Watchmen: A Very Belated Analysis

With the Zack Snyder film on Channel 4 last night, it was interesting to see Watchmen trending on Twitter. There were legions of derisive tweets scorning the film for being complex, ponderous, nasty, stupid, and dull; equally there were no shortage of people leaping to its defence by sneering at the people who didn't like it and calling them pretentious.

My favourite comments of the evening were one by a friend wondering whether the film's makers made a decision early on that as the film was to be long it should be dull too, one remarking that he'd gone to see it in the cinema when he was sixteen and had been forty-four by the time the film ended, one saying how it was weird to recognise every image from the comic but being retold by an idiot, and one pointing out that the film is not without merit, but is seriously flawed.

I think I'd go along with at least the last two of those two observations. The main problem with the film, as Pádraig Ó Méalóid concluded in reviewing it when it first came out, is that:

'It looks a lot like the original Watchmen book, but has none of its grace, or beauty, or subtlety, or sinuously beautiful timing. Watchmen is the most perfect graphic novel there is, and a huge amount of work went into making it that way, and attempting to streamline that for the big screen was never going to work.'

I know, we should judge films on their own merits, and not in comparison with the books they're based on -- even if that weren't common sense, Bill Goldman has proven the point with style in both Adventures in the Screen Trade and Which Lie Did I Tell?  --  but that's not to say that we can't analyse a film's strengths and weaknesses in comparison with the source material.

Watchmen is very much a comic about comics, a comic that tries to show just what comics can do, and that aspect of the book is obviously impossible to reproduce on the screen. Take, for example, the book's fourth chapter, where Doctor Manhattan is on Mars. This is an unparalleled instance of what comics can do, as it puts us exactly in the position of Doctor Manhattan himself: just as he exists in the present but simultaneously perceives all manner of points in his past and his future, so too we read the chapter, focusing on one panel at a time but always aware of and even able to see a host of other panels. In reading comics we are almost godlike ourselves, existing outside the universe of the characters in an eternal present but able to perceive all points in the characters' pasts and futures. They exist in a space-time continuum of their own, whereas we, beyond their pages, can see all points in their universe.

There's no way this can be reproduced on the screen. Snyder tries, but I think he fails. His Mars sequence is beautiful, but it doesn't even come close to achieving what the comic does in this chapter, and in some ways actually hurts his story. If the comics' reader is metaphorically divine, the cinema viewer is essentially voyeuristic, and in many ways it's hard to see the film's Doctor Manhattan as other than a standoffish voyeur.

Still, there's not much Snyder could do about that. What of the rest of the film?

Missing the Point

I think a huge part of the problem with the film is that Zack Snyder really doesn't seem to have understood the book. 300's glaring inconsistencies demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that Synder's not an intelligent film-maker, and while I don't dispute his visual gifts, a book as relentlessly intelligent as Watchmen deserved to be brought to the screen -- if that had to happen at all -- at the hands of a smarter director.

The first time I saw the film -- on an Imax screen on the morning of the day the film opened, with me not having slept the previous night -- I was almost immediately thrown by how Snyder directed the opening scene where Eddie Blake is assaulted by his mysterious attacker. In the comic this episode is understated -- we see it as a series of flashback panels, interspersed into a dialogue between detectives inspecting the wreckage of Blake's apartment. There are only seven such panels -- we see an eighth later on, revealing the assailant's face -- and as far as we can tell if we assemble them into a sequence, what they show is that Blake was punched once, hurled to the floor where he is kicked once, and then thrown out a window.The episode is retold three times, and we only see these few actions, so I think that's probably all there was to the event.

Anyone who's seen the film won't remember the film's fight as having been quite so straightforward. A glass is thrown, a gun is  fired, knives are hurled, and there are punches, kicks, and blocks aplenty with bodies being smashed into and through things before Blake is dashed through his window. Oh and along the way, Blake punches a colossal lump out of what appears to be a concrete wall...

... and is himself smashed through what must surely be a fairly sturdy counter-top.

When I saw the film in the cinema I assumed the counter-top was marble, and stared in horror, thinking that Snyder seemed to have given genuine superpowers to both the Comedian and his assailant. Even allowing that it's probably meant to be a glass counter, I'm still far from convinced that Snyder doesn't want us to think of these combatants as being preternaturally powerful.

Just as importantly, perhaps, the tone of this was radically different from the tone of the comic. The comic keeps us at a distance, watching the action in a detached way, far enough off to observe and understand what's really going on. We see more of the game that way -- but this fight sought to suck us in, just as all the film's subsequent ones would do. The film tries to involve us in the action, pulling us in so we can't really see what's going on. I'm not saying that's not a reasonable thing to do, but if you want to do that, go and come up with your own story. Watchmen isn't about involvement. It's an autopsy of the whole costumed-hero genre, and like any autopsy needs to be carried out dispassionately.

Or, putting it another way, if you want visceral thrills and excitement, there are plenty of other superhero stories out there. Watchmen's not about that, and the film insults the book by trying to make it into something so radically opposed to what it's meant to be about.

Still, my concerns were almost allayed by the film's superb credit sequence. Indeed, I'd comfortably say that the credits are the best thing about the film. Loaded with jokes, and playing with the iconography of the last half century, its superheroic tableaux offer a potent and sometimes hilarious commentary on how superheroes have developed on the screen -- silver or small -- over the decades. There's only one thing I was troubled by in the sequence, but that aside, the first time I saw the film the credit sequence almost banished my concerns.

What if Superman were Real?

Unfortunately, as the film progressed, and especially thinking about it afterwards, I realised just how massively Snyder has misunderstood the comic. Take, for example, the scene at the end of the film where Ozymandias, Adrian Veidt, explains his apocalyptic scheme to Rorschach and Nite Owl. Rorschach says that they won't let him do that, and Adrian looks at them as though they're idiots.

'Do that, Rorschach?' he says, 'I'm not a comic book villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my masterstroke to you if there were even the slightest possibility you could affect the outcome? I triggered it thirty-five minutes ago.'

Clever, you might think. If only Bond baddies could resist their urges to tell 007 what they're up to, maybe they might just get away with their schemes. But here's the thing. In the comic, Adrian doesn't say that. Rather, he says something which is subtly -- yet crucially -- different.

A Republic Serial villain? Well, of course, nobody nowadays remembers the 1940s and 1950s movie serials, where the likes of the Phantom or Zorro would confront all manner of nefarious characters and thwart their diabolic schemes, so it makes sense for Snyder to change things. Everyone nowadays knows how the Penguin, Lex Luthor, Magneto, Loki, and so forth have a tendency to give the game away to their heroic antagonists, so why not mention comics villains?

Except that this misses the point of Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen to an astonishing degree. Just as Watchmen is, in terms of its form, a comic about comics, so in terms of its content it is a superhero comic about superhero comics. One of the things it considers and tries to answer in a sincere and intelligent way is what a world would be like if there were costumed heroes in it, especially if any of them had actual superpowers. An important parallel to the story in the original book is a comic-within-a-comic, this being a horrific pirate story. It seems there are no shortage of comics in the world of Watchmen, but they're not about superheroes. Superheroes exist in the real world, and so escapist fiction has to look elsewhere for its source material, rooting its stories instead on the high seas of the eighteenth century.

'I'm not a comic book villain?' Of course he's not. He's not a pirate.

