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English creators have a record of producing poignant and resonant works regarding social class. Jane Austen's novels practically defined propriety and manner, while Charles Dickens gave a voice to the voiceless with books like Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol. BBC programming such as Are You Being Served?, Red Dwarf and The Office provided not just hilarity but also a scathing indictment on the lines between the social structures. Alan Moore, that prolific, and English, comics legend continues the track of social commentary with The League of Extraordinary Gentleman--Century: 1910 .
Accompanied once again by artist Kevin O'Neill, Moore introduces a new cast of LEG members and takes the reader on a rousing adventure through the streets of London's destitute East End. Leading the group as always is the curious and deceptively frigid Wilhelmina Murray, accompanied by the adventurer Allan Quatermain, Jr., the supernatural detective Thomas Carnacki, ace cat burglar A.J. Raffles, and the immortal, gender-changing Orlando, wielding the sword of Excalibur.
After Carnacki experiences a prophetic dream regarding a secret cult and machinations to bring about an apocalypse, the League sets out to find whether or not the dream has any merit. Meanwhile, Janni, the daughter of Captain Nemo, outright rejecting her father's expectations abandons the Nautilus to find a new life among the seedy, uncertain docks of London's East End. These two plot threads balance nicely together, as the League's investigation provides some much needed relief from the travails of Janni's experiences on the docks.
The story plays out much like a Greek tragedy, in that our heroes in their search for truth find that the events unfolding around them are beyond their power to manipulate. Also, in lieu of traditional narration in the form of captions, Moore creates an oracle, or soothsayer, of sorts in the form of a madame from the East End, who sings of the events transpiring on the page while also hinting of their greater impact. All coalescing into a climax which is not comforting nor reassuring, yet nonetheless thought-provoking in that it reveals how those at the bottom of an unbalanced class system will react to injustice with the only means available to them.
Moore, known for his uncompromising, and unflinching approach to human nature, explores some dark territory in this new book. While the action is often grotesque and pornographic, there's also an attention to character and the weaving of an intricate narrative, which incorporates real life events into the shared universe of these timeless literary figures. Kevin O'Neill's art, while at first seeming crude and disproportionate, is alive with detail. He builds this world from the bottom up, countering and balancing the traditional architecture of the time with surreal, maze-like structures, such as Nemo's island fortress and the interior of the League's headquarters. In addition to building a setting, O'Neill then populates the world with a myriad of characters, each with their own action and drama, which gives the reader the opportunity to study the art in a sort of "Where's Waldo" approach; as each character drawn on the page creates the ambiance of this impoverished world. Sometimes humorous, sometimes sad, O'Neill accomplishes the subtle effect of a landscape of faces.
The League of Extraordinary Gentleman--Century: 1910 is the latest in Alan Moore's run of great reads. Fans of his work will notice some familiar themes, such as a return to the Whitechapel murders and presenting a new perpetrator, and the traditional text piece at the end of the book has a segment which is resonant of his classic Superman story "For the Man who has Everything". 1910 is the first of three new LEG volumes from Top Shelf Comics, and this first act is superb.
For more info: Top Shelf Comics
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