r/AlanMoore

Was thinking about how Watchmen was supposed to be Charlton Comics, and then LoEG are public domain character. Then I think I read there's a spin off from Tom Thumb with pulp characters or something along those lines. Miracle Man too

Has he done anything else with existing characters where he takes a possibly forgot or PD character and did his thing where he fully expands them and gives a ton of character of depth.

Beyond Moore, are there any other examples of this? You'd think there would be more now that more characters are coming into Public Domain. Why is there Southern Gothic Odyssey with Steamboat Willie yet!?

I recently picked up the final volume of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Having not touched the series in years and with a bit of free time on my hands I decided to read the series start to finish before tackling the final book. It was an interesting experience and I thought I’d share my thoughts on the various volumes. Trigger warning for some brief discussion of SA. 

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Volume 1:
The series gets off to a strong start, with distinctive and evocative artwork that I think really suits the story’s mix of the fantastical and brutally real. It makes its pitch early on, with its bloody depictions of violence and untranslated foreign languages showing this isn’t a book that’s going to coddle the reader.  

But it’s not long before a big misstep, the short sequence involving the recruitment of the invisible man. I read it as an oddly out of place attempt at humour, given the volumes otherwise serious tone, but any humour that’s based on the rape of underage schoolgirls is a hard no from me. 

After this the story returns to its regular tone, delivering a really solid and action packed conclusion. The prose story that finishes the volume is clearly going for a specific tone of turn of the century adventure / horror, and how much you enjoy that genre will determine your enjoyment of this story. Personally I love those old pulp adventure and horror stories, so this worked for me. 

Volume 2:
If anything the art gets even better in volume two. The opening scenes of the battle for Mars, then the brutal incineration of the British armed forces are just incredible, and the quality remains high throughout, especially the monstrous depictions of Doctor Moreau’s hybrid creatures. 

The story of this volume is, I think, better than in Volume. Essentially a retelling of War of the Worlds with the League fighting against the Martians, it delivers both fantastical action and strong character moments for all the main cast, with no major missteps like the one in the prior volume.

There is another strongly implied rape scene in this volume, but I think this one lands because it’s committed by a monstrous character and treated appropriately by the rest of the cast, unlike the last one that was played for laughs. Hyde is a fascinating character, brutal, vicious and cruel, but with his own sense of honor and dignity, I wish we’d had a chance to see more of him. 

I really struggled with the prose story at the end of this volume. It reads as Alan Moore just showing off about how many references to classic literature he can cram into twenty pages than an attempt to write something actually entertaining to read. Moore chooses to include in this story an event of great significance for the rest of the comic, Mina and Quatermain finding the pool of life and becoming young and immortal, yet the whole thing is told in a couple of paragraphs.

The Black Dossier:
A departure in format from the previous books, this one presents a series of shorts aping the style of various forms of media to tell stories about the League throughout history, with a framing narrative of Alan and Mina retrieving the ritual dossier from British Intelligence then fleeing to the Blazing World. 

The various stylistic shorts are hit and miss and your enjoyment of them is going to depend very much on your enjoyment of the various styles they’re aping. My personal favourite was the Cthulhu Mythos meets Bertie Wooster story, whereas I couldn’t even finish the Kerouac style beat poetry section. 

The framing narrative was well done, although not quite to the standard of the League stories in the prior volume. For the first (but unfortunately not the last) time, Moore seems to be using the comic as a soapbox to preach his dislike of James Bond as a character, clearly seeing him as inferior to the pulp adventurers of old. 

Moore has made significant changes to the canon of characters before, but none quite so dramatic as with Bond, who is made into a cowardly, traitorous lecherer. The book version of Bond is certainly a lot more morally gray than the hero he becomes in the film series, but nowhere this level of outright villainy. 

One point that I found interesting is that despite Moore’s distaste for Bond and his explicit condemnation of him as inferior to his literary predecessors, Bond wins the day at the end. He gets a bloody nose, sure, but ultimately his crimes are concealed and his story ends with him seducing Emma Peel shortly after murdering her uncle.   

