The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume 3: Century

 The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume 3: Century.

Have you ever got caught in a media slump? That feeling where you only want to consume the familiarity of the tired and tested, and simultaneously immensely bored with the same old crap? You try and dip your toe into something new, running the risk of wasting time on something you won’t enjoy or weighing up the uncertainty of the new thing simply being not what you want right now, so you go back to the well that ran dry years ago. My wife and I have been caught in that rut for some time now.

We are looking for that ever elusive unicorn of a product that feels recognisable but exotic. The best way I can explain it is… Do you remember the wait between Games of Thrones seasons? You scratch around trying to find something Game of Thrones shaped to fill the Game of Thrones hole. You pick up various things like The Witcher or Wheel of Time and they just aren’t the right flavour or texture. But Soph and I just don’t know what shape the hole is right now.

I have a suspicion it's the MCU. We’ve loved a lot of Marvel’s offerings, but Love and Thunder left such a bad taste that we’ve been put off. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 was good! But it still didn’t cleanse the pallet. With all this in mind, I scoured my shelves for something that I haven’t read, but knew what to expect. 

What am I Reading?

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume 3: Century. Written by Alan Moore, illustrated by Kevin O’Neill.

What’s it about?

The year is 1910, and an ill omen hangs over London. The newly formed League are still finding their feet in the new century's infancy. Mina Murray’s team now consists of the gender fluid immortal Orlando, the ghost-finder Thomas Carnacki, the gentleman thief A.J. Raffles, and the recently immortalised Allan Quartermain (courtesy of the fountain of youth).

The year is 1969, and the league is dying. The space age and decade of free love has left the league scattered or lost. All that's left is Mina, Allan and Orlando. They live as a throuple in the hidden safe house beneath a beat bar. The league may be gone, but the apocalyptic threat from fifty years before still looms large across the city. 

The year is 2009, and the end of the world has begun. 

What’s good about it?

I’ve read the first two volumes dozens of times, but the third instalment has been left on the shelf for a good long while. I don’t really know why I haven’t read it before. It must have just got lost between other more appetising titles at the time. It's good to revisit this horrible world. This is by far the bleakest of the three. Alan Moore rarely holds back with the doom and gloom, but this grim. It's all the more grim because the filthy face of it isn’t buried in drab colouring. The techno tie dye luminosity of the sixties is twisted into a sinister landscape. 2009 is worse, because it somehow captures the rescission riddled streets sublimely. I don’t know how O’Neill has captured the hopelessness of that time in so few panels.

This won’t come as a surprise for those who know me, but in my opinion this is the best Harry Potter book. I’ve read all the Potter books, and listened to the wonderful Stephen Fry audiobooks countless times. But it's only the dulcet tones of Mr Fry that make it wonderful, I think the stories are absolute dross. Harry is a void, just a vessel for exposition. He is a characterless protagonist; he stands for nothing, rarely puts forward anything as his own, he is just a passenger through the plot, never questioning the injustices he sees in plain sight, he is no hero. The Wizarding World is a neo-liberal new labour nightmare that doesn’t promote morals or equality. Harry Potter dissolves under the slightest scrutiny. It’s a touch of genius to make him the Antichrist. Even smarter to have him washed away by the ultimate cosmic corrector of naughty children, Mary Poppins. 

I think my favourite new addition to the pantheon of literary characters is Andrew Norton, from Iain Sinclair’s delightfully bizarre Slow Chocolate Autopsy. If you’ve not read it, I would strongly recommend it. Norton is a man displaced in time, if not space. He is eternally trapped within the bounds of London, but not within the linear timeline of its existence. He bounces from date to date, observing all the coming and goings of the city. The league uses him as a kind of informant, even though his messages are always garbled cryptic clues (due to his lack of time to adequately explain). However, from his first meeting with Mina in 1910, I saw the way the story would unfold.

What did I struggle with?

There is a touch to much sexual assault for my liking in this story. Of course it's gross and awful and scary, but it's also quite a cheap way of showing that people are bad in my opinion. You can show that people aren’t to be trusted without them being rapists or perverts. Outside of Jani’s assault in the 1910 section, I don’t think any of the other attacks are needed to progress the story. Mina being touched whilst unconscious in 1969 is entirely unnecessary as she is already battling for control against an evil possessive force. I would have just made her assailant a thief, trying to steal the talisman that’s protecting her: Giving Mina more agency and urgency to get back to her body before it's lost to the cult leader, rather than some random dude feeling her tits.  

The biggest gripe I have with this book is… what the fuck is going on? Turns out you really need to read the Black Dossier for big bits of this to make sense. The whole Duke of Milan stuff went right over my head. I found it immensely off putting. It's such a hard left turn away from the previously semi-grounded lore of the League that it had me baffled. I’m used to a small amount of hand holding from Marvel and DC (because no way are you going to remember, let alone read, all the back catalogue that establishes the macguffins used from issue to issue) so having this sudden shift jump out at me feels like an idiot. 

Would I recommend it?

If I’m being honest with myself, probably not. It’s a clear statement that as a culture Britain has lost its way. I think most of us will agree with that. As a comic and story, this is by far weaker than the earlier volumes.