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#league of extraordinary gentlemen
thestuffedalligator · 3 months
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The Canadian League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was founded in 1910, and consisted of Dorothy “Dott” Pilgrim, a talented martial artist and bar fighter from Toronto, Anne Shirley, a schoolteacher from Prince Edward Island, and Sam McGee, a prospector who died during the Yukon Gold Rush and cremated on the marge of Lake Lebarge near Whitehorse, Yukon.
Together they fight crimes or whatever
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curtvilescomic · 3 months
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League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alex Ross
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b1ueins1de · 1 year
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There are 3 types of Hydes:
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The hulks
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The Clark Kents
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And the gremlins.
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picklepie888 · 8 months
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bindi-the-skunk · 4 months
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maxwell-grant · 12 days
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I guess it's also time for the annual ask: Thoughts on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen?
@mirrorfalls asked: Perhaps it's time to touch the elephant in the room: thoughts on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen?
anonymous asked: Any thoughts on Moore's LOEG? anonymous asked: any advice on how to do a fictional character mashup story ala chimera brigade, league, etc? anonymous asked: you wrote a bit on the wold newton universe and the chimera brigade, any thoughts on league of extraordinary gentleman?
(TW: sexual assault, also a whole lot of racism)
(clip from Anti-Spook Squad by Doctor Lalve)
Let it never be said I don't love or do anything for you people because Jesus Christ what an ordeal.
It was pretty inevitable that I'd eventually have to talk about LOEG given the, niche, I made for myself here, and given I'd read and touched on all these other works that either inspired it or were inspired by it, like the Wold Newton Universe, The Chimera Brigade, Tales of the Shadowmen and etc. I'd read through plenty of different LOEG takes and fics, it's an idea that has a lot of appeal on it's own and is easy to flirt with, if not so easy to pull off.
One thing to put upfront: Kevin O'Neil was a brilliant, one-of-a-kind creator and his work here is great, it's the one thing almost unimpeachably great about the whole thing except when he's asked to draw racist caricatures, which he does quite a bit, we'll get into those. I love the collaboration between Moore and O'Neil and I frequently enjoy the little tidbits where they show up as themselves within the supplemental material. O'Neil does a lot of heavy lifting in these even at their worst, in fact especially at their worst. This comic is a legitimately impressive achievement, and I don't regret reading it, if nothing else I think it was a hell of a wake-up call in regards to all of it's warts I may have been overlooking or replicating in my work or that of others.
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I'm gonna break it down by going through the individual installments:
Volume 1: One of the nicest things there is to League is that it only keeps getting better, in the sense that it starts off on the worst foot and it gets better by virtue of not really being able to get worse (yes, even with the Golleywog and Harry Potter sections and whatever). From the moment you open the book it takes about six pages for Mina to be assaulted by Brute Arab Rapist Hordes that Quatermain and Nemo have to gun down, and that pretty much sets the stage on what to expect. Volume 1 is where the series has yet to jump off the deep end in tackling all of fiction, being a more grounded adventure story based on it's premise of being a comic book crossover/hero team comprised of Victorian era literary characters. It's LOEG at it's shallowest and most straightforward, and also at it's least impressive. I'm not remotely charmed by much of what's done here, I've seen a million variants of these before and many of those weren't that great either, but their lows weren't as catastrophic.
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(text comes from an essay Alan Moore wrote regarding his usage of Fu Manchu in the book, which was scanned and sent to me by @mirrorfalls, thank you for that.)
The LOEG's first enemy is Fu Manchu and the book sure likes depicting leering hordes of yellow peril cartoons for our heroes, Mr Hyde in particular, to brutally mow down. Alan Moore thought the genius trick to making Fu Manchu not-racist was to make him as inscrutable and sinister as possible so as to not even appear human, which is a great understanding of how racial caricatures work guys, the "not potentially offensive" shirt has people asking a lot of questions answered by it.
