. But, these are presented in some unusual ways. For example, when we want to talk about the founding of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which involved Prospero, then we include a lost Shakespeare folio for a play called Fairy's Fortunes Founded, which Shakespeare commenced to write in 1616, which was the year of his death, and thus never completed. So we have got the opening scenes of Fairy's Fortunes Founded reproduced in the manner of a Shakespeare folio as part of The Black Dossier, fully illustrated and featuring some pretty good Shakespeare, if I say so myself.
And when we're detailing the 18th century League, the Gulliver group, then this is done in the form of a sequel to John Cleland's Fanny Hill, it "Being the Further of the Adventures of a Woman of Pleasure," with lots of text and full page illustrations, like in the illustrated Fanny Hill that the Marquis Von Bayros illustrated. So, there're those things. And there's lots of things that you might expect in a source book, like a really neat double page cutaway of the Nautilus. There's a twenty-five page comic strip history done in the style of those great old full color English comic strips that we used to have in Boy's World, or things like that; stuff that was painted, like Dan Dare was painted.
This history is, essentially, a twenty-five page "Life of Orlando," which tells the entire life of Orlando from his birth in the City of Thebes in 1190 B.C. And then, basically in the life of Orlando, we give the timeline for the entire The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen's world, up to the Second World War. And we've got every famous fictional character and event that you've ever heard of in there.
It turns out that Orlando has slept with absolutely everybody. And the ones he hasn't slept with, he's waged terrible war upon. If he was a he at the time, you know? He's posed for the Mona Lisa, and he's fought at Troy. He was personally responsible for the Renaissance, he believes. That was a lot of fun. But, that was just twenty-five pages.
There's a Beat Generation novel, allegedly inspired by the activities of The League in America during the 1950s, as written by Sal Paradise, who was the surrogate for Jack Kerouac that appeared in On the Road. And it's a Beat novel called The Crazy Wide Forever, which has got The League teaming up with Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty against the villainous Dr. Sax, from another Kerouac book, as he was a kind of cross between Fu Manchu, The Shadow, and William Boroughs. So, yeah, we've got Dr. Sax in there.
There's an immense amount of stuff in the Dossier. A prospectus of London, features upon previous versions of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Les Hommes Mysterieux from France, and Der Zweilicht-helden from Germany. There's an account of The Surrogate League that British Intelligence tried to put together in the 1950s, and which was a complete disaster. There's everything that you could ever want to know about any incarnation of The League. And this is the source book material; this is the actual Black Dossier.
And, wrapped around that and running through that, there are these very lengthy sections of comic strip which tell the story of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, such as it is, basically retrieving the Black Dossier from British Intelligence in 1958. They basically steal the Black Dossier that has got all of these things that British Intelligence know about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen contained in it. Members of The League break into British Intelligence in 1958, steal the Black Dossier, and then try to escape from the country while being pursued by a trio of deadly British agents, who are trying to get them and the Dossier back.
And, as you might expect with The League, there is nobody who appears anywhere in these books who is not somebody that you probably should have heard of or heard about from literature, or from films or comics or from some other cultural source.
But, I don't want to tell you who's in it. For one thing, as I'm sure you can imagine, the closer we get to the present day in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the more intricate the dance around the minor matters like copyright has to be. Victorian characters are fair game. They're all public domain. Even so, you occasionally get someone like Sax Rohmer who, I believe, didn't have the decency to die until sometime in the 1940s or 50s, which meant that we couldn't use Dr. Fu Manchu in The League. So we just used an oriental mastermind who was known as the Doctor, and who was controlling Limehouse, but everybody knew who it was.
And that's the technique that we're approaching some of the characters with in this Dossier. There are some very famous characters in there who we can't actually spell out who they are, but everybody will know who they're supposed to be, because we make it completely obvious. We do everything but spell it out.
And the actual material in that comic strip is much, much more interesting than the actual wonderful material in The Dossier itself. It's got this sort of fascinating flight across England, touching upon a number of interesting English fictional characters of the 1950s, and, it ends with probably the most spectacular sixteen pages you have ever seen in any comic. I'm saying this before Kevin's actually drawn them, but, I know what they're going to be like. There are a lot of little extras that we put in this, as well.
BB: How about the multi-media aspects of The Black Dossier?
