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A review by mschlat
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier by Alan Moore
2.0
I had forgotten how vigorously and frustratingly bad portions of this were....
Unlike the first two volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (which were relatively restrained in terms of character introduction and world building), The Black Dossier is a gushing thrashing fire hose of exposition. We follow Mina Harker and Allan Quartermain as they retrieve the Black Dossier in question (a history of the League throughout several centuries) from a particularly nasty incarnation of British intelligence spearheaded by an even nastier version of James Bond. Harker and Quartermain's goal is to bring the dossier to the Blazing World, Moore's utopia of fictional characters. The story details the trip with interludes (primarily text pages) from the dossier. The result is a choppy story that mixes a mass of fictional figures from the 1950's with highly dense exposition.
Some of the dossier pieces are a treat. I rather enjoyed the Jeeves & Wooster mashup with Cthulhu, the sequel to Fanny Hill, and the Tijuana bible set in Orwell's 1984. But much of the rest is a chore to read, not helped in the slightest by the questionable design choice of using very small fonts and very small margins. There's an excerpt from a stream of consciousness "beatnik novel" that I'm pretty sure I have never read through once in my three reads. And the comic book that introduces Orlando to League mythology has the double sin of introducing an uninteresting character in an uninteresting fashion.
The end of the book suffers from quite a bit of opaqueness, from the 3D pages to the introduction of the Galley-Wag (a character who not only speaks in part gibberish, but who appears to be a racial caricature unless you research his fictional history and how Moore has changed him). I also tired of the spate of expositional dialogue from Harker and her compatriots (including a long soliloquy from Prospero).
In short, not my favorite Moore read. It's clear that this volume is where he decided to embrace wholeheartedly what the series could be in a much more expansive fashion, and parts of this book are crucial to future volumes in setting up important characters and environs. But, you could stop with the first two volumes (or even add in the three subsequent Nemo books) and be happy not knowing everything Moore wants you to know (in painstaking detail) about this world.
Unlike the first two volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (which were relatively restrained in terms of character introduction and world building), The Black Dossier is a gushing thrashing fire hose of exposition. We follow Mina Harker and Allan Quartermain as they retrieve the Black Dossier in question (a history of the League throughout several centuries) from a particularly nasty incarnation of British intelligence spearheaded by an even nastier version of James Bond. Harker and Quartermain's goal is to bring the dossier to the Blazing World, Moore's utopia of fictional characters. The story details the trip with interludes (primarily text pages) from the dossier. The result is a choppy story that mixes a mass of fictional figures from the 1950's with highly dense exposition.
Some of the dossier pieces are a treat. I rather enjoyed the Jeeves & Wooster mashup with Cthulhu, the sequel to Fanny Hill, and the Tijuana bible set in Orwell's 1984. But much of the rest is a chore to read, not helped in the slightest by the questionable design choice of using very small fonts and very small margins. There's an excerpt from a stream of consciousness "beatnik novel" that I'm pretty sure I have never read through once in my three reads. And the comic book that introduces Orlando to League mythology has the double sin of introducing an uninteresting character in an uninteresting fashion.
The end of the book suffers from quite a bit of opaqueness, from the 3D pages to the introduction of the Galley-Wag (a character who not only speaks in part gibberish, but who appears to be a racial caricature unless you research his fictional history and how Moore has changed him). I also tired of the spate of expositional dialogue from Harker and her compatriots (including a long soliloquy from Prospero).
In short, not my favorite Moore read. It's clear that this volume is where he decided to embrace wholeheartedly what the series could be in a much more expansive fashion, and parts of this book are crucial to future volumes in setting up important characters and environs. But, you could stop with the first two volumes (or even add in the three subsequent Nemo books) and be happy not knowing everything Moore wants you to know (in painstaking detail) about this world.