There’s one significant problem I have with this book, although it’s more of a meta-level story issue. At the start of the Black Dossier Mina and Quartermain have switched allegiances from the British secret service to Prospero and the blazing world. This happens entirely off-screen between books and is never given a full explanation. There’s certainly some setup for it, with their dissatisfaction with the government in the earlier volumes and some hints of their discovering the Blazing World in the Alemenac, but this is a big story change that happens entirely off-screen and makes the start of the book rather disorientating. 

Century 1910, 1969, 2009:
This is where the series takes a distinct dip in quality in my opinion. Moore makes several creative choices that I just found baffling, for example several times using a device of having a character sing the comics narration, which for me just didn’t work. Trying to depict music compellingly in a comic is difficult and I found this attempt to be a complete failure. 

Speaking of complete failures, this volume starts another problem that runs right through to the end of the series. From this point on the League are failures. They achieve almost nothing and spiral downwards from here to the end of the series. In 1910 they failed to prevent a massacre at the docks and failed to stop Haddo, actually ending up inspiring him to create a moonchild. In 1969 the League are given the run around, barely slow the villain down, then he’s killed by an unaffiliated separate character. In 2009 they found the villain, but had nothing to do with his actual defeat, basically just standing around while Mary Poppins deus-ex-machina’s the antichrist away. 

The constant failure of our protagonists just became a bit boring and disheartening. Moore seems to be using it as some commentary on the failure of England’s ambitions and imagination after the Victorian era, showing ruins of some of the spectacular buildings that were under construction in the first volumes, but the point rings kind of hollow when the great heroes of that bygone age are still here and screwing up at every turn. And while the 21th century is depicted as depressing and squalid, it’s better than the depressing depictions of poverty from the Victorian era. 

Maybe there was a deeper point here that I was missing but it all just seemed rather muddled. 

And finally in 2009 there’s the somewhat controversial depiction of a serial numbers filed off Harry Potter as a magical school shooter antichrist spouting entitled teenager cliches. Honestly came across as mean spirited and lazy, there’s so many valid angles to critique the HP franchise from and Moore went with a very vapid ‘aren’t today's teens so disrespectful.’

The art at least remained consistently great through all three of these volumes, from the muted tones of 1910 to technicolor of the 60’s, then more a mixed palate for 2009. The highlight for me was the final confrontation in 2009, just beautifully drawn. 

Tempest:
The final to the whole series, and if you think the League was failing before you ain’t seen nothing yet. It starts with their actions leading to malevolent James Bond regaining his youth, and eventually spirals to the complete destruction of human civilisation, which the League realise far too late has been Prospero’s goal all along. From there the League is just swept along in events, only surviving the collapse thanks to the aid of their old allies in the Nemo family.  

It gets even worse from their as its slowly revealed the last couple of wins the league actually had, stealing the Black Dossier and stopping a war between the different races that live on the moon, helped lead to Properso’s apocalypse and the eventual conquest of most of the solar system by a brutal lunar warlord. 

I’m a bit conflicted by this bleak ending to the series. On the one hand, the universe of the League is one where all fictions are true, and post apocalyptic fiction is one of the most popular genres, so some sort of apocalypse was inevitable. On the other hand, it would have been nice if our protagonists could have gotten at least something resembling a win, or shown some shred of agency, instead of being constantly swept along in events outside their control. 

A large portion of the page count in this volume is dedicated to the collapse of the Seven Stars superhero group Mina was part of in the 50’s. It’s a broad satire of the issues the superhero comic industry faced as a whole during that time, which I found… fine, if not particularly interesting, but it took up a lot of pages. I’d have happily cut this section in half and given some more page count to the ultimately victorious villains of the whole series, who barely get any screen time. It would have been interesting to get some better idea of why Prospero was so happy to have spent the last few hundred years orchestrating humanity's downfall on Gloriana’s behalf. 

In a similar vein to the Black Dossier the art in this book jumps between a number of styles, this time taking inspiration from various different old British comic lines. As someone old enough to have been a regular Beano reader I did enjoy this, although some may find it jarring, and the regular League art was stellar as always. 

