By Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill

Knockabout Comics

Before Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill took The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to Top Shelf & Knockabout for LoEG: Century, DC Comics were responsible for putting out the third volume – LoEG: The Black Dossier.

To put it mildly, it didn’t go well. Not at all. Worst of all, for us here in the UK, DC decided that “due to international copyright concerns and related issues” they weren’t going to release it in the UK.

Which meant that everyone who wanted a copy in 2007 had to get a little creative, punters and comic shops alike. But we all managed, so essentially DC’s ban on selling it in the UK meant very little, bar annoying Moore and O’Neill, something DC seem extremely good at.

Which brings us to this Knockabout edition – the first time it’s been properly available here. It’s simply the DC product re-stickered with a Knockabout barcode on the backcover. But so what, fair  play to Knockabout for working the deal, and I’m sure Moore and O’Neill are happy that their work is being made available in the UK by one of the good guys of comic publishing.

Anyway, back to the book….

We’re in mid-50s England, with the League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen disbanded, disavowed and existing as just the ever youthful Mina Harker and Alan Quartermain.

They’re back in Britain searching for “The Black Dossier” – the book that reportedly holds the secret and hidden history of The League through the ages. But the powers that be are after it as well, with some very familiar faces on the case, like this fella, a certain Jimmy Bond:

The Black Dossier was originally meant to be a mere trifle of a sourcebook in between Volumes 2 and 3 of The League, but it rather expanded into something far bigger, far more important.

Moore and O’Neill’s comic story here is a simple enough espionage tale, but what gives the book it’s depth and interest is contents of the dossier itself, the non-comic stuff that gives Moore and O’Neill a chance to go wild with format, content, style and history.

We get so much in between the comic tale; a Tijuana Bible insert, the continued adventures of Fanny Hill, the comic strip adventures of Orlando, a long lost and unpublished Shakespeare manuscript, various pieces detailing League history, beat poetry writings, a very Lovecraftian adventure of Jeeves and Wooster, and a volume concluding 3-D section (glasses included).

When The Black Dossier originally came out, I was nonplussed and rather disappointed. It all seemed too concerned with Moore and O’Neill throwing more and more references to the characters they were alluding to, and less with telling something interesting and cohesive.

Skip forward to August 2011, with the publication of LoEG Century 1969, I took a long look back at the entire League saga, in an attempt to contextualise my relative disappointment, and doing so finally allowed me to look at the series in perspective, a  storyline spinning out across four volumes, across time and space.

The whole series worked so much better for me suddenly, and most pertinently here, the Black Dossier was the volume that came out most improved.

Here’s what I had to say about it then:

“Then we get to The Black Dossier and suddenly it all gets very complex very quickly – suddenly we’re playing spot the reference all too often. Except, I have to admit, this re-reading of The Black Dossier immediately after the first two volumes, and with the events of 1910 and 1969 fresh in my mind really opened it up for me – and suddenly, having freed myself from continually questioning my knowledge of who, what, where and why – it turns into a really good book – far, far more enjoyable read than I remembered from the first time round.”

“In fact, freed from worrying too much about what I’m missing and concentrating instead on just enjoying what is right there in front of me, The Black Dossier turns out to be a cracking mystical espionage thriller as a rejuvenated Mina and Quartermain join Orlando to pick their way through a crumbling post Orwellian Britain of 1958, hunting “The Black Dossier”, doggedly pursued by analogues of James Bond, Emma Peel and Bulldog Drummond, all working for the new “M”, Harry Lime.”

“And once the espionage thriller of the comic bits fell into place, all the non-comic bits got a damn sight more interesting without constantly fretting I was “reading them right”.”

“Now, maybe it’s just the novelty of “getting it” at last, but I’ve got to say, on this read through, I actually enjoyed The Black Dossier a little more than the first two volumes, the density of the material didn’t plague me so much, the enjoyment of Moore and O’Neill’s work was there all along, it just needed me to finally read it for myself rather than be overly concerned about everything extra.”

And reading it once more with this new Knockabout edition, I can’t really add any more to it than I’ve already written. It’s a far, far better book than I’d always thought, with Moore and O’Neill crafting something rather beautiful in so many different styles, mixing the straight forward espionage thriller with numerous delights in the pages of The Black Dossier itself.

It’s a good read in and of itself, but so much of my enjoyment of the series comes from the cumulative effect of reading the complete set. The good news is that thanks to Knockabout it’s a damn sight easier to get hold of the whole series. Even better is that Knockabout will be publishing League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 2009 this summer. I’m already looking forward to a long weekend reading the whole thing once more.

Seen a fair few variations of this floating around these last few days since the BBC interview with Moore, but this is my fave thus far. (Via Link Machine Go)

Hard Talk interview – BBC iPlayer, You Tube.

And if you didn’t realise…. Alan Moore knows the score…..

It’s pretty interesting stuff and, as you’d expect from Alan, pretty straight talking, honest, unpretentious stuff. Sadly the BBC iPlayer doesn’t let us embed the video on here and I’m not sure if anyone outside the UK can see the video or not, I know BBC radio can be streamed anywhere but I suspect there may be international restrictions on some of the video content, but for those who can access it, you can find it here. Thanks to Col Fawcett for the heads-up.

Alan Moore from Ecology, Cosmos & Consciousness on Vimeo.