I've heard a lot of claims over the years that LOEG was intended to be a parody, or satire, and that it's using Fu Manchu to make a point as a criticism of the British Empire and imperialism, and I'm gonna make this clear before we move on: LOEG is not a parody or satire, not as a whole. It parodies and satirizes a lot of things, but it is neither parody nor satire. It is very much in love with much of it's subject matter even when it wants to burn it down. LOEG is also a frankly terrible critique of imperialism, it is one of the most imperialist things I've ever read. Part of it is because you can't just recycle problematic garbage and claim it's commentary, especially when you're going out of your way to sensationalize said garbage to be provocative or in many cases add shit that wasn't even there in the first place. Moore asked if anyone else was gonna try and criticize colonialist bigotry in fiction by tripling down on reproducing it as hard as possible, and then didn't wait for an answer before doing it.
Volume 2: Objectively an improvement over the first if only because Fu Manchu isn't there. It's also where the book kinda improves in terms of making a critique. LOEG never really has much to say about it's characters, instead developing them in service of the story or social commentary, and Volume 2 is better at it than the first. Still has a lot of the same problems as 1, it's still a shallow team-up thing that wants to have it's cake and eat it too, it's still the worse version of a concept that's been done many many times before and after. Edward Hyde gets the bulk of the focus here and he was very clearly Moore and O'Neil's favorite character to work on, he gets the most memorable sequences for better or worse. I don't wanna talk about him much and I don't wanna talk about how the book wraps up the Invisible Man's subplot (and how it's not even gonna be the last time sexual violation of a villain is played for oh-so-horrific catharsis), I'd frankly like to stop thinking about it.
The Traveler's Almanac was definitely the most exhausting part to read in full and only not a total waste of time because of Jess Nevins' annotations, which turn this into fairly valuable research material. But so do Wold Newton articles and they're really not the most riveting thing to read, and at least those have a point or constrain themselves to a single topic or character, or are briefer and come with resources on hand or have a point or even can pitch some neat/cool ideas and concepts as a whole. Jess Nevins even did the better version of this in his own WNU chronologies.
Where as this is just complete ass and there's only so many times you can read a variant of "and then we went to this place with horrible cannibal savages and then we went to the other place with beautiful cannibal savages and then we found this utopia and then we found this dystopia and then we referenced this and that and this and that", and it brings me to another point I'd also seen brought up a lot in regards to LOEG: that it's too damn anglocentric to live up to it's premise, too contradictory within itself, and it was always too big of an undertaking to be done the way Moore and O'Neill did it.
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I appreciate Moore trying to make this world feel like a world, in as gigantic all-encompassing a scale as he could possibly account for, with a full world tour and internal chronology. I sure would have liked a big fiction crossover almanac with entire chapters for Africa and China and South America, but we don't get that, because EVERYTHING in them is taken from colonial texts elevated to fact. Literally, entire paragraphs taken from political and colonial texts. All the time spent dicking around with all of those Euro political texts and ancient lore that just had to be paid it's due, and then Orlando goes to China and finds Sun Wukong stuffed as a public freakshow and dismisses his mythos as a bunch of loony (but intriguing and exotic!) hogwash, and Godzilla is later brought up in one line of dialogue to mention how Hugo Hercules killed him offscreen. (I think those might be the only two texts Moore brings up that aren't from European/American sources? There might be others but good luck finding them in the annotations).
Is it unfair to expect Moore to have read all of fiction? Of course it is, but that's what he wants this to be about, he wants this to be about All of Fiction and he wants to write about Africa and China and South America with nothing but colonial texts about those places as reference. He wants to write about how the things he likes are cool and happened and are real while the things he doesn't like don't count or are garbage or didn't happen the way we were told happened. He wants to make a story criticizing racism and misogyny in fiction while writing a text far more racist and misogynistic than most of the things he's bringing up. It's irreconcilable.
Black Dossier: It's constantly jumping between different formats and having to adjust it's prose and visual style accordingly, and it does that fairly well (the beatnik section is completely fucking unreadable though, the prose sections are already a handful to get through as is but that one was too much even for me), although Tempest I think is gonna do it much better. It's got some good parts, it's also got some bad ones. Definitely more readable than the prior two + Almanac.
