In the first two volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, writer Alan Moore and artist Kevin O’Neill have chronicled a world in which all of the characters of 19th century fiction are real. Moore and O’Neill turn to the 20th century in Volume 3, titled Century, which itself consists of three books. Top Shelf in America and Knockabout in the United Kingdom have just published the first installment, Century: 1910.
Kevin O’Neill explains, “The first one is 1910; I’m working on the second one which is set in 1969; the third one will be in the 2008-2009 period. We trace the characters of Allan Quatermain and Mina Murray and Orlando”—the three immortals in League—“through the course of a century.”
Top Shelf publisher Chris Staros says that Top Shelf intends to release “1969” in the spring of 2010, and then the last installment of “Century” in the spring of 2011.
Staros points out that League has its own very large audience,” but that “the buzz for the Watchmen movie accelerated interest across the board. The pre-orders were very high on this one,” with a first printing of 100,000 copies. Previously, the League books were published through DC Comics’ Wildstorm imprint, but that ended with the Black Dossier, which came out in 2007. “Alan decided to part ways with Wildstorm and offered the series to me and Knockabout,” says Staros.
“We had a huge amount of problems on the Black Dossier with DC,” O’Neill explains. For example, the book was supposed to include a special CD with music. “It was produced. It was terrific. At the very, very last moment they pulled it.” There was a problem over the “Dossier’s” combination H. P. Lovecraft/P. G. Wodehouse parody, O’Neill observes, “even though there are hundreds and hundreds of pastiches of Jeeves and Wooster dating back to when P. G. Wodehouse was a relatively young man, without any problem.” But, O’Neill says, “one of the joys of changing publishers, being with Top Shelf is they’re perhaps less prissy, less gun-shy.”
Staros notes that with Moore’s controversial Lost Girls, Top Shelf had “the chutzpah to put it out and support it.” With Century at Top Shelf and Knockabout, Staros observes, “I think Alan was able to be a little freer. He could stretch a little farther.” Certainly Staros is pleased to be publishing the latest of the League. “One day Alan and I were walking around Northampton [England], and he was narrating what his idea was, the big arc for Century. I just got this big grin on my face. It is really clever, really smart.”
Returning in the 1910 incarnation of the League are Mina Murray, the heroine of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and her adventurer lover Allan Quatermain. “She’s quite tiny, a very slender woman, and she is surrounded by these incredibly formidable men, and she can bark them down, which is interesting. I’ve always enjoyed drawing her. For the 1969 installment, “I’m drawing her with a ‘60s hairstyle, which is great, and a miniskirt, and she’s still formidable.” O’Neill says that “Quatermain’s often in the shadow of Mina. He’s got a degree of puppy love around her.”
As for the gender-switching Orlando, from Virginia Woolf’s novel, “Alan has a particular affection for the character.” O’Neill says. “He/she has a relationship with Mina and Quatermain and we explore that across the three books, and it’s quite combustible.”
However, it is another character, Pirate Jenny, whom O’Neill describes as “pretty much the prime focus for much of the book,” and who is the daughter of Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo. Following his death, Jenny goes to London where she becomes “kind of a dogsbody in a hotel in the London docks.” There she also becomes Jenny Diver, a character from playwright Bertold Brecht and composer Kurt Weill’s classic 1928 musical “The Threepenny Opera.” She likewise becomes the title character of its song, “Pirate Jenny”, in which she fantasizes being rescued from her mundane job when a black freighter attacks the town. The song also inspired the “Tales of the Black Freighter” segment in Moore’s superhero epic Watchmen.
“From a style point of view we incorporate song into the narrative,” states O’Neill. Moore has written his own version of the lyrics for several songs from Threepenny that are used in 1910. “I’m old enough to remember my parents’ generation singing a lot,” O’Neill recalls. “There was a sort of joy in singing and dancing. Britain had this whole music hall heritage, much like you [Americans] had the vaudeville background, which really fed into radio and television.”
“We have a short dance routine at the end,” O’Neill says, “which was very much fun to draw. Hopefully in some future book we’ll have room to do even bigger musical numbers.” Indeed, as Century continues, “moving into the 60s we have rock music, and ultimately we play into punk and the post-punk period.” The subplot about the creation of a “moonchild” will also continue through all three Century books.
O’Neill cautions that the London he is drawing in the 1969 story is “not Austin Powers’ London, not the kind of hippie trippy, groovy London, which is a bit too easy. And frankly, London wasn’t like that back then as much as snippets of Carnaby Street might suggest it was. People were dressing more stylishly, but if you look at the clothes regular people could afford, they were very cheaply made.” Instead, part of the 1969 book will be set in London’s Soho: “Soho in the ‘60s and ‘70s was a real dodgy, dicey rubbish-in-the street area,” which O’Neill compares to the pre-Disney Times Square.
Alan Moore famously writes voluminously detailed scripts. O’Neill says that he stacked the script pages for Black Dossier atop each other, and they were as tall as “two telephone directories.” But although Moore allows him leeway to make changes, O’Neill prefers not to. “His scripts are like perfect blueprints. It’s like building a house: if you went too far in an odd direction, you could have the roof in the garden.”
So Moore and O’Neill pack the panels of League with visual detail. O’Neill likens this to the backgrounds of great artwork in the early MAD magazine. “I have a huge amount of admiration for just how much they put in.” He reminisces “MAD has this huge effect on our generation, almost greater than anything else in comics. People like [Mad’s founding editors and creators] Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder, Wally Wood, all those guys are huge heroes of mine.”
O’Neill claims, “There’s not many good-looking characters, frankly in League,” though he acknowledges that some of the women are exceptions. He says he is reacting against “TV movies where everybody’s good-looking and there’s not many regular people you’d see in the natural order of a day.” He points to another influence on himself and Moore. “Back in the early ‘70s when we began to see American underground comix. Certainly the shock of seeing Robert Crumb’s work or Greg Irons or Gilbert Shelton, another generation that was very much influenced by MAD Magazine.” O’Neill concludes, laughing, “Harvey Kurtzman has a lot to answer for!”