One final nitpick, there’s a flashback in the final issue of Mina talking to an elderly Sherlock Holmes where he explains his theory that extraordinary individuals are too disruptive for society as a whole. It’s only one page, but the rest of the story very much doesn’t support this point. If anything it generally shows the reverse, that despite the existence of superpowered individuals the world of the League is almost depressingly similar to our own. And humanities collapse isn’t really anything to do with extraordinary humans disrupting the status quo too much, it's a supernatural attack by fae-folk from another dimension. Again, whatever point Moore was trying to make here seems a bit muddled. 

The Nemo Trilogy:
A side series to the main league books covering the life of Janni Nemo, I’ve got to say I enjoyed these three more than anything in the main series post Black Dossier. More straightforward adventures without the experimental styles and constant grinding failures of the main series, these are just a lot of fun start to finish, with the usual fantastic art really selling the wild events. My personal favourite was the chronologically jumbled sequence in the arctic after an encounter with a member of the Cthulhu mythos. 

Summary
In my opinion The League started very strong, but loses steam as it goes, not ever quite becoming actually bad but certainly getting weaker and more muddled as it goes along. I wonder if the weaker later volumes are a result of Moore moving away from the classic victoriana he’s so obviously a fan of and into the realms of modern media which he’s less familiar with.

The art remains top-tier throughout, no complaints there. The series makes some bold stylistic choices with its homage to various literary genres and classic comic styles. This is obviously going to be hit or miss depending on the reader's fondness for the different styles and genres, although it was more hit than miss for me.  

Overall I’d wholeheartedly recommend the first two volumes and the Nemo trilogy to anyone. To the rest of the series I’d give a more cautious recommendation, as enjoyment will strongly depend on how familiar you are with the vast stock of classic writing its referencing.

If Alan Moore had continued, I think he would have gone less mythopoetic and more forensic than Gaiman.

Gaiman’s Golden Age is basically: “What does the world feel like after gods remake it?” It’s mosaic, humane, melancholy, full of ordinary people living under impossible benevolence.

Moore, I suspect, would have been more interested in the moral horror of utopia itself. No so much “isn’t it strange to live among gods?” but, "What has Miracleman actually done to the human condition?" A few directions Moore might have pushed:

First, he probably would have made the utopia feel more coercive. Miracleman and the others eliminate war, scarcity, disease, maybe even ordinary death, but Moore would likely keep asking: what consent did humanity give for this? Is peace still peace if it's imposed by beings no one can resist?

Second, he might have dug harder into Miracleman becoming alienated from humanity. Gaiman’s Miracleman is remote, godlike, sad, somewhat unreachable. Moore might have made that transformation more disturbing: Mike Moran not merely transcended, but effectively replaced by Miracleman’s ideology. The superhero as benevolent fascist is very Moore territory.

Third, I think Liz Moran would have remained central. Moore had already made her the human moral counterweight. Gaiman uses the post-Moore world beautifully, but Moore might have kept the emotional wound closer to Mike, Liz and Winter. Liz rejecting godhood, motherhood becoming cosmic, Winter being posthuman from birth, that feels like Moore would have made it the spine of the next arc.

Fourth, Kid Miracleman’s aftermath might not have ended as cleanly. Even defeated, he's the proof that one damaged superbeing can invalidate civilization. Moore may have made the new order obsessed with prevention: surveillance, psychological conditioning, maybe containment systems for gods. Utopia starts looking like a prison designed by people who remember London.

And fifth, Moore probably would have gone bigger and colder with the metaphysics. Gaiman goes literary-fable. Moore might have gone toward Blake, Nietzsche, occult evolution, language, sexuality, transformation, the superhero not as “god among us,” but as a rupture in reality’s symbolic order. Very Promethea before Promethea, maybe.

So the contrast is:

Gaiman asks, “What is it like to live in Miracleman’s heaven?”

Moore would ask, “What monstrous assumptions make this heaven possible?”

And knowing Moore, he might eventually have turned Miracleman himself into "the final problem." Not a villain exactly. Worse: a perfectly sincere savior whose paradise reveals that saving humanity and preserving humanity may be incompatible goals.