Indeed, Snyder doesn't seemed to have perceived in any meaningful way the extent to which Moore and Gibbons grappled with how the existence of a godlike superhero like Doctor Manhattan would change the world. The Watchmen of the film is, like the book, set in an alternative 1985, but the texture of that world doesn't seem all that different from ours. It should be, however. The book has a scene in early 1962, where Hollis Mason, the original Nite Owl, learns just how world-changing Doctor Manhattan really is.

There's not a hint of an electric car in the film until pretty much the final shot, and neither are there any electric hydrants to power them with. This makes sense in some ways, of course, as the modified plot of the film in fact involves the eventual replacement of oil, other fossil fuels, and nuclear power with a form of energy based on Doctor Manhattan's own powers. That's fair enough, you might think, so what's this sign doing outside Hollis Mason's garage?

'Obsolete Models A Speciality,' it says. In the comic this is a reference to the whole automobile industry having been transformed, as well as being a metaphor for both Nite Owls being past their sell-by dates, but I'm not sure what it's doing here in the film. Sure, you might argue that I'm quibbling here, and that this might just mean that Mason fixes old-fashioned cars, but I don't buy that. Moore and Gibbons put an enormous amount of effort into building a real and consistent world, with its own distinct yet coherent texture, and that sign was a very deliberate part of that, a specific foreshadowing of just how thoroughly Doctor Manhattan's existence had changed the world; it seems to have little relevance here. It's just here, as far as I can see, because Snyder saw it in the comic and thought it should be there. I don't believe he considered why it was in the comic.

And yes, this is a small point, but it's these kind of details that reveal the depth of Snyder's incomprehension.

Missing the Magic between Panels

One thing Scott McCloud talks about at some length in his stunning Understanding Comics is that much of what makes comics work is what goes on between the panels -- the gaps in time that we fill with our own imagination. Cinema's brilliantly capable of doing this too, of course -- we need only think of the shower scene in Psycho, in which we see the knife being raised but never actually see Janet Leigh being stabbed to death.

Unfortunately, Zack Snyder's anything but a subtle director. He doesn't like to leave things to our imagination. I suppose the film's opening fight scene pretty much made that clear, but still, take, for a more gruesome example, the episode where a gang of 'Top-Knots' attack Dan and Laurie in  an alleyway. It happens in the third chapter of the book and fills just a few panels over five pages -- indeed, there are only five panels showing any fighting at all, and it can hardly be said that these panels shirk the violent reality of what's happening. Here are the first two panels, juxtaposed to make a point.

In the first panel Laurie breaks one mugger's arm with her knee and elbow; if you've any doubt of that, note the commentary from the TV interview with which this sequence is crosscut -- 'make it snappy,' says the interviewer, talking about something else entirely, but as part of this panel serving as a counterpoint to the image. The agony on the mugger's face is obvious. You can see him wailing on the ground in the second panel, as Laurie turns to a second assailant -- a third panel shows him clutching his broken arm. Dan, meanwhile, has grabbed another mugger's jacket with his right hand in the first panel, and in the second slams his left hand upwards, breaking the mugger's nose in a manner that is, as the interviewer's commentary tells us, 'quite sudden and quite painful'.

But how does Snyder render this? Well, he has Dan breaking an arm too. Like this.

Gory, eh? I'd say unnecessarily so. That's the mugger's forearm being graphically snapped, such that his radius -- and quite possibly his ulna too -- rips through his flesh, with blood spurting everywhere. This same sequence will also feature a neck being broken with a horrendous crunch, and Laurie driving a knife into the neck of another mugger. For all that the fight in the comic is violent, it's nothing like this. Gibbons' art was matter-of-fact, realistic without being showy, whereas Snyder, as in 300, glorifies in violence. Frankly, I think this is -- at least by James Joyce's definition -- pornographic.

And that, of course, brings us to perhaps the film's most gratuitous episode, a cringeworthy minute-and-a-half long sex scene, moodily lit and acrobatically performed such as to put the puppets in Team America to shame, and all conducted to the exultant strains of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, with the volume turned up to eleven. Perhaps you'd like to see how it appeared in the comic?

And then, following that little Hitchcockian gag, reminiscent of North by Northwest and To Catch a Thief, we had to turn the page to see...

Well, not a whole lot, actually. And doesn't that work better? Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying I've got issues with Malin Akerman's pretty face, comely form, or shiny black boots. I'm just saying that there's no need for this scene in the film. The comic merely implies it, and allows us to fill in the gaps in as tasteful or tasteless a way as we see fit. The film, on the understand, reduces us to the status of voyeurs, watching an absurd sequence as devoid of necessity as it is of art.

Issues with Women

I've heard it argued that Moore has issues with women, and that this really comes out in his work, but having been weaned on Roxy in Skizz and especially The Ballad of Halo Jones, I just don't accept this. Horrible things sometimes happen to women in Moore's work, certainly, but horrible things happen to men too, and I think it's telling that he dedicated From Hell to Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Liz Stride, Kate Eddowes, and Marie Jeanette Kelly, all five of them victims of Jack the Ripper, saying, 'You and your demise: of these things alone are we certain. Goodnight, ladies.'

There's an attempted rape in Watchmen, and this has enormous consequences to the story of both the book and the film, but the way it's handled in the film differs from that in the book, in such as way as to somehow be both trite and offensive. Snyder at times charts a course that differs from Moore's, in such a way as to hurt the work. And in the credits sequence, he does this:

Is that in the book? No. No, not really. The book details the death of the Silhouette in a text section -- an extract from Hollis Mason's autobiography -- as follows:

'After that, things deteriorated. In 1946, the papers revealed that the Silhouette was living with another woman in a lesbian relationship. Schnexnayder persuaded us to expel her from the group, and six weeks later she was murdered, along with her lover, by one of her former enemies. Dollar Bill was shot dead, and in 1947 the group was dealt its most serious blow when Sally quit crimefighting to marry her agent.'

Dollar Bill's death is also shown in the credit sequence, with him sitting dead with his cloak caught in a bank's revolving door, as mentioned elsewhere in the story. That tallies with the story. But this image? Sure, the book says nothing of how the Silhouette and her lover were murdered, so some imagination is needed here, but was it necessary for them to have been killed in bed, in underwear and suspender belts, with the words 'lesbian whores' scrawled across the wall in their blood? This seems an image designed to titillate and horrify in equal measure, and seems a classic example of how profoundly different Snyder's vision of Watchmen is from that shared by Moore and Gibbons.

And then there's Rorschach...
I really think Snyder gets the characters wrong in this. There's no way that Snyder's Dan Dreiberg could be deemed a 'flabby failure who sits whimpering in his basement,' as the book's Rorschach dismisses him, and his Doctor Manhattan is more an softly-spoken voyeur than an aloof god who's almost paralysed by his near-omniscience. The film's Ozymandias, as played by Matthew Goode, looks so effete that the phenomenal strength he displays in the movie is wholly inexplicable unless we assume he has superpowers. And as for Rorschach himself? Well, I think Snyder almost gets him right, but in cutting the most self-revelatory lines the comic Rorschach utters, he deprives Rorschach of the paradox that makes him breathe.

In the book there's a horrific sequence where Rorschach executes a child murderer after having realised the child's fate; it's a flashback scene, with Rorschach telling a psychiatrist how he became who he is. The film features the same episode, but even more graphically, and with some liberties taken in the action, and then has Rorschach say:

'Whatever was left of Walter Kovacs died that night with that little girl. From then on there was only Rorschach. You see Doctor, God didn't kill that little girl. Fate didn't butcher her. Destiny didn't feed her to those dogs. If God saw what any of us did that night he didn't seem to mind. From then on I knew. God doesn't make the world this way. We do.'