This is the one with the Gollywog in it and I'm not gonna talk about that thing, I think what's wrong with it is self-explanatory as is. Look, I truly love a lot of Moore's work I've read, and I think a lot of the pushback against Alan Moore painting him as just a cranky old man who hates comics is overblown and shitty and symptomatic of bigger issues with how fans discuss comics and superheroes, but his defense of the Gollywog and his response to the criticisms of LOEG was embarassing and beneath him.
Century: This is the one with Harry Potter and The Lightning Penis in it. To those of you who heard at some point that Alan Moore had done a much-maligned pisstake on Harry Potter and got curious, don't get your hopes up. It's nothing, it's not even that mean, it's just a crude crayon doodle in service of a larger and very dumb critique of modern fiction that could have been anyone. Shame that he bullseyed ahead of the schedule the cultural about-face against Harry Potter without having anything actually criticizing Harry Potter to show for it.
Century does work for me a bit better because it dispenses with the pretense of the series and has it build up to the big awful tragedy it ends on, with all of it's remaining characters miserable immortals and all the fictions having curdled up and gone sour. It works for me only because I have no love whatsoever for this world and so it destroying our characters in the service of the larger narrative about stories and fictional immortality and whatnot is a decision I agree with and I think makes it stronger, even if the social commentary / the story's criticism of modern stories compared to the old ones is frankly absurd. Century I think was perceived as Moore/O'Neill having lost the plot, but to me it feels like the plot (more importantly, the point of it) finally showing up after so much pointless dicking around.
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The Nemo trilogy: Easily the one I most enjoyed reading, the Nemo Trilogy is almost like a breather set in between books, just fairly straightforward pulp adventure stories done in far less rancid a fashion than Volume 1. It feels less like a LOEG book and more like one of those LOEG fanfics made by people who like the concept and characters but are dissappointed by the books, so they fill or add or rewrite in the blanks with their own ideas, which is basically every LOEG fanfic ever made. I quite like Janni Dakkar as a character and I'm already a huge mark for Captain Nemo, one of my favorite characters ever, and I was of course very glad to get away from the extremely tiresome Mina/Allan/Orlando trio for a change. Frankly I'd even recommend these as a standalone, they're so disconnected from everything else in LOEG.
If you guys want to read a comic take on Captain Nemo though, read Mobilis by Juni Ba. Infinitely better than anything Moore did with the concept of Nemo, takes far less pages to actually explore the character meaningfully and has far more interesting, more humane and personal things to say and do in general, one of the best things I ever read and a tremendous palette cleanser after LOEG.
Tempest: Tempest is what I'd call the best of the LOEG books, in terms of craft and in terms of achieving what it sets out to do. Namely, it's one of the most elaborate and most artistically impressive slowly unfurling middle fingers I'd ever read, Alan and Kevin in full burning down the house mode throwing everything they've got at the wall, playing around with as many different styles and gags and ideas as they can cram into the great apocalyptic ending of their collaboration. It's a very spiteful work that has a lot of joy and humor to it, fully divested from giving a shit about it's characters and instead recasting them as the bit players they always were in the grand fuckening of humanity at the hands of our fictions.
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It gets to burn down everything and also preserve everything in a big dreamy Noah's Ark forever, it plays to every strength the series had, and frankly I barely minded the detours because this thing is all detours. The superhero parody that takes up so much of it isn't really anything funny or insightful or really anything, but there's good bits in it, and I like Alan Moore talking trash about superheroes (of course, it pales in comparison to What Can We Know About Thunderman, but that one is a league of it's own). It's Alan and Kevin's farewell to comics with all the mixed feelings towards it and the industry and the subject matter they both have decades of so much experience with it. It is The End of Everything and I think it ended on the best note it could have ended with.