AM: Well, part of the book, which is set in 1958, remember, deals with the residual influence of George Orwell's Big Brother Government. That book was originally set in 1948. But the publisher said, "Well, George, nobody's going to understand this. Let's change the last two numbers around, and we'll say it's happening in the future." And so, instead of being called 1948, it was called 1984. So, by the time our book opens in 1958, the Big Brother Government has already been over for a number of years. So we've got a lot of references to Orwell's world, and we tie that into our world in a way that makes perfect sense.
As one of the little extra giveaways, we've got a book produced by Pornsec, which, in Orwell's book, they're working for the Ministry of Truth, the Ministry of Propaganda, and they produce these little pornographic comics. And so, one of the giveaways is an eight-page Tijuana Bible, as dreamed up by Orwell's Thought Police. So it's Thought Police pornography. And that is something that will fall into your lap like subscription cards when you open the book.
There is a pair of 3-D goggles that will be included as well, that will be necessary for one section of the book--quite an important section of the book, actually.
And there is a 45 [RPM] vinyl single that is supposedly by a 1950s band on a 1950s American record label, both of which are fictitious, but which are taken from other sources. That's part of the fun of The League, you know? The band is called "Eddie Enrico and His Hawaiian Hotshots," which, I believe, were mentioned very briefly by Thomas Pynchon in his excellent The Crying of Lot 49. But it's double-sided, it's a single with two sides. One side of which is "Immortal Love," and the other side of which is "Home with You," which are kind of League-themed 1950s pop songs. And so, yeah, there'll be a lot of little extras in this. It's going to be a very handsomely produced volume....
BB: Just out of curiosity, who did the music?
AM: Who did the music? It was me and Tim Perkins, pretending to be a 50s American rock and roll band. I've discovered, at this late stage in my life, that I am, in fact, an Elvis impersonator. But you'll have to wait and listen for yourself, you know? [His voice assumes an Elvis Presley-like drawl] "Uh huh, thank you very much."
So there'll be a lot of little goodies, because me and Kevin like that. We like having lots of nice little things in there. It reminds us of British comics of our youth, where there were always these kind of cheap giveaways included. But we've got some quite expensive giveaways in this one.
BB: And porn, too!
AM: Absolutely. It is 1984 Newspeak totalitarian porn, so it's kind of depressing, but also kind of funny. [Laughter] It's George Orwell's 1984, told as an 8-page tale in a Tijuana Bible pornographic comic strip, which is kind of funny and dreadful at the same time. But that's just a minor bauble to fall into the reader's lap.
http://www.worldfamouscomics.com/bakersdozen/back20070103.shtml
The book is finished on Moore & O'Neill's end, and is in DC's hands, but they have to do production on the 3D chapter.
So the publication date remains unknown, but at the least it will be the October date Amazon and DC are providing, if not sooner.
Also--it's looking like the vinyl single will only be a part of the Absolute edition, not the first trade.
http://ratmmjess.livejournal.com/
"We commenced in prehistoric, pre-human times and talk about the Great Old Ones and the various gods - Crom and Cthulhu and various other ones"
"Then you've got a 25-page comic which tells the story of the mythical Orlando from his/her birth in about 1100 B.C., and it brings you up to through every major event in fictional history up to the Second World War. And you've got what Orlando was doing at Troy, or at Camelot"
"We detail Prospero's Group - that was the first League of Extraordinary Gentlemen"
"There's a sequel to Fanny Hill that's in a special sealed section, so it doesn't fall into the wrong hands, detailing the Gulliver group."
"Then we talk about Miss Murray's team and what they did before, during and after [volumes one and two]"
"We've got a couple of pages detailing the pathetic, failed surrogate League that was set up in the '50s, and it's a complete disaster."
"And we detail the various foreign groups that are set up as counterparts to the League, like the French version, Les Hommes Mysterieux, and also the German counterpart Die Zwielichthelder, the Twilight Heroes"
"We've got a character who...his name is...Jimmy. And he does seem to be carrying that cigarette case that Campion Bond had"
We have an update; DC has decided to resolicit the book at a later date and it will now include a recording with Alan Moore involved in some capacity.
http://www.silverbulletcomicbooks.com/rage/index1.htm
What does the success of "Lost Girls" mean for your first "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" book, which I don't even believe you have scheduled yet?