That's not bad, but the book has him saying something far more bleak, far more nihilistic, and far more determined than that:

Look at that. The Rorschach of the book doesn't merely say that if God's up there he obviously doesn't care; he says that there is no God, and indeed that there's no purpose to life, and no objective meaning to anything other than that we choose to impose on it. Rorschach sees this the world as a world of brute facts, without meaning or purpose or pattern save what we imagine. In a universe consisting purely of 'is', it's impossible to construe an imperative 'ought', and yet Rorschach does it anyway. What meaning does he chose to impose on his universe, and does he ultimately chose to die for? In both book and film, he answers that question in his diary:

'Millions will perish in sickness and misery. Why does one death matter against so many? Because there is good and evil, and evil must be punished. Even in the face of armageddon...I will not compromise in this.'

Why must evil be punished? There's no meaning or purpose to life, after all, so why bother? The answer, ultimately, is simply that Rorschach is certain that this is true: this is the design he is determined to scrawl on this morally blank world.

In the film, if you want to, you can read Rorschach's disagreement with Veidt as a Kantian refusing to accept the views of an utilitarian, scorning the idea that evil can be done for the sake of a later and greater good, and then ultimately sacrificing himself, hoping that good will prevail but unable to countenance having not tried with every fibre of his broken being to overcome evil. But in the book, Rorschach's morality is his own.

Evil must be punished, he says, and in this he will not compromise, not even in the face of Armageddon. But what is evil and what is good? Rorschach believes the world is, in itself, morally blank. Strictly speaking, he doesn't believe in good or evil, save as what he chooses to call good and what he chooses to call evil. And yet at the end, he realises that one man cannot have a personal morality, as distinct from and as superior to everyone else's. Either all moralities are equally valid -- Veidt's and Dreiberg's and Laurie's and Manhattan's as much as his -- or else there's a higher one, that transcends our own.

Either way, Rorschach, who has lived his life without nuance, having battled so hard and so long with monsters that he has become a monster, gazes so deeply into the abyss that he sees the abyss gazing into him, and realising  his own inadequacy removes his mask, so that at the end, facing death, he stands again as a battered and broken Walter Kovacs.


You'll notice I've not taken issue with the film's climax, which is significantly different from that of the book. To be frank, I didn't mind it. I thought that was an imaginative rethinking, and I'm not hung up on the film being a carbon-copy of the book. What I have issues with is films adapting books or comics or whatever and not even attempting to recreate the feel of the source material. If you just throw out the tone and theme of whatever it is you're trying to adapt, why bother at all? Surely the essence of the source should be the one thing that's sacrosanct?

A Mole in the Great Wen

Unlike many of my friends in academia, I wasn't particularly thrown -- on a personal level -- when the Government here in Britain decided that universities here weren't going to be funded as they had been. Sure, I was disappointed, not least because I think it's a big mistake and that it's nonsense to think that the market sorts everything out. After all, even when it comes to so-called 'priority subjects' like engineering and sciences, if we follow a straightforward neo-liberal economic model, I don't see why they should be supported by the State either; the logical question for a laissez-faire thinker in connection with the universities should surely be 'what are universities for?' Because if the answer is 'research', why not just allow the research to be done where it can be done most effectively, and buy the results? University research is irrelevant to vast majority of those who study in universities, after all; for most people in Britain, if we think purely in terms of the 'market', universities are about teaching, and that's it.

No, obviously I don't believe that's the sole function of universities; I just think that that's the inevitable and logical end of any argument that tries to justify British universities in a free market.

Anyway, the reason the new arrangements here, which will have the effect of deracinating all employment in my field, didn't bother me too much on a purely personal level, was that I'd already long decided on quitting academia. The plan has been that once I'd finished my studies and worn my clown costume and silly hat, I'd shake the dust from my shoes and walk away.

Given a choice I'd like to go to London. Well, Rome and Berlin and Paris and New York and Vancouver would appeal too, as would settling back properly in Dublin, but in real terms I've thought of London. I love London; it has a texture and a breadth like no city I've ever visited.

I don't know when the fascination began. With a childhood love of the Household Cavalry, watching them on the television and wishing I could be one, I suppose. I first set foot in London when I was fifteen, whirling through on the return leg of a school tour to the Continent -- we whizzed passed the Houses of Parliament and Nelson's Column, attended and nearly fainted at an impromptu mass in a small chapel somewhere in the bowels of Westminster Cathedral, wasted a ludicrous amount of time in the Trocadero Centre, spotted some of the cast of Beverly Hills 90210 on Petticoat Lane, and waited for our bus in Hyde Park, gathered by the statue of Achilles and within easy sight of Apsley House, which nobody ever thought to point out to us had been the home of the greatest Dubliner ever to -- allegedly -- be ashamed of the fact.

I started regularly visiting when I was eighteen, staying with a sister or two on its outskirts and scuttling in almost every day, whether to comic conventions -- I wanted to be a comic artist -- or to comic shops, all the while trying to take in more and more sights: the National Gallery, the British Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Cabinet War Rooms, the London Eye, Saint Paul's, or the Public Records Office, say, all the while attending conventions and seeing exhibitions, of Ingres portraits and Monet lilies, say, or of all manner of Star Wars props. And though I travelled all over London during at this point, sometimes even staying with friends who had moved there or who I'd made and who lived there, in a fairly profound way I never knew London. I'd been to Harrow and to Finchley; stood outside Buckingham Palace; drank between Trafalgar Square and Leicester Square; eaten a pork bun in China town; spent endless hours in Foyles and the bookshops of Charing Cross Road; marvelled at the comics in Gosh! Comics on Great Russell Street, the Forbidden Planet on new Oxford Street, and Mega City Comics on Camden's Inverness Street; even listened to Scott McCloud expound his theories way out in Ladbroke Grove. But I didn't know London, which became absurdly apparent when staying in Mayfair at a very weird gathering and me utterly clueless as to where we were.

Because I never walked anywhere.

I used to be able to get cheap tube tickets, you see. 25p to anywhere in Zone 1, and never more than a pound anywhere in London. So for me I had this strange, mole-like view of London. I knew the Tube, and I knew destinations near Tube stations, and I knew that you could never get lost in Central London, because after wandering more than a couple of minutes you were bound to find a Tube station, and then you'd be safe.

Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere fascinated me when I first saw it on telly, and moreso when I read the book, and bought the series and watched Neil's commentary on it. There were disused Tube stations? Indeed, there's a whole London below London! I've since read quite a bit about London -- fun introductions to the city's quirks like Tim Moore's Do Not Pass Go, dense introductions to its arcana like Peter Ackroyd's London: the Biography and Iain Sinclair's Lights Out for the Territory -- the kind of books that like Alan Moore's From Hell reveal just how fascinating the most apparently banal of places actually are -- and specialist explorations of its peculiarities, like E.J. Burford's London: The Synfulle Citie and Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman's London Under London: A Subterranean Guide.

Trench and Hillman's book is fascinating, delving into the history of tunnels under the Thames, Tube lines and disused stations, military installations, mail tunnels, pneumatic tubes, bunkers, catacombs, and lots more, not the least of which are London's underground rivers. London used obviously to have lots of rivers, you see, the most well-known of which probably being the malodorous Fleet, which rose in Hampstead Heath and flowed southeast to join the Thames by Blackfriars Bridge, just off modern Fleet Street, reeking from the by-products of the local tanners. Its route has been mapped out pretty clearly on this Google Map, and seemingly if you sit outside the Coach and Four pub in Farringdon, and listen carefully, you can hear it through the grating on the ground. Or, if you've a deathwish, and want to risk wandering about in tidal tunnels that can fill in thirty minutes' flat, you can visit it, like these heroically mad people.