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In summary, I think LOEG has a lot of individually cool or neat or even great ideas that I think get lost, because there is so, so much of it, and so much of it is impressively painted sludge. Sometimes it is ingenious, sometimes it is fun, it is never not visually impressive, but it's more frequently dull and grotesquely self-indulgent and far too shallow. It suffers from an almost inescapable side effect of doing this dealing with the fiction he was dealing with without accounting for taste or bothering to reign in his worst impulses, too much to cover and not enough actually being said about it. In truth, much of it doesn't feel much different than reading the wiki summaries for it I had already read forever ago. It is a unique beast taking swings that I'd never seen before that most wouldn't, probably for very good reasons most of the time. It is also guilty of literally everything it's criticizing other works of being and doing, and sometimes it actually provides it's best commentary because of that! It's a complicated thing to tackle and wrap your head around. God knows what Jess Nevins must have gone through to make the annotations for this, as they put it on the Almanac annotations.
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I don't consider it wasted time because, I did really enjoy the final two installments, there are good bits scattered across the other books and I learned some good things from it as a whole, but would I recommend it in it's entirety? Unless you're really a huge fan or completionist for it's creators (although reading LOEG really disillusioned me on Moore in a lot of ways, not that this is a bad thing, if anything that's a necessary thing to really try and grasp a creator's body of work) or you're the kind of sicko who'd be in the tank for the whole thing, no, not really.
It is one of the most impressive and accomplished works I've ever read, I will probably come back to it for research purposes, but holy shit am I glad to put it behind me.
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91939art · 5 months
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Happy Halloween, everyone 🦇🧪✨
Henry Jekyll, you're a devil!
We're convinced that anyone who's anyone has got to have a take on Jekyll and Hyde, especially in lieu 🎃
🌟patreon | commission us🌟🌟
Our favourite portrayal would be Flemyng's, in a very corny movie That Had Potential!
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strangestcase · 8 months
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Anybody else finds it a little fucked that most of the criticisms regarding Mina's writing in the LOEG/LXG franchise are "WHERE IS HER HUSBAND????" like guys... I know you like her cringefail hubby but I promise women can be badass proactive protagonists without having their husbands glued to them 24/7
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invisible-vampire13 · 4 months
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If everyone had to pick one character from all media in order to make their own league of extraordinary gentlemen would you have?
This is who I would have for mine; Bella Swan, Tintin (and his dog Snowy), Larry Talbot, Hatsune Miku, and Howl Pendragon.
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balu8 · 5 months
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League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol.1 #2: Ghosts of Miracles
by Alan Moore; Kevin O'Neill; Benedict Dimagmaliw and Bill Oakley
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coupleofdays · 4 months
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This image of what a 1990s American version of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen would look like is awesome for many reasons, of course:
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My eyes are of course drawn to the upper left corner, where among other images of possible 80s League members, we see good old Tron. And look who he's hanging out with: None other than Max Headroom!
For those of you who don't know, Max Headroom was a 1980s TV character, who was presented as if he was CG generated, but was in reality an actor (the extraordinary Matt Frewer) in physical costume and makeup made to look as if he was CG. He was intentionally portrayed as often "malfunctioning", stuttering and repeating himself for humorous effect. Here's a collection of funny bits with him, to give an idea of what he was like:
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I've always been fascinated by this concept, of using traditional effects to pretend that something is computer generated. And that's why I think Max meeting Tron is fitting. The original Tron film is of course famous for its actual CG elements, but a lot of the film instead uses other special effects, such as matte paintings, cell animation and the lovely backlit animation, to portray the computer world. This feels to me like a variant of the "trickery" behind Max Headroom, a way of filmmaking that was probably unique to that era when CG was just starting to become the hot new thing, and was promising great leaps forward for special effects, but wasn't able to live up to those promises just yet (and some would argue that it still hasn't).
Also, I think a crossover between the characters would be really funny, with the stoic serious warrior Tron having to deal with the joking, self-absorbed jackass Max Headroom.
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thestuffedalligator · 7 months
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Every country should make their own League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Alan Moore tried to depict a world made of all fictions and he never could, because he would always rely on English literature and English perceptions of other cultures, so artists from every country should make their own League of Extraordinary Gentlemen from their culture’s literature and oral history.