Jerusalem will be Alan Moore’s second novel. It will be huge. At one point it was talked of in the region of 3/4 of a million words. But since then: “That was my original estimate. I have cut it down a bit, it’s now nearer 600,000/ 650,000 words,” according to Moore in this interview/article by the Northampton Chronicle and Echo.

“My earlier book Voice of the Fire was set within Northampton/ Northamptonshire, but this book is a lot less cosmopolitan and far reaching and is focused for the most part on Spring Boroughs, or The Boroughs, when I lived there …. But then that was once the whole of Northampton, if you go back to Saxon times The Boroughs’ boundaries were pretty much the boundaries of Northampton.”

“I have worked with everything I remember of The Boroughs from the phraseology to local legends. Since the Great Fire in 1670, it has almost been an untouchable area of the town … The fire started in The Boroughs, but with the straight West Wind it annihilated the rest of the town, while The Boroughs was untouched. That meant the rest of the town was rebuilt and The Boroughs wasn’t. I think that period began the decline of The Boroughs, until now, where it is an area which is in around the top two per cent for deprivation.”

“It’s trying to reinvent The Boroughs as the mythical territory I believe it to be … As much as Jerusalem is about history it is also about the outrageous, the fantastic and metaphysics.”

Moore’s links with Northampton are solid, humble, and increasingly important, and his appearance at the library is part of his long support for reading, and for the importance of libraries in thes austere times, when more and more of our libraries, often in the poorest areas of the country find themselves under threat.

“I don’t think people realise how vital libraries are or what a colossal danger it would be if we were to lose any more. Having had a truncated school life myself, all of my education from the age of 17 has been self-taught. I wouldn’t be the person I am today if it wasn’t for the opportunities the library gave me.”

The article’s well worth a read, and it’s well worth grabbing a brew, settling back and spending 35 minutes in Moore’s company as he reads Jerusalem Chapter 24, as narrated by the Archangel Gabriel, as a statue, on top of Northampton Guild Hall roof…

Long 35 minute version…

And the other one, a big interview with seraphemera.org about that whole Watchmen problem.

There’s been an awful lot of Internet chatter about Before Watchmen. In the end it boils down to the big corporate side having a bestseller they can exploit to make more money off. That it’s happening is no surprise. Big company wants more money, exploits existing property to do so is hardly new. But where you stand on it depends very much on your opinion of where you think the line of fair and unfair lies.

And I’m not going to bother rehashing all the various sides of this, or restate my opinion.

Here it is. It’s business vs ethics. Business won.

Oh, and a quick Google around shows me it’s also available for those without that Facebook thing at the excellent 4 Colour Heroes site, which is a wonderful repository of all things obscure and Alan Moore.

Oh, this brings back fond memories of the Marvel UK Daredevils comic. This was the cover to Daredevils #8:

I can still remember actually walking into the newsagent for this one. 1983, I was a mere child. And oh, how I loved The Daredevils: Captain Britain by Moore and Davis, reprinted Miller and Janson Daredevil from the US, Alan Moore writing Night Raven prose, and that weird Daredevil comedy strip. Thanks to Mike Collins for the nostalgia trip.

(cover to Alan Moore: Storyteller by Gary Spencer Millidge, published Ilex)

A quick scan down the events also reveals several science fiction and fantasy related events, including the fine SF scholar and librarian Andy Sawyer with award winning Gwyneth Jones on Science Fiction But Not As We Know it on the 29th, Andy Briggs discusses the legacy of Edgar Rice Burroughs; immortal hero Tarzan on the 31st of March, the remarkable Christopher Priest (one of our finest) appears on But Is It Literature on the 27th and the wonderful national treasure that is Brian Aldiss will be An Exile on Planet Earth on Sunday 25th March. And of course there are many other writers to take in from all genres of publishing; the festival runs from 24th March to the 1st of April amid the dreaming spires of Oxford – check the main site for more information.

(art meet life, life meet art: Moore with some of the Occupy protestors outside St Paul’s London)

“At the start of the 1980s when the ideas that would coalesce into V for Vendetta were springing up from a summer of anti-Thatcher riots across the UK coupled with a worrying surge from the far-right National Front, Guy Fawkes’ status as a potential revolutionary hero seemed to be oddly confirmed by circumstances surrounding the comic strip’s creation: it was the strip’s artist, David Lloyd, who had initially suggested using the Guy Fawkes mask as an emblem for our one-man-against-a-fascist-state lead character.

When this notion was enthusiastically received, he decided to buy one of the commonplace cardboard Guy Fawkes masks that were always readily available from mid-autumn, just to use as convenient reference.

To our great surprise, it turned out that this was the year (perhaps understandably after such an incendiary summer) when the Guy Fawkes mask was to be phased out in favour of green plastic Frankenstein monsters geared to the incoming celebration of an American Halloween.

It was also the year in which the term “Guy Fawkes Night” seemingly disappeared from common usage, to be replaced by the less provocative ‘bonfire night’.

At the time, we both remarked upon how interesting it was that we should have taken up the image right at the point where it was apparently being purged from the annals of English iconography. It seemed that you couldn’t keep a good symbol down. ”

(members of the Polish parliament don V masks recently in protest at economic, repressive copyright & web intrusion laws and other measures. V is no longer just for the street activist)