Well, I may not know London as well as its sub-urban explorers, but I know it fairly well now. I get the bus nowadays, and I walk. I've walked from Islington to the British Museum and the National Gallery and out to Victoria Station, from Fulham to Saint Paul's and up to Holborn, from Chelsea through Knightsbridge to Victoria and Westminster too many times, from King's Cross Station to Paddington and then made my way to Trafalgar Square and thence along the old shores of the Thames to the best pub in England.  And I've wandered aimlessly too many times in Shoreditch and Bloomsbury, Herne Hill and Dulwich, Wood Green and Manor House, Earl's Court and South Kensington, Bermondsey and Rotherhithe, and along the South Bank.

And once, from a train, I saw where all the old red phone boxes go to die.

The Tale of One Bad Rat, or, thoughts on teaching adults to read comics

 I was talking to my housemate last night about Watchmen, raving about it as I tend to do, and following Pádraig Ó Méalóid in scorning the Zach Snyder film based on the book. I'd not say the film is a travesty, but I think Pádraig was almost exactly right to have said:

'It looks a lot like the original Watchmen book, but has none of its grace, or beauty, or subtlety, or sinuously beautiful timing. Watchmen is the most perfect graphic novel there is, and a huge amount of work went into making it that way, and attempting to streamline that for the big screen was never going to work. Alan Moore said it was unfilmable, and I have seen that he was completely right.'

Anyway, I wittered away about why I felt the film didn't work -- how it had fundamentally missed the point of the book, misunderstood the nature of the book's characters as created by Moore, seemed oblivious in all but the most cosmetic of ways to the how the fabric of the world of Watchmen differs from that of our own world, and been unable to play to the book's strength. It has strengths, to be fair -- the credit sequence was funny and clever, the casting was excellent, and every so often the sets were spot-on, but in the main I thought it missed the point and substituted brashness, gore, and gratuitous violence and nudity where Moore and Gibbons had been elegant, subtle, and often just matter-of-fact. 

At this my housemate pulled me up, as someone who had liked the film and never read the book, saying that he'd liked it and didn't agree with me, so I went and got the book and tried as best I could in a hasty way to point out how the book works, panel by panel. I wished I'd Gibbons and Kidd's Watching the Watchmen to hand, but I did my best.

My housemate's intrigued now, and is tempted to buy the book for himself, but I'm a bit wary of him reading it just yet. Watchmen, to be frank, isn't a book to start a new comic-reader on. It's too complex, too sophisticated, to dependent on familiarity with the form and its grammar. 

Years ago I went to a talk by Bryan Talbot, back when he'd just written The Tale of One Bad Rat, where he talked of how he'd been amazed in the aftermath of his avant-garde The Adventures of Luther Arkwright to learn that there were people who couldn't read comics, who found them complex and hard to follow. How does one read a page? How does one read a panel? What do you read first -- the picture or the speech balloons or the captions or the thought bubbles or a combination of them all? It was with this in mind that he wrote and drew The Tale of One Bad Rat the way he did.

The Tale of One Bad Rat is about as legible, and sad, as beautiful, and as hopeful a comic as one could ever hope to read, and it's become one of a handful of comics I like to show people who don't read comics if I want to show them how good work can be done in the medium, work as valid as anything in film or prose. Originally intending the book as a story of a girl obsessed with Beatrix Potter who runs away to the Lake District, Talbot needed to explain why she ran away, came up with the idea that she'd been abused, and then decided that if he was going to involve child abuse in the story then he'd better do it properly.

He did the work, and the result is a masterpiece, utterly nailing the distrust, the difficulty in forming relationships, the hatred of being touched, and the obsessional imagery that can so often haunt abuse survivors, while nonetheless showing paths to healing and being a beautiful and gentle ode to Beatrix Potter, the Lake District, art, and rats.

As a primer in what comics can be and what comics can do, it has very few rivals. I rather wish I had my copy here. It's something I'd like to show people so they can understand.

Attending the tale of Sweeney Todd, rather than watching the Watchmen

One of the topics that came up after the Murder Mystery dinner the other evening was the coming Watchmen film, with the prospect of it being met with much muttering and shaking of heads. Pretty much everyone agreed that there's no way this is going to work, even if Dave Gibbons seems to be having a blast on the set, marvelling at how his creations are being brought to life. Leaving aside the fact that purely in terms of structure and storytelling, Zak Snyder's surely not the man to attempt this, I'm with the jaundiced Terry Gilliams on this one in a broader sense:

This nightmare began back in 1988 or 89 when Joel Silver, the producer of Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, The Matrix suggested that we make a film of the Watchmen. "The what?" I said. He thrust a fat hardback comic book in my hand and said read. I read. I loved.

But how to make a film of a masterpiece? Always a problem. So far no one has made a good version of War and Peace, and to me Watchmen is the W and P of comics ... sorry, graphic novels.

I sat down with Charles McKeown, my writing partner on Baron Munchausen and Brazil, to squeeze out a script. Time passed. Frustration increased. How do you condense this monster book into a 2 - 2½ hour film? What goes? What stays? Therein lies the problem. I talked to Alan Moore. He didn't know how to do it. He seemed relieved that i had taken on the responsibility of fucking up his work rather than leaving it to him. I suggested perhaps a 5 part mini series would be better. I still believe that.

With every bit of narrative tightening, we were losing character detail... and without their neuroses and complex relationships the characters were becoming more like normal run-of-the-mill-quirky-super-heroes. There wasn't time to tell all their stories. The Comedian was reduced to someone who dies at the beginning. That's all, just a convenient corpse to kick off the action. None of this was satisfying to me. I was wasn't happy with our results.

By now, actors were fluttering around Watchmen like crazed moths beating at a dirty street lamp. Robin Williams was keen to play Rorschach. Was that Richard Gere knocking on the door? The pressure on me was building. Thank god, Joel solved the problem. he failed to convince the studios to hand over enough money to make the film. Brilliant! I was saved! And, perhaps, Watchmen as well!

Certain works should be left alone... in their original form. Everything does not have to become a movie. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was alwats best in its original manifestation... a radio show.

So forget about the movie. Ley your imagination animate the characters. Do your own sound effects. Your own camera moves. Dave Gibbons' artwork is perfect. From my first reading of Watchmen, it felt like a movie. Why does it have to be a movie?

Think of what will have to be lost. Is it worth it?

That's from Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman, in case you're curious. If you read William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade, or better yet in this context, the chapter on Absolute Power in Which Lie Did I Tell?, you'll get a terrifyingly vivid picture of just the kind of butchery that will need to be done to Watchmen in order to turn it into a credible film. I just can't see anyone managing that.

That's not to say that butchery is always a bad thing when it comes to making films, I must admit. After all, it seems that the Sweeney Todd that shall be hitting British and Irish screens in a month or so has had more than the odd note shaved off it; Sondheim wasn't remotely precious about his masterpiece, fully recognising that it would need serious surgery to become truly cinematic, and as a result from what I can gather barely ten songs are performed in anything even close to their stage versions.

