Scan barcode
jtbookman's review
adventurous
slow-paced
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
michaelsellars's review against another edition
4.0
As intriguing and erudite as the previous League stories but lacking the energy and forward momentum of those earlier issues, so not quite as entertaining and thrilling. Still pretty wonderful, though.
otterno11's review
adventurous
dark
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
This thick volume compiles the three follow-up volumes to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century, taking Mina Murray and Alan Quartermain into the tumultuous twentieth and twenty-first centuries and expanding Alan Moore’s cultural critique of escapist literature to contemporary times. Of course, it’s also when the issues present throughout the early entries of the series began to really take over, I feel.
The LoEG series built a fascinating and thought-provoking world in its first volumes (collected in the Jubilee Edition), so the thought of the series building into all of the myriad fictional characters and events of the last century was pretty exciting. Most of the thoughts and criticism I had for the Jubilee collection still apply here. However, the issues I noted in that review seem to have kind of taken over and makes up the majority of the content, particularly by the 1969 and 2009 entries.
The series follows the newly immortal Murray and Quartermain from the Edwardian world of 1910, to the swinging sixties of 1969, to the banal modernity of 2009. With the help of gender-shifting fellow immortal Orlando, a veteran of various League incarnations over the centuries, they attempt to thwart to century-long plot of body-hopping occultist Oliver Haddow to create an antichrist and thereby bring about the end of the world. Unfortunately, the unremittingly dour quality throughout makes for some joylessly recursive reading, mirroring Moore’s evident distaste for contemporary popular fiction.
It is obvious that, while Moore knows a lot about and holds much affection for the popular literature of the 1880s or 1950s even as he aims to critique them, the same can not be said of later works, and particularly by 2009, the references feel lacking. The ultimate reveal of the antichrist being none other than a (thinly veiled) Harry Potter only serves to show Moore’s lack of engagement with the current zeitgeist. Of course, Harry Potter is certainly ripe for criticism or deconstruction of its themes, but it is pretty obvious that Moore is only vaguely familiar with the general motifs of the series. All in all, he chooses among the blandest takes for the character, one that I’m sure has seen multiple interpretations among fan writers already. Moore just uses Potter as a convenient stand-in for everything wrong with kids today, you know?
As always, it’s a bit amusing to see some minor character pop up here and there during the proceedings with some minor role to play, but the interesting references to search through, become, in the Century stories, self-indulgent and crowded. It seems like there is barely a panel that is not stuffed to the brim with crowded city streets filled with characters who seem to be a reference to something but serve no other purpose. Even the faithful and exhaustive LoEG annotators don’t always know what any given thing is referencing, exactly. O’Neill does his best to bring this cacophony of characters and locations to life, but it’s all a little much.
The general feeling of doom and gloom that pervades the Century series creates a sense of Moore’s feelings of the superiority of vintage storytelling, despite Moore having ostensibly been taking it to task for its rank imperialism and sexism in the previous volumes. Not to say that contemporary culture is not immune to criticism or that it should not be subverted, of course, the current consensus around the Potterverse illustrates that, just that Moore seems to regard it as inferior on the face of it. And that is not a good place to base a convoluted subversion story around.
Speaking of doom and gloom, we’ll see what Moore has in store in the concluding volume of the LoEG series, The Tempest.
I discuss my feelings on Moore's other works in LoEG and his genre deconstruction in general at https://spoonbridge.medium.com/deconstructing-alan-moores-deconstructions-600c73ffe750, Harris Tome Corner, here.
caleb9cccf's review
3.0
A clever and intriguing mish-mash of cultural references, but also bitter and meandering, leaving me overall disappointed and with a bad taste in my mouth.