We don't have it quite scheduled yet, but I did talk to Alan last week about it and he's started writing the script and he's very happy with the way the story is coming along. We're probably looking at a 2008 release on that, more than likely. Obviously "League 3" is going to be a really big release for us and another big release for Alan and Kevin O'Neill as well. We're gonna just get behind that one in a big way. DC recently announced they'll be pushing their final volume "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier" back to 2007, when it was originally scheduled for release at the end of this year.
Does that delay affect your publishing plans at all?
Not at all. Our production will be independent of that. Right now Alan is writing the script, and once that's done it'll be passed on to Kevin O'Neill to illustrate.
Has the success of the "Lost Girls" format got you thinking of different formatting or anything like that for your first "League?"
What Alan wants to do is release League Vol. 3 as three, 72-page prestige format comics and then collect it as a trade paperback afterwards. So we're going to release "League" in somewhat of a traditional format to be consistent with the other "Leagues" in the past.
http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=8374
In another news revealed at DC's retailer presentation, Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier graphic novel, which was solicited for an October release, has been delayed indefinitely. According to DC, a new in-store date will be announced as soon as possible. As a result of the delay, the book will be made returnable for retailers at a later date. The will be the last League of Extraordinary Gentlemen project publish through DC/Wildstorm/ABC before Moore moves the property to Top Shelf, publisher of his current Lost Girls graphic novel.
"With Black Dossier Kevin O'Neill is producing the work of his career," Wildstorm's Scott Dunbier told Newsarama in response to the news. "Unfortunately, due to his intense eye for detail and the complex nature of the book, it is also turning out to be the slowest project he has ever done. Wildstorm, through its ABC imprint, will be publishing the book in 2007. Alan and Kevin hope readers who have waited so patiently will feel it's worth the wait, I know I do."
http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=83723
The Black Dossier is not going to be on sale on Oct. 25. It may be on sale *by* Christmas, but more likely it will be on the shelves sometime early next year. Impossible Territories is now slated for an August 2007 release, with advance copies still on sale at San Diego next year.
http://ratmmjess.livejournal.com/
"The working title of my next League companion is:
"Impossible Territories: An Unofficial Companion to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen."
http://ratmmjess.livejournal.com/
Did you know that in Dymchurch we have a "Day of Syn" over the August Bank holiday reinacting Dr Syn every two years
This year we have a talk on Dr Syn at the Anglican church at 6.30pm On Sunday at 3pm we have a church service where Dr Syn and the cast appear in period costume On Monday starting at the Bowery Hall we reinact scenes from Dr Syn and during the day along th Dymchurch shoreline and in the Ocean pub.
http://www.comp.dit.ie/dgordon/League/OtherLeagues/1780s/synweekend/
Alan Moore interview:
JPK:The idea of using famous literary characters is something you've done before in The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Which came first, Lost Girls or that?
AM: "The three Lost Girls are actually, in a way, the parents of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I'd been having such a lot of fun with these three public-domain characters in a pornography — it was making all sorts of things possible in the storytelling and it was so rich that it occurred to me that "Hey, maybe you could do this with a bunch of adventure characters as well.'"
JPK: Are there any other characters in the public domain that have caught your fancy?
AM: "The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen does actually touch on all of my requirements in that area. In the forthcoming Black Dossier, we give a timeline to the world of fiction included in the almanac in the second volume. There's a 25-page comic strip done in the old British quality boys' comics style, one of those posh painted bookish comic strips from the 50's which is just the life of Orlando - in which we've created a life and timeline for him which includes the Virginia Wolff version of the character, but the one created by (Italian poet Ludovico) Ariosto in the 15th century. So we'll have a timeline, which reaches from 1189 BC to, the present day and then that can continue into the future. "And actually, whether characters are in the public domain or not is becoming less and less of a problem as we become more skillful at just making allusions and relying upon the readership's vast knowledge of these characters and all the trivia surrounding them. "This proves very useful in the Black Dossier where the overarching story into which the dossier is sighted is in 1958 and we've used a lot of the characters from specifically British literature and television and movies that seem to belong in 1958. That creates copyright problems, but there are ways around these things. Any character that seems interesting, there's probably a way that I could fit it into The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen without too much difficulty."