Having seen the show four times on stage at this point, and with a DVD and a couple of CDs of it floating around, I obviously have an absurd amount invested in the film working, so Neil Gaiman's verdict was more than a little encouraging, especially with his own weakness for the show:

I took the family to see Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd last night, which I absolutely loved (even down to a couple of grace notes, the St Dunstan's market and the Bell Court street sign -- in the earliest versions of the Penny Dreadful, Sweeney's shop was part of St Dunstan's Church and Mrs Lovett's was around the corner, in Bell Yard). I even loved Johnny Depp's early-Bowie-when-he-was-still-doing-Anthony-Newley singing style. (At least until, on the way out, I found myself trying to imagine a blood-spattered Sweeney Todd singing "The Laughing Gnome" as he waited for customers, and was unable to explain to anyone else why this was funny.) I think it just edged out Ed Wood as my favourite Tim Burton movie.

Ed Wood is a masterpiece in its own right, of course, a hilarious, poignant, heartbreaking masterpiece, so for Neil to regard this as eclipsing that is high praise. I've been looking at some clips over at the New York Times site, and they just fill me with delight. You should check them out. Really. This looks as though it's very very very good indeed.

Is Big Brother Watching You... even now?

I could go on about the political subtexts of League in general and Black Dossier in particular, but at this point I reckon you're either bored senseless or tempted to get your hands on the books yourselves, in which case you can make your own minds up.

It's probably worth pointing out, though, that while Black Dossier stands on its own merits, it is part of a series, serving as a bridge between League Volume II and Century, the coming three-part Volume III of League.

Thematically Moore has explained that the three parts of Century -- set in 1910, 1968, and 2008 -- will comment, among other things, on what Moore sees as the decline of the popular imagination. You can read elsewhere what Moore has revealed about the plot, but I think after this deranged week I'm in a mood for a little speculation. After all, adverts on the telly have demonstrated how spectacularly wrong I was in my suspicions about the Doctor Who Christmas episode, so I may as well embarrass myself yet again. I'll be shutting up about the Dossier after this post, anyway.

I realise that this is the historian in me coming out, but I can't help but notice when there are discrepancies going on with dates. Ropey chronology is something I have a nose for, and not just in historical matters -- NMRBoy could tell you how I ran riot last December, tearing to shreds an astoundingly malicious piece of fiction marked not merely by a host of demonstrable falsehoods but by the most absurdly inconsistent chronology.

Anyway, most of the documents within the Dossier come with notes attached or scrawled on them, all bar the last couple of notes being from Gerry O'Brien to General Sir Harold Wharton, Moore's 'Big Brother'. Wharton died, we're told on two occasions, in 1952.

But here's the thing: two of the memos from O'Brien to Wharton are on yellow post-it notes, attached to the front and back covers of the 'Life of Orlando' strip. The strip ran from 22 August 1953 to 17 October 1953. The dates of each issue are clearly marked on every single page.

Was O'Brien writing notes to a dead man? Was Wharton really dead?

I know, it could just be a mistake. But considering how carefully and precisely Moore has set up this world, I very much doubt it, especially when you consider Mina's observations above. She's right, surely. Why would M have sent such skilled agents after Mina and Allan unless he was really afraid of what they'd discover in the Dossier? And yet what was there of significance in the Dossier that they didn't already know -- with the possible exception of a reference to M having colluded with O'Brien in plotting Wharton's demise, a demise that I'm now inclined to suspect was staged?

I know, I know. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I'm afraid that paranoid conspiracy theories are meat and drink to me at the moment. As NMRBoy asked the other day, does the plot ever do anything other than thicken?

... Banished from the Nursery

That's all very well, you might wonder, but why the Golliwogg? After all, Marc Singer can cope with the change in the book's tone at the point when Mina and Allan need rescuing, and can understand why Moore feels a need to introduce an outlandish character from children's literature to save the day, but cannot understand why Moore and O'Neill have opted for a figure so many are bound to regard as a racist stereotype.

Apparently it was O'Neill who introduced Moore to the character a few years back; Moore would naturally have been familiar the Golliwog dolls so popular during his childhood, but was evidently unaware, as was I until I looked it up, of Florence Kate Upton's book The Adventures of the Two Dutch Girls and a Golliwogg. Moore was immediately intrigued by the character, and said he'd surely find a place in League, and indeed true to his word the Golliwogg was first alluded to on the last page of the 'Almanac' in League Volume II. The 'Almanac' has Mina reporting that Olympia, the Queen of Toyland, said that Toyland was occasionally visited by someone she described as a 'bold, fearless black balloonist,' an explorer she thought they might well be advised to meet.

It's striking that Moore's Golliwogg does not live in Toyland -- striking because he is, after all, a doll. Indeed, in a passage within the Dossier's final section describes his skin as being 'matt black' and textured in a way that did not permit even expected normal highlights and reflections. The simplest explanation for this is that the Golliwogg is, traditionally, a doll. In League matters are a little more complex, as Mina refers to him living in a 'black-material cosmos', 'black material' presumably being dark matter.

Enid Blyton followed Upton by using the Golliwogg, by this point spelling the word Golliwog, in her 'Noddy' books, all set in Toyland, and I think this is of crucial thematic significance for the character's symbolic value in this world. If you pick up any recent edition of any Noddy book you'll not find a hint of a Golliwog in it; the Golliwog, recognised as a racist caricature, has been written out of the story. Granted, the reasons for doing this are certainly not bad ones, but whatever you think of this what's indisputable is that for reasons of political correctness, the Golliwog is unacceptable in Toyland.

In terms of the overall thrust of Black Dossier, then, it's clear that the Golliwogg has become the great 'Unperson' of children's literature. It seems to me entirely fitting that this supreme 'unperson' should appear at the critical moment, rescuing the fugitives and ferrying them to their arctic asylum, from where the war against the forces of repression and the mundane can be planned.

Banished to the Nursery...

Umberto Eco, in Reflections on The Name of the Rose, says that a novel is a machine for generating interpretations, so wish me luck.

There's a passage very early in Black Dossier where Allan and Mina, having stolen the eponymous dossier, are getting ready to retire for the night. Allan is making tea, while Mina is getting ready for bed.

'You think they'll send anyone after us?' asks Allan.
'Their Dossier's gone, ' Mina replies. 'They'll soon work out who must have taken it.'
'So yes,' Allan admits, 'Of course they'll send someone after us.'
'I mean,' says Mina, 'When we broke from British Intelligence after the war, they must have assumed we were dead.'
'Mm,' Allan agrees, 'Or that we'd never existed. "Unpersons." Wasn't that what the regime called people like us? People they'd revised out of history, like characters written out of a story.'

This notion of the 'unperson' must, as far as I can see, be absolutely central to any attempt to interpret Black Dossier. In 1984 an 'unperson' is someone who has been erased from history, and who people aren't even meant to think about. It's an totalitarian version of damnatio memoriae which forbids even mentioning unpersons -- merely referring to them is a crime.

There are certain threads that run through The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in all its incarnations. One is the notion of the difficulty of distinguishing between heroes and monsters, something which has been central to Moore's writing since V for Vendetta. Another is the concept of the interconnectedness of fiction, and I think this needs to be examined in connection with the concept of the 'unperson' if we're to make any sense of what happens at the end of Black Dossier.

