About Volume III:

• Alan Moore says "We've got the third 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. 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."

• Top Shelf says: 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.

• Top Shelf says: 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.

• 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,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.

• Alan Moore says "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."

• Alan Moore says "The third volume grows out from the fairly radical approach that we’ve taken with The Black Dossier. We decided that, for practical reasons, we’d like this third volume to be structured differently than the preceding two volumes. We thought that it might be easier on the readers if we did three standalone 72-page volumes that are, nevertheless, connected by an overarching story, so that if there is a long wait between issues, it won’t be a cliffhanger. Having read one chapter of this third volume, the readers will be satisfied to a certain degree They will feel like they’ve read a substantial chapter of a story that answers the questions that it has raised to a large extent, while still leaving a couple of plot threads dangling, traveling into the next episode. Now, we the story overall is going to be entitled Century, because it takes roughly 100 years to tell."

• Alan Moore says "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."

CHAPTER ONE: What Keeps Mankind Alive

• Top Shelf says: 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.

• Alan Moore says "When volume three does come out, I’m still not sure exactly what it’s going to be like. At least a significant chunk of it is going to be set in 1910 and will be set in London in 1910, during the coronation of King George, when Halley’s Comet was passing overhead. There’ll be some interesting new characters, some interesting old characters. You’ll be seeing Captain Nemo in the 1910 adventures, although I don’t want to say much more than that. There are all these things that we might well pick up on. Les Hommes Mysterieux–I’ve still not quite worked out how to do that one yet. It’s a bit too obvious. It’s an obvious idea, the clash between the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and their opposite numbers, it’s a bit too comic booky. There’s an obvious way of doing it, so until I can think of a non-obvious way of doing it I shall perhaps be leaving that one alone. Although, who knows, I’m talking about a couple of years until book three shall be a possibility, by then I might have the entire Les Hommes Mysterieux storyline completely hatched."

• Alan Moore says "The story starts around 1910, where you’ve got a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen composed of five or six characters from that period’s literature – a couple of familiar faces and a few new ones. Basically, they are acting on strange presentiments of a disaster that is going to happen in London and that they think may be connected with the forthcoming coronation of the king. These are the events around which Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera concerned itself, so we’ve got characters from that – Mack the Knife and Pirate Jenny – turning up and playing quite a big part in this first chapter. There are also threads which refer to an occult conspiracy – again, drawn from the occult literature of the period. In fact, there’s quite a good scene with kind of a magician’s club somewhere in the West End, where most of the 19th century occultists are all hanging out and discussing trade secrets."

CHAPTER TWO: Paint It Black

• Top Shelf says: 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.

• Alan Moore says "The second book, by which time the League has been pared down to three or four members, is set in 1968, and revolves around the psychedelic, swinging London of that period, and which features a variety of characters from the films and literature of that time. Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius makes an appearance. There are also a lot of references to some of the cult cinema of that period, to television, to literature, and even to comic books."

• Alan Moore says "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."

• Alan Moore says "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."

CHAPTER THREE

• Top Shelf says: 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.

• Alan Moore says "And then, the third and final chapter of Volume 3 is going to be set in 2008. We’ll bring the League right up to date and will, I hope, demonstrate the flexibility of these characters, and that they are not just perennially frozen in a kind of Victorian wonderland and can’t survive outside of it. I think that we’re going to demonstrate that you could extrapolate upon these characters until the end of time, if necessary. They’re adaptable, is basically what I’m saying. I think by showing that we can actually set the story in the present day, that it will be a good demonstration. In the overall course of this third book, I think that the subtext is probably going to be the decline of culture. I mean, the first part is set in 1910 and will probably be packaged in the style of one of the very beautiful post-art-nouveau art movements of that period, and will look fairly gorgeous. The second one, set in 1968, will probably have a cover that is in a psychedelic poster style. The third one will be reflective of our culture in 2008. And, I think that something about the tone of the books themselves and the way that they’re packaged will kind of give a strong message that we’ve come a long way since the glory days of the Victorian era, with all of those marvelous and rich characters. Yes, we’ve come a long way and it wasn’t necessarily in the right direction. That’s going to be part of the subtext of Volume 3, but as usual, it will be a fairly rip-roaring yarn that will build up to quite a devastating climax in Book 3. And, there’s a sort of encroaching frankness to the delivery. Perhaps that’s because we’re moving out of the Victorian era, where if I wanted to have the characters use and expletive or a swear word, I would substitute a line of asterisks, which was the Victorian style. In The Black Dossier, we’ve been a lot more frank about the sexuality and language. And this is something that I think we’re going to be continuing with as the League progresses through the decades towards the present day – that they will reflect the times that they are moving through. And as a result, some of the material in the third volume is quite savage. I don’t really want to give too much away yet, but some of the scenes in the second book are very, very bleak, and the third book is a complete nightmare. But, that’s the one that I haven’t yet written, so I should be getting to that sometime early next year."

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