JPK: What's next for you after the Black Dossier?
AM: "The Black Dossier will be my last comic work that comes out from ABC/Wildstorm/DC Comics. The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen will, however, is continuing. Kevin and I will be producing it for Top Shelf, simply because it's such a good idea and it can run forever — or at least as long as we're interested in it. "There's just so many ways we can change the settings, the characters, the theories, that I can imagine we'll be interested in it for a while yet. "We've got the fourth volume already planned. At the moment it looks like it's going to be three 72-page books so that each one will fit in to a broader complete story arc, they will all be very self-contained stories. This should help to ease the readers' torment at long gaps between issues."
JPK: What's the timeframe for this next League project?
AM: "The first story will be set in 1910, the second story will be set in 1968 and the third will probably be set in 2007 or 2008. We'll get started on that as soon as Kevin is finished with the Black Dossier."
http://www.metronews.ca/column.aspx?id=5028
There have been enquiries as to the status of the audio element to "League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier" that had previously been discussed but not on the solicitation. I understand that due to size constraints and Moore not wanting the product on CD, it will be released on vinyl as part of the "Absolute" edition next summer.
http://www.comicbookresources.com/columns/index.cgi?column=litg
Alan Moore said about The Black Dossier:
"Kevin is putting the last few touches to it at the moment. It's got none of the things in it that anyone would ask for, but after they've seen it, it will have been all of the things that they secretly wanted. It's this wonderful compendium of stuff, and there's all kinds of cute give-away things including a 7-inch vinyl single and a 3-D section at the end, which I think will hopefully astound people. You not going to believe this, this has got everyone in it. It's not Book 3 of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; we've yet to start that, but that will be coming out sometime next year from our new publisher Top Shelf."
THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN: THE BLACK DOSSIER
http://www.dccomics.com/comics/?cm=5977
Written by Alan Moore; Art and Cover by Kevin O'Neill
Acclaimed writer Alan Moore once again joins forces with artist Kevin O'Neill for THE BLACK DOSSIER — a stunning original hardcover graphic novel that is the next chapter in the fantastic saga of THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN!
England in the mid-1950s is not the same as it was. The powers that be have instituted some changes. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen have been disbanded and disavowed, and the country is under the control of an iron-fisted regime. Now, after many years, the still youthful Mina Murray and a rejuvenated Allan Quatermain return in search of some answers — answers that can only be found in a book buried deep in the vaults of their old headquarters — a book that holds the key to the hidden history of the League throughout the ages: The Black Dossier. As Allan and Mina delve into the details of their precursors, some dating back centuries, they must elude their dangerous pursuers who are hellbent on retrieving the lost manuscript…and ending the League once and for all.
THE BLACK DOSSIER is an elaborately designed, cutting-edge volume that includes a "Tijuana Bible" insert and a 3-D section complete with custom glasses, as well as additional text pieces, maps, and a stunning cutaway double-page spread of Captain Nemo's Nautilus submarine by Kevin O'Neill. Don't miss what's sure to be one of the most talked-about books of 2006!
America's Best Comics | 208pg. | Color | Hardcover | $29.99 US | ISBN 140120306X | Mature Readers On Sale October 25, 2006
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier (Hardcover) Americas Best Comics
Release Date moved to Oct 25th 2006.
Absolute League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier (Absolute) Americas Best Comics
Release Date moved to Jan 30th 2007.
On the Wildstorm Message Board Jess Nevins said "It's definitely not coming out this month--I think I can say that without betraying any secrets"
http://dcboards.warnerbros.com/web/thread.jspa?threadID=2000041171&tstart=0
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier is due for the fall and covers the entire secret history of the LoEG. It starts with the first League, goes into the 1950’s, and right now looks to be about 185 pages of story.
http://www.newsarama.com/WonderCon2006/wildstorm/building.htm
The "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Black Dossier" by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill. It's an original hardcover and "one of the more revolutionary books the industry has ever seen," said Dunbier The book follows the history of the group from its "very early" origins to the 1950s. Having 185 pages of actual story, it's larger than either of the original miniseries. "Kevin has been doing a fantastic job," said Dunbier. The book will use different types of paper for different sections and 3-D effects. While 3-D "normally (consists of) throwing balls at the camera; this one has real meaning and is incredibly complex. The way Alan wrote it and Kevin draws it is unique and fantastic. Alan has called it 'the most fabulous book in the history of the universe,' and he isn't far wrong."