One of the things Moore is trying to do in League is to create what's been called a covert history of the popular imagination. I think it's worth quoting him at length here:

The planet of the imagination is as old as we are. It has been humanity's constant companion with all of its fictional locations, like Mount Olympus and the gods, and since we first came down from the trees, basically. It seems very important, otherwise, we wouldn't have it. Fiction is clearly one of the first things that we do when we stand upright as a species - we tell each other stories. Now, Nature doesn't do things for decorative purposes, except like giving peacocks wonderful plumage so they can attract a mate, but since there seems to be little point to telling each other stories all the time — except there must be. We have depended upon them and to some degree the fictional world is completely intertwined and interdependent with the material world. A lot of the dreams that shape us and, presumably, our world leaders, are fictions. When we're growing up, we perhaps base ourselves on an ideal, and even if that ideal is a real living person, there is every chance that living person may have based themselves on a fictional ideal. This is actually ground that we do cover in 'The Black Dossier,' and in the final soliloquy, which is delivered by Duke Prospero. We're talking about this very thing: the interdependence between the world of fiction and the world of fact. It is something that interests me, and has come to dominate my thinking on the series. I'm not exactly sure why, but it feels as if it might be important.

Moore's definitely onto something here, something that really isn't very far from 'A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls', that dazzling early Chesterton essay, memorable for its assertions that while literature is a luxury, fiction is a necessity, and that the popular novel, far from being vulgar, is 'the actual centre of a million flaming imaginations.'


One of Moore's concerns, embodied so well in Allan Quatermain's scathing criticism of James Bond, is what he sees as the gradual impoverishment of our collective imagination. It's not merely that -- as he sees it -- or heroes have become more cruel, more brutal, and more cynical. Rather -- and this theme is apparently to be clearly drawn out in Volume III -- it's how the popular imagination has deteriorated from the Victorian and Edwardian periods to a point where the landscape of fiction is a comparatively sparse and dull place.

Prospero's soliloquy at the end is reminiscent of his speech at the end of The Tempest, and it's tempting to read it as Moore simply breaking his staff and departing from DC, a publisher with whom his relationship has been all too stormy. I think it's more useful, though, and more true to the text, to consider it not as a defence of artistic freedom but rather an appeal for artistic freedom!

Moore's concern, as expressed by Prospero, is not so much that artists are limited by their agents but that they voluntarily shackle themselves and are simply not imaginative enough.

I've mentioned already how the 'Life of Orlando' in Black Dossier functions as a kind of rough timeline of the world of League; it's worth reading the 'Life' while bearing Prospero's speech in mind, contrasting the kind of stories Orlando tells with the 1958 in which Mina and Allan are supposedly reading the Dossier. Look at Prospero's speech, expressing Moore's idea that we are -- to some extent -- fabricated from the stories we hear and the heroes we idolise. Putting this very crudely, I think Moore's point is that modern fiction is -- in the main -- less likely to fire the imagination than the fiction of the past, and that this is a shame both for us as individuals and for as a species.

Neil Gaiman had an article in the Guardian a couple of months ago where he commented on how, long ago, fairy tales used to be for adults:

Children listened to them and enjoyed them, but children were not the primary audience, no more than they were the intended audience of Beowulf, or The Odyssey. JRR Tolkien said, in a robust and fusty analogy, that fairytales were like the furniture in the nursery - it was not that the furniture had originally been made for children: it had once been for adults and was consigned to the nursery only when the adults grew tired of it and it became unfashionable.

It wasn't just fairy tales that became unfashionable; around the middle of the Nineteenth Century a rift developed between the world of 'popular' and 'literary' fiction, with the latter becoming decidedly uncomfortable with the fantastic elements that had been so characteristic of mainstream European writing up until that point. Michael Moorcock, in his introduction to Wizardry and Wild Romance, remarks that 'it could be said that Jane Austen established our taste for the novel of manners but it was Victorian middle-class morality which established that type of fiction as the only respectable form.'

The Big Brother government's classifying of the likes of Captain Nemo, the Invisible Man, Allan Quatermain, and Mina Murray as 'unpersons' takes this tendency to an extreme, and the Blazing World stands as an enclave where such 'unpersons' can still thrive. It's a glorified ghetto for disreputable fiction, stories scorned as tales for children and idiots but which Moore believes are far more valuable than that. Prospero's speech stands then, as a powerful manifesto for a creative and even innocent imagination, not limited by a fetish for 'reality', whatever that might be.

As Moore says, '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.'

A Blazing World

A few weeks ago I was talking about how jarring the shift in From Dusk till Dawn is, when it suddenly switches from an frightenly intense and disturbingly violent crime thriller into a cartoonish film about vampires, and I'd quoted Neil Gaiman quoting Chesterton on how uncomfortable we feel when stories change genre halfway through. Black Dossier does something like this 160 pages in, as I mentioned yesterday, and it's a hell of a jolt. It's taken me four readings to get comfortable with this.

Major spoilers ahead, I'm afraid.

Essentially what happens is that Mina and Allan manage to get to Scotland, and as they're nearing Dunbayne castle a helicopter bears down on them, carrying three British intelligence agents. So far so Hitchcock, as the three spies get out and try to pursue our heroes on foot. Only yards separate them when suddenly the castle door opens and out steps a giant golliwog to save the day.

Yes, you read that right.

So what the hell is going on?

Well, let's backtrack a bit. As I said yesterday, if in reading the previous volumes of League you had skipped over the text appendices you'd have thought that the world in which Mina and her comrades were operating was a 'realistic' world. Granted, you'd have thought it was a realistic world in which Victorian science fiction was science fact, where Cavorite could take men to the moon and where Martians in giant tripods would assault the earth, but a realistic world of sorts for all that.

But you'd only have thought that if you skipped the appendices, in particular 'The New Traveller's Almanac'. If you did that you would not have noticed how Mina and Allan, while on a mission to Russia in 1906, visited many remarkable places in Asia, including Octavia, 'a fragile cobweb-city of rope walkways strung across a chasm' before making their way to Shangri-La, where they met Orlando. Likewise slipping your attention would have been the tale of their return through the Arctic in 1907, during which time they visited Toyland, which naturally enough is located close to the North Pole; it's ruled by Olympia from Hoffmann's 'The Sandman' the husband of whom is Frankenstein's monster, something which if you think about it makes more sense than might at first appear to be the case.

You might have missed those references, so, but would you have missed this striking page in the Dossier, showing four postcards from places Mina and Allan had visited?

Yes, this is a little harder to ignore, but somehow it's not that obtrusive. I think there's a tendency to think of the comic strip -- which as I've said operates as a framing sequence in Dossier -- as the 'real world', with the text passages as almost apocryphal. The eponymous Dossier, being largely text, isn't quite there yet.

And it's this that leaves us looking at this going, ah yes, there's Octavia from Calvino's Invisible Cities, and there's Sussex with a coded reference to Sherlock Holmes on the back of the card, and yes, the Phantom is lurking away there in the rear row in the card from the Paris Opera, and how funny, they went to Toyland and met the Queen, and oh look, surely that's Noddy and Big Ears in the crowd! How clever!

Somehow, though, neither this nor any of the other fantastic details elsewhere in the Dossier or filling the cabinets of the British Museum in the first two volumes of the League really prepare us for the appearance of Golliwogg and what comes next. I think it's just very easy to think of the fantastic references as part of an elaborate literary game on Moore's part, where he is trying to chart an entire world of the imagination. We never expect the more outlandish elements of this world to impact on our reality any more than we expect Julia Roberts to drink in our local pub or the Creator to talk with tax collectors and government officials. Having a golliwog turn up to save Mina and Allan's bacon does seem to stretch credulity too far: sure, we realise he's out there, and out there is fine, but what's he doing in here?