China and India and Ghana and Mexico and countries across the world have such deep and beautiful literary histories and they all deserve the chance to have a silly comic where they team up and fight crime maybe
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chick-with-wifi · 2 months
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The storyline and outfits of Mina Harker (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen)
We are introduced to Mina as a proper Victorian lady, polite and well dressed, who has been widowed for many years. (Please see the image descriptions for more details about her appearance.)
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When the group meets with her former lover Dorian Gray in an attempt to recruit him, Mina learns about his immortality for the first time. This is demonstrated by her surprise when Quartermain corrects her assumption by saying, "Quite the reverse. It was Gray visiting Eton...and I was the boy."
During the fight with the Fantom's men, Mina witnesses his invulnerability when she cries out for him upon seeing him shot, but he is unharmed.
When the fight is over, a survivor threatens Mina with a knife to her neck. Revealing that she is a vampire, she brutally kills him.
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Afterwards, she holds up a compact mirror. Vampires often don't have reflections and, since she is angling the mirror away from herself and Sawyer points out that she missed some blood, it is possible that she isn't looking at herself. She's looking at the others to see how they react to something she's kept so tightly under wraps for so long.
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She puts her hair back up, wipes away the last spots of blood and politely comments, "excuse me", as if trying to return to the image of propriety, despite what they have just seen.
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Although her display shocked the team, their reactions range from impressed (Nemo) to forced nonchalance (Sawyer) and curiosity (Skinner). Dorian claims this discovery is enough to renew his interest in joining the League - or rather, he's pretending it is new information for him since, as far as Mina is aware, he didn't know.
Aboard the Nautilus, Mina's appearance is slightly more relaxed.
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When she and Dorian get some time alone, he tells her about the painting that ages instead of him and she asks when he last saw it. Having finally found someone like herself, and not just anybody but her ex she still has feelings for, she wants to know how long he's been alive.
Dorian offers her a nightcap and, when the glass breaks, she licks the blood off her fingers. For once she doesn't need to hide part of herself and this freedom adds to the eroticism of the moment for her.
When they arrive in Venice, Mina has both literally and metaphorically let her hair down, and is wearing a looser outfit.
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During the chase, she does not hesitate to use the full range of her powers in front of her teammates, including transforming into a swarm of bats and climbing up the side of a building. Also in this scene, Quartermain declares that "the vampire lady has us covered!" which indicates he has moved past both his assumption that she is nothing but a distraction and his disapproval of her unladylike conduct.
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Upon learning Dorian is the mole, Mina is furious and insists on killing him herself. ("Not Gray. He's lived long enough.") It is worth noting that the two of them were the only characters on first-name terms, but now she uses his surname.
Before the team go their separate ways for the final fight, they stack their hands on top of each other. Like Sawyer says in a deleted scene, M may have brought them together under false pretenses, but that was his mistake - bringing them together.
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Mina is pre-emptively in her full vampire form. After keeping her powers secret or only using them for self-defense in the heat of the moment, she arrives ready to use them for premeditated murder. And during this fight, she doesn't hold back. She gives in completely to the vampiric nature she spent so long hiding. She uses all of her speed and agility, aiming for fatal strikes, and even tells Dorian, "Do you realize what you've done? What you've let out of me?"
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Mina kills the one person who understood her experiences, who she wouldn't have outlived. And as he crumbles, she sees a reflection of what might one day happen to her if all the years she's lived, everything she's done, catches up with her.
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At Quartermain's funeral, Mina is once again wearing her hat and veil. But this time, she is surrounded by people who know and accept her true self, even if they can't understand what it's like to be immortal. In response to Nemo saying he's done hiding and they are welcome to see the new century with him, she comments, "We've all been hiding in one form or another," using past tense, and follows him to the Nautilus.
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chernobog13 · 9 months
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Alex Ross having fun with likenesses for his version of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
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bindi-the-skunk · 15 days
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