"The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier" by Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill - Running Commentary, Part 2

The Dossier proper begins with an account of our world's encounter with other planes, drawing heavily on the Lovecraft Mythos. Like The New Traveller's Almanac, it's a rather dry scholarly exercise in combining mythologies and providing a fictional history of the world, which I'm sure is of interest to some but just seems to provide near-irrelevant background to the series proper.

More interesting is the next item, the life of Orlando told in the style of '50s children's comics -- albeit with more graphic imagery! It's like a more entertaining version of events hinted at in The New Traveller's Almanac, telling the life of Orlando (obviously) chronologically and with pretty pictures. The brevity of the text makes it less verbose than the preceding document, which is a welcome change -- especially with some faux Shakespeare to come.

This Shakespeare 'play' (just the first two scenes from Act One) is convincingly written, though clearer to a modern reader than genuine untranslated Shakespeare is. It retains a sense of wit and mystery, however, and with references to events already covered or hinted at in the first two artefacts, the beginnings of a linking thread -- perhaps what one might even call a plot -- for this graphic novel are emerging. Individually, it shows the genesis of the first iteration of the League (commonly referred to as Prospero's Men in the series).

It may seem obvious to say this, but Black Dossier initially seems to be no more than a collection of roughly chronological artefacts, which together build up the world and history of the League. If it were just this then it would be an interesting experiment, of interest to diehard fans, but not convincing as anything more. However, in these first three documents there are some themes and ideas overlapping that, perhaps, will come together to create some sort of plot for this volume, beyond just the history of the League. Obviously it's impossible to say for certain until the end, but there is hope that there's more to the book!

Either way, what is here cleverly mashes various ideas and fictions together, and while each artefact follows the story of one character or group there are always crossover points that help you tie the sequence together. The advantage of having both things like the Almanac and this is that they are different ways of presenting similar information -- the Almanac being geographical, for example, whereas this is chronological-by-character. Put them all together and it becomes easier to follow the story. It's also worth nothing that, by the end of the book, there'll have been 108 pages of new story (as in, 'proper' comics pages) for the League itself -- equivalent to four or five issues of a normal comic, which makes it almost as long as the previous series.