Well, for starters, before we look at what's going on beyond the story, let's get the story straight. Rescuing Mina and Allan in his air-ship, he takes them away north, to the Blazing World, a relic of Seventeenth Century fiction located within the Arctic circle and already signalled to us in the Almanac and in the 'Life of Orlando' contained within the Dossier. The Blazing World, remarkably rendered in 3-D -- don't worry, glasses are supplied, but you'll look daft reading this on the bus, especially at the parts where you have to shut first one eye and then the other -- is a kind of asylum for all manner of fantastic characters ranging from Prospero to Mary Poppins, all of whom, presumably, were declared 'unpersons' by the British government during its Big Brother years.

Orlando welcomes Mina and Allan back, not having seen either of them in years, and asks whether they've retrieved the Dossier. They assure her that they have, and that while there's lots about Orlando in the Dossier, there's not nearly as much in the Dossier as had been feared; for starters, Mina observes, there's virtually nothing in it about the Blazing World. Allan remarks that this is just as well, noting that the entire Third Dimension appears to be run by spies, and that they ought not to be allowed get control of the Fourth.

Okay, that's the plot revealed: Allan and Mina, operating as agents of the Blazing World, stole the Dossier in order to find out what M and his underlings knew about them and to prevent it being examined too closely by the likes of M, as they feared the possibility of the dossier containing information that might endanger them.

(In so far as the Dossier doesn't endanger them at all, it's a classic McGuffin in that regard, not unlike the Maltese Falcon, although it's far from insignificant for other reasons.)

But what does this mean? Isn't this really just Moore and O'Neill showing off in a 3-D spectacular dragging in pretty much every improbable fictional character you care to name?

No, I don't think it is.

I'll explain why tomorrow, and then there'll be just two more Black Dossier posts before I move on to less bizarre matters.

A Literary Connect-The-Dots Puzzle

The second volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen includes a remarkable document called 'The New Traveller's Almanac', which Jess Nevins refers to as Alan Moore's attempt to kill him. That may well have been Mr Moore's secondary intention, in which case he's failed, but his primary one is rather more audacious. Purporting to be compiled from declassified MI5 documents -- notably the journals of Prospero, Captain Nemo, and Mina Murray -- it pulls together hundreds upon hundreds of literary references in order to place the adventures of the League in one improbably coherent world.

The section dealing with Ireland, for example, draws upon The Crock of Gold by James Stephens, the Fenian Cycle, the Mabinogion, Oscar Wilde's 'The Selfish Giant', The Castle of Leixlip by Wilde's great-uncle Charles Maturin, 'Molly Malone', Sheridan Le Fanu's The Siege of the Red House, The House on the Borderlands by William Hope Hodgson, Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies, and the voyage of Saint Brendan of Clonfert. The almanac draws attention to two houses in Connacht with distinctive properties, one being the aformentioned House on the Bordelands, and the other being immediately recognisable to anyone even remotely familiar with modern Irish literature:

'Forty miles east of Galway stands a house that presently belongs to a middle-aged gentleman, one Mr. Mathers. Local legends or tall tales suggest that Mathers' house may somehow form a gateway to a strangely different Ireland, where the laws of physics and logic seem more similar to those reported in the realm that Miss A.L. and Eric Bellman vanished into, rather than to those in our own world.'

Yes, it's the house from The Third Policeman, arguably Flann O'Brien's greatest and funniest novel, and certainly his most accessible. If you haven't read it, you really should rectify that, unless you're a Scottish cleaning lady, if which case you may find rather traumatic the policemen's bicycle obsession. I'm inclined to think Moore has read rather more of O'Brien's work than just the Third Policeman, though, and not just because if the Almanac itself is anything to go by he seems to have read just about everything.

O'Brien's first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, features a treatise on what a novel ought to be, and how fiction ought to be treated by writers. It reads almost as a challenge which Moore has eagerly answered:

Characters should be interchangeable as between one book and another. The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required, creating only when they failed to find a suitable existing puppet. The modern novel should be largely a work of reference. Most authors spend their time saying what has been said before -- usually said much better. A wealth of references to existing works would acquaint the reader instantaneously with the nature of each character, would obviate tiresome explanations and would effectively preclude mountebanks, upstarts, thumbleriggers and persons of inferior education from an understanding of contemporary literature.

It works doesn't it, even down to those staggering rarities, the characters in League that Moore has been forced to create due to a lack of a suitable pre-existing puppet to appropriate? Offhand, I can only see two such creations of any note in the entire League corpus to date, being Campion Bond and William Samson Snr, both of whom are examples of what Moore calls 'back-engineering'. They're fresh contributions to the world of fiction on his part, but it is implied that they are respectively grandfather to James Bond and father to William Samson Jnr, the so-called 'Wolf of Kabul', both of whom feature in the subsequent history of the League.

In an interview in The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore, Moore is reminded of an introduction he wrote in the 1980s to his first Swamp Thing collection, in which he says something about Doctor Frankenstein kidnapping all the Little Women -- the poor doctor would have been getting on by that point, since I think Alcott's book is set a good half-century after Shelley's, but let that pass. Pondering this reminder, Moore muses:

'That might have been the first time that I actually had the idea for treating mainstream fiction as if it was a superhero continuity. That might have been the first place. Probably the original idea, there must have been some kernel of it back around then, but it didn't really develop until a few years back when it started to.... Certainly well after I'd done Lost Girls, when I'd started to to think how much fun it had been using these fictional characters together in the same context, and started to have musings about whether you can put together a Victorian super-hero thing.'

At its most basic level, that was indeed the premise of the first volume of League -- it was, as Moore says, a 'Justice League of Victorian England', a straightforward adventure story pulling together Mina Murray, Captain Nemo, Allan Quatermain, Hawley Griffin, and the double act of Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde, under the command of James Moriarty or Mycroft Holmes.

Within an episode or two, however, Moore says that himself and Kevin O'Neill realised that League had far greater potential than they were allowing it, that it was 'a fantastic opportunity to map the entire world of fiction'. For all that, though, Moore has eased his readers into this world. Mina's scarred throat is almost the only evidence of her encounter with fiction's most celebrated vampire, while if Rupert the Bear or Mister Toad appeared, well, they were the result of scientific experimentation, hybrids created by Dr Moreau. In other words, the stories are relatively 'realistic' affairs in the first two volumes of League, with the fictional realms of magic, faerie, and the occult being firmly relegated to the supplementary text sections at the end of each issue.

I mentioned a few days ago how I was having difficulty deciding whether Black Dossier was mindbogglingly brilliant or just self-indulgently clever. My main problem lay in the fact that a hundred and sixty or so pages in, what had up until that point been -- I thought -- implicitly apocryphal, suddenly went mainstream.

I had difficulty accepting that, but having read the Dossier four times at this point, I'm pretty happy with it. I'll tell you why tomorrow.

The Ill-Made Knight

Most of the action in Black Dossier takes place in 1958, and involves the theft of the 'Black Dossier' by Allan Quatermain and Mina Murray, and their pursuit by various agents of British Intelligence. Aside from allowing Moore to link 1984 and Frank Richards's 'Greyfriars' stories with almost every British spy story you care to think of, this serves as a framing sequence for the Dossier itself.

The eponymous Dossier consists of an assortment of documents which, viewed in their entirety, detail the history of the League over the centuries, and indeed place it in a broader historical context, just as the 'New Traveller's Almanac' in League Volume II had mapped out the geography of the world in which League is set. The documents include part of a lost historical play by Shakespeare entitled Faerie's Fortunes Founded, an account by Bertie Wooster of the manifestation at his Aunt Dahlia's home Brinkley Court of Lovecraft's Elder Gods, and an extract from a beat novel by Sal Paradyse featuring characters based on Mina, Allan, and the grandchildren of Fu Manchu and Professor Moriarty.

