It's almost impossible to describe Black Dossier. It's a one-off volume situated in the middle of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen run, the last book published by DC for the League. About one hundred pages or so are wonderful comic story by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, set in 1958 and featuring the further adventures of Mina Murray and Alan Quartermain. Both have achieved some level of immortality thanks to the well of Ayesha (though they've managed to keep that secret by pretending to be their own children). Of special note is that this issue is dedicated to Bill Oakley, the letterer who handled the previous LoEG books and the first fifteen pages of this project before his death. The project was finished by Ted Klein.
The two broke from the British government after WWII when they saw the "Big Brother" government which was coming. That government has just begun to break down as this story begins and lots of its elements are still evident. The two sneaked into a secret facility to steal the"Black Dossier" which is in fact a file on their own activities among other things over the last many decades.
We also learn a good deal in the dossier about Orlando, a nigh immortal being who is mutable when it comes to gender and who was a partner to the couple in later incarnations of the League as well as otherwise. We learn about the earliest days of the League when it was formed under Queen Gloriana and later again under King George III. We get this information through a barrage of different documents, a tour de force by Moore and O'Neill imitating such things as Shakespearean plays, official governmental reports, beatnik novels, comic books, Tijuana bibles, the further adventures of the libertine Fanny Hill, and much, much more. The detail is staggering and requires diligence and excellent vision to unlock.
In the main story the pair are chased by "Jimmy" (James) Bond and Ms. Knight (Emma Peel) and Bulldog Drummond. Their clashes are brutal and bloody, and the chase sends them across all kinds of weirdly familiar landscapes, especially a rocket base bristling with echoes of Gerry Anderson puppet projects. The tiny thrills of recognition are what keep this one buzzing along as the going gets stranger and stranger.
This is a doozy of an adventure which will fill you up with League trivia, and will inform what is to come. To get a hint of the massive amounts of detail Moore and O'Neill have slathered on this yarn check out this link to Jess Nevin's Annotations to the Black Dossier.
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I think somewhere in here Moore began to get high on his own supply, escalating from merging literary and pulp characters in a way that felt wonderfully logical to seeing connections that were nearly irrational. Involving Shakespeare with the Man from UNCLE is just silly.
ReplyDeleteIt is silly, but that silliness seems intentional. There is a delight in seeing the various Supermarionation characters pop up throughout the book as well.
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