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From glancing over the other reviews for this book, I'm sure that someone is going to say that I am dense and dull for not enjoying it. That's okay, I suspect that it's true. I adored the first two volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. They were my first introduction to Alan Moore during the very early days of my comic fandom, and I was delighted with how they were darkly funny and smart and full of literary references.The Black Dossier, however, tries too hard too be all of those th...
There's two major strikes against The Black Dossier, and neither of them has anything to do with the contents of the book. The first, of course, is that we've been waiting years for this - five years, for many, just to see any new LoEG work; two years since the Dossier itself was announced. Expectations therefore peaked at a high, and that never bodes well for something as unusual and experimental as this.The second is that this really should have been the final volume of LoEG. But more on that
"The Black Dossier" is not nearly as fun as the earlier editions of "The League." As it begins to dawn on you that a considerable stretch of the book is dominated by text-only pages, you may begin to worry that Moore has become yet another Dave Sim - who, as the years passed on his 6000 page "Cerebus" saga, began to sprinkle in ever-more turgid parodies of great authors, longwinded self-serving rants against feminism and Marxism, and over a hundred pages of theory on the Torah, written in small
Mina and Quartermain turn up in the 20th century, in the 1950s to retrieve the Black Dossier… more thought provoking cyberpunk-ish stuff from the comics guru Alan Moore. 7 out of 12
3.5 grudgingly rounded up. The Alan Moore team at its best can produce complex visuals and challenging text. When they are stoned the results can be psychedelic, meandering, crowded graphic novels. With the LOEG Black Dossier they appear to have attempted a pastiche of ancient and modern story telling printed in a wildly experimental package. Recommendation one, do not wait for this to come out as an e book. For example, a part of the book is published in the old 3 D style which is barely readab...
What the hell did I just read?
Well. Alan Moore's a very clever fellow, you certainly can't deny that. Not that this book will let you. Virtually every page can be pored over for references to some literary or pseudo-literary or pulp work: newspaper headlines, street names, background details, nameless characters--they all (presumably, since I can't figure out all of them) reference or come from somewhere. It is of course a massive and complex task to weave every fiction and fictional world you can think of into a single narr...
This is not a review. I cannot review this thing anymore than i could review the Sun, which is what this is to me. The object around which my entire literary life has revolved for many years. This is the reason i've read over 400 novels.It is not a comic or a novel, it is an annual, a scrapbook, an appendix, a sourcebook, a Bible. The other League comics are mere stories. This is the world those stories exist in.Prolix and profound, vulgar and erudite, filthy and funny, pretentious and dazzling,...
Way too dense for a "fun" read but still great. And the 3-D pages are really well done. Go through those again and close one eye and then the other -- there are hidden images you can only see with one eye open. Best use of 3-D comics EVER.
I'd read this before, and now have read it again, and liked it better. Someone said the League series is like a superheroes tale for English majors ( or fantastical tale or comics/myth Super Group yarn), and that seems right, it's all inter-textual and in order to fully appreciate it, you have to have read quite a bit, of both comics and thrillers and mysteries and Shakespeare and this is especially true for The Black Dossier, which brings Mina and Alan Quartermain up to the eighties and Thatche...
See Brooke's review, which pretty much says what I have to say about this book.I thought that integrating all these disparate threads of English fiction was a good - if overly ambitious - idea, but leave it to Alan Moore to attempt just that. Some of it works. The prose sections were tedious and self-indulgent, and they totally killed any momentum the book was trying to build up to that point. I eventually skipped those; I feared that I wouldn't be able to finish the book otherwise! The last 17
I really wanted to like this book. After reading Vols. 1 and 2, I was eager to pick this up. However, I was dismayed after reading it. There's a few good parts - I especially liked the narrative of Orlando and his long life, but so much of this book was useless and oversexed. There has always been a bit of sex in LXG, but this book was just over the top, and actually made me less interested. Most of the things in here are just told, and some of the events don't really make sense, especially sinc...
I loved the first two volumes of League, but this is pretty crappy. I have a theory that Moore wrote this just to mess with overeager fanboys who insist on pretending they love everything he does; it honestly feels like he's putting a lot of effort into making it totally unreadable. In which case, consider it a smashing success.
If you skipped or skimmed the appendices of the first two League volumes, you can probably skim or skip this volume. If, however, you enjoyed all the world-building, prose pastiche and obscure jokes and references in those appendices, this volume will be right up your alley. There's a thin framing story in which Mina Murray and Quartermain escape from "Jimmy" Bond (Moore's unbridled contempt for the character of Bond and everything he represents is maybe the best thing about this volume) and oth...
I have never been made to feel stupid by a book, except maybe a few math textbooks, but this book came very, very close. I got the very real impression that I should read it again in a few years when I've accrued more knowledge and experience, and maybe even read more books. It's still a spectacular book, but it can get a little self-indulgent at times (you can tell Moore wasn't writing this for anyone but himself) but it almost always errs on the side of entertainment. From a "lost" Shakespeare...
By now, I've come to realize I'll never be able to read as much as Alan Moore has read in his life... though I dare to say that he is a massive inspiration to anyone who loves the worlds of imagination that literature has created throughout the ages. This thirds installment in the world of the League (which the dreadful movie got all wrong and didn't get any close to matching) is both a summary of the heroes' past adventures, and a very well researched and thoughtful "what if all those character...
Less cohesive and enthralling than the first two volumes but still super fun.
After all the hate this book has received over the years, I was fully prepared to be angry and bored out of mind. Fortunately, this wasn't the case. What Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill have crafted here is, in a lot of ways, incredible. Rather than write a simple, bland encyclopedia (like he did in volume two of the original League series), Moore has chosen to use a myriad of storytelling pastiches to lay out the entire history of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, from its inception in the da...
There is quite a bit to write of here, so bear with me. First and foremost, let me tell you that the... assembled documents (so to speak) of the Black Dossier hold very little interest for anyone not exposed to at least the first two installments of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, also known as the Murray Group, after Mina Murray.What Alan Moore has done here, is use a number of different printed visual mediums, to outline the history of secretive extraordinary groups in Britain (and elsewher...