The chronological backbone of the series is laid out in the eighteen-page 'Life of Orlando', presented in the form of a 1950s boy's adventure comic. That's part of the charm and the brilliance of this book -- it's a triumph even as an object, with each pastiche looking absolutely perfect, whether resembling a yellowed paperback or a Tijuana bible. Anyway, Moore merges the different Orlandos that have been written over the years into one immortal character of mutable gender and -- it would seem -- species, and uses him to mark out the major events in the history of the world of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, such as, for example, the brief flickering candle of Camelot.

1958, the year in which Black Dossier is set, was also the year in which the Candle in the Wind, the fourth part of T.H. White's Arthurian epic The Once and Future King, saw print, detailing the destruction of the dream that was Camelot. It can hardly be a coincidence then that in describing Arthurian Britain, Orlando refers to 'awesome, monstrously ugly Lancelot', who you can see here, hacking his way across the battlefield.

White's Lancelot, introduced in 1940's The Ill-Made Knight, is as brave and mighty as any other take on the character, but unique among Lancelots in being spectacularly ugly -- White describes him as ape-like. There's no doubt then that this is meant to be White's take on the hero, not least because, as Keith Kole rightly observes on Jess Nevin's annotations site, there is a marked similarity between Kevin O'Neill's depictions of Lancelot, Caliban, and Edward Hyde.

On top of that, White's Lancelot is a sadist. It's not just that he's merely good at beating people up and killing them; he actively enjoys doing so and takes pleasure in inflicting pain on others. He's not just monstrously ugly, as Orlando opines, he is -- in effect -- himself a monster, slaughtering in the service of his queen. But that shouldn't surprise you, really, considering yesterday's observations on another rather more contemporary sadist.

I think it's fair to say that Lancelot's a far more attractive character than Bond, though. He may be a sadist, but he knows it, and is horrified by it. Deeply good, rather than ruthlessly amoral, his whole life is dedicated to controlling the beast that he is, to harnessing his monstrous tendencies so that his extraordinary abilities can be used for good, rather than evil.

It's rather tempting to consider Lancelot as a sort of proto-Hyde figure, considering not just his appearance but how Edward Hyde's character developed over the first two volumes of League.

It's also worth noting in this respect that O'Neill depicts Lancelot as looking suspiciously reminiscent of Sláine, the Celtic hero of 2000AD. Look at his armlet, and at that wide and ornate metal belt, and then note that that's pretty much all he's wearing: everyone else is wearing generic Celtic armour. Why? Well, the implication must be that that like Sláine and Cúchulainn, the Irish hero upon whom Sláine is largely based, Moore and O'Neill's Lancelot is warped, prone to berserker furies that transform him into a creature more like a beast than a man, and utterly invincible in battle. Echoes of Hyde again, methinks...

I know, it's a lot to get from just one panel, isn't it? That's Alan Moore for you, though. And if you turn the page you'll see that O'Neill's depiction of Beowulf rather spectacularly echoes his Lancelot; this Beowulf wears a similar armlet on his right arm, and a wide and ornate metal belt and not much else. With his ragged mane and his broad grin he looks more than a little like Sláine as he used to be drawn by Mike McMahon, back when O'Neill and Moore were still working for 2000AD. Is Beowulf a berserker too, then? Possibly -- after all, Orlando observes that he's 'still not really sure what Beowulf was, exactly.' He's right to wonder, and if you watch the film in the cinema at the moment, you'll be hard pressed not to agree with Grendel's mother that beneath his heroic glamour, Beowulf is a monster just as much as her son.

I even wonder whether we're meant to see parallels with Orlando's description of Ajax as 'a confused brute', or of Mina's reference to Bulldog Drummond as 'a big ape', but if I were to get started on that, I'd never talk about anything else.

Moore tomorrow so. Same League time, same League channel.

Heroes and Monsters

The very first issue of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen bore a quotation on the back cover from Moore himself, attributed to the pen of Campion Bond, the intermediary between the League and their shadowy spymaster 'M'. The quotation, which in many ways acts as a manifesto for the series, observes that 'The British Empire has always encountered difficulty in distinguishing between its heroes and its monsters.'

Lest we'd forgotten this line, Moore makes sure to include it afresh in Black Dossier, this time placing it in context in 'Shadows in the Steam: 1898, and the Genesis of the Mark I Murray Group', a supposed extract from Memoirs of an English Intelligencer, Bond's 1908 memoir.

In case you're curious, the two gentlemen in the sequence above are, to all intents and purposes, Allan Quatermain and James Bond. Granted, Quatermain looks like no Quatermain that you might know, while Bond is never identified as such for copyright reasons, but he's clearly him. You can tell by the long scar on his right cheek, by the casual lock of hair falling over his right brow, and by his having ordered a vodka martini just a little earlier, asking for it to be strirred rather than shaken, just like in the books. And his grandfather, it is clearly implied, is the Campion Bond already mentioned.

I'm not even going to get into explaining what Allan Quatermain is doing in 1958, let alone looking so young and spruce; you'll have to read the books if you want to find out. For now, though, take a look at 'The Mark of Batman', Moore's 1986 introduction to Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, which I've referred to previously:

The fictional heroes of the past, while still retaining all of their charm and power and magic, have had some of their credibility stripped away forever as a result of the new sophistication in their audience. With the benefit of hindsight and a greater understanding of anthropoid behavior patterns, science fiction author Philip Jose Farmer was able to demonstrate quite credibly that the young Tarzan would almost certainly have indulged in sexual experimentation with chimpanzees and that he would just surely have had none of the aversion to eating human flesh that Edgar Rice Burroughs attributed to him. As our political and social consciousness continues to evolve, Alan Quatermain stands revealed as just another white imperialist out to exploit the natives and we begin to see that the overriding factor in James Bond's psychological makeup is his utter hatred and contempt for women. Whether most of us would prefer to enjoy the above-mentioned gentlemen's adventures without spoiling things by considering the social implications is beside the point. The fact remains that we have changed, along with our society, and that were such characters created today they would be subject to the most extreme suspicion and criticism.

One of the things that League tries to be is a history of the popular imagination -- I'll come back to this tomorrow -- and in connection with that its first two volumes analysed the Victorian mind, the assumptions and repressed fears of which were embodied in such characters as Allan Quatermain. Dossier moves the clock forward sixty years, through two world wars to a time when the Empire was being lost, when the Cold War was being fought, and when Britannia was increasingly playing second fiddle to her colonial daughters across the sea.

This manifested itself in the popular mind in the paranoid form of spy fiction, which Moore brilliantly parodies and dissects here through the nexus of his Greyfriars' old boys network and through his unsparing portrayal of Her Majesty's most devoted bootboy, Her Majesty here being -- presumably -- Queen Gloriana II.

The depravity and brutality of Moore's Bond may seem shocking to those of us who know Bond only through the movies, but in his original form his sheer nastiness is far more blatant than in any of his cinematic incarnations; Judi Dench's 'M' in Goldeneye was only scratching the surface when she called him a sexist, misogynist dinosaur and a relic of the Cold War. Fleming's Bond, so eagerly adapted for the screen and still being reinterpreted so many decades later, sees women as nothing more than objects and is cruel and ruthless to the point of amorality.

The Bonds of the screen may be charming, suave, and sexy, but we never see what's going on behind their cold eyes; Fleming shows us that, and he shows us, whether he means to or not, that James Bond is a monster. But is he a monster because he serves his Queen, or does he serve his Queen because he's a monster?

Is this what the British adventure hero has come to?