http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=6651
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier (Hardcover) Americas Best Comics (May 30, 2006)
Absolute League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier (Absolute) Americas Best Comics (September 30, 2006)
"The final Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neil’s LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN will be a hardcover book entitled THE BLACK DOSSIER. It is rumored to have a 3-D segment to the book. "
http://www.cosmiccomix.com/news/120505/
"I've just talked with Kevin O'Neill about the new LoEG, "Dark Dossier", which will be a big story jumping all over the place from the dawn of time to the 50's. Remember the first "new" LoEG announcement where Moore mentioned he was going in a recording studio? It's for a record which will be sold with the book, including songs performed by (50's) characters of the book, Moore does the singing, à la Roy Orbson, american accent and all"
http://www.millarworld.net/index.php?showtopic=51308&hl=dossier
Alan Moore, co-creator of the "V For Vendetta" comic, has publicly disassociated himself from the upcoming Warner Brothers movie project based on the comic book and written and produced by the Wachowski Brothers.
And as a result, he has cut his remaining ties with DC Comics, including future volumes of the "League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen." Moore has promised future "League" comics will be published by a US/UK collaboration between Top Shelf and Knockabout.
Moore's last remaining "League" for DC is all but completed and due this year. This is "The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Dark Dossier," a hardcover graphic novel coming from Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill later this year from ABC/Wildstorm/DC Comics. Moore tells me this "will slip in between volumes two and three" of the "League." Moore described it to me as "not my best comic ever, not the best comic ever, but the best thing ever. Better than the Roman civilisation, penicillin..." The human brain? "Yes and the human nervous system. Better than creation. Better than the big bang. It's quite good."
He continues, "It will be nothing anyone expects, but everything everyone secretly wanted." It's unusual to hear such hyperbole from one more commonly associated with self-deprecation. It's nearing completion and Moore tells me he was in a recording studio last week, working on part of it. Yes, that intrigued me too, though Moore refused to be drawn past the tantalising glimpse he'd deliberately dropped. Then after that, volume three of the "League" will be published by Top Shelf/Knockabout a year to eighteen months later, in a totally new format. And future volumes will continue from this publisher collaboration
http://www.comicbookresources.com/columns/index.cgi?column=litg&article=2153
"Moore and O'Neill are at work on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volume 3, with an eye on a 2006 release."
"Also from Moore…or technically, Moore and offspring, the veteran writer joins with his daughter Leah and John Reppion for the debut of Albion 1 in June."
"As Newsarama has reported, the miniseries will feature many of the classic IPC characters in a Moore-plotted revival. The six issue miniseries will be illustrated by Shane Oakley with covers by Dave Gibbons, and feature the likes of Robot Archie, Steel Claw, Captain Hurricane and the Spider."
"The press release is wrong on just about every count. Best to ignore it and act like it never appeared. "
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Dark Dossier is a hardcover graphic novel from Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neil due in late 2005. The story is set primarily in the 1950s when the League and the British government no longer see eye to eye. Surviving League members infiltrate MI:5 to steal a closely guarded book, the Dark Dossier compiled by MI:5 over hundreds of years, detailing the League, who the members are, what they do, what they've done, everything about them. As the story unfolds in 1950's London, the main characters - whose identities are a closely guarded mystery - peruse the Dark Dossier while eluding the agents of MI:5. The story takes place in the 1950s, the teens (1911 - 1919), in the 1800s, 1600s, and possibly one story is set in 2000 BC.
"I had a really perverse idea the other day ... it would be funny to have one series set in the 1950s where you have Sal Paradise from Jack Kerouac's On The Road and his crazy wired-up driver friend, Dean Moriarty, who of course is the great grandson of James Moriarty, or I could say that he is. Then there'd be Doctor Sax, a Kerouac character based on William Burroughs and The Shadow but who owes a lot Fu Manchu. You could set it in Interzone with the Burroughs centipede people appearing all over the place. You could even have a couple of members of the Victorian League still around."