Headscratchers / The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

The Comics

"New fiction is evil?"

• I'm not entirely sure this belongs here but I have seen similar headscratchers on Watchmen for instance, so I suppose this counts: Is it just me, or is Alan Moore's choice of works in his argument about the decline of fiction (a link can be found on the main page) bizarre and not making a lot sense? Outside of to what extent Moore likes them, what do those works have in common in terms of their target audience, genre, goals, influence, popularity or cultural relevance? It's like saying “We went from from Božena Němcová’s Grandma, to Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, to My Little Pony!”
  • It might help for you to provide the link, or at least a specific quote, in order to more clearly identify exactly what about Moore's claim and views is providing the trouble. There are, after all, lots of links on the main page, and it's not particularly efficient to have to search through all of them in order to be able to understand and discuss the point you want to discuss.
    • Sure thing, but what other links do you mean, I haven't seen any. Under Clueless Aesop (interview here):
  Alan Moore: I would say, that if you’re talking about a line of progress, if it can be called progress, that runs from Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, to Donald Cammell’s Performance, to Harry Potter, I don’t think you can really see that as anything but a decline.
  • To address the earlier request for clarification: in the first place, saying "a link can be found on the main page" isn't particularly clear to begin with, since it's a page on website — by nature it's full of links. Mainly links to other pages on the wiki, true, but you didn't specify that it was a link to an external page, or give any indication where the specific link you were referring to could be found, so it's not immediately clear what you're talking about. And even if you're talking about an external link, it's still a fairly long page, split into folders, meaning that someone who wants to address your question and point is forced to scroll up and down opening folders and reading every bullet point until they find a link to something that could possibly be related to what you're referring to, which isn't incredibly efficient for them. Clarity and specificity are your friends; if you're expecting and asking people to respond to a question you have about a specific quote, you could at least make things a bit easier for us and provide/link to the original quote yourself so that we don't have to go looking for it.
    • I apologize, English is my second language and I don't recall hearing the term "links" in any context but for external links prior to my entry here. I do not think you needed to write down such a hand-holding explanation though. I provided the quote and the link when asked without objection. It simply didn't occur to me people would need it and was confused about what the troper above was saying, I wasn't defending my right not to spend ten seconds on making it easier for people understand what the hell am I talking about.
    • I apologize if my response came across as condescending; I assure you, that wasn't my intention. I was just trying to clearly explain what was meant, since your response suggested (to me, at least) you were confused about what was being asked for and why.
  • To address your original question: To be honest at first glance I agree that those examples probably are definitely at least a bit skewed in terms of the art work that Alan Moore would personally enjoy (Moore would prefer Marxist Brechtian drama and surrealist 1960s cinema over 21st century children's literature? Colour me surprised) and aren't exactly entirely fair, equal or flattering comparisons. However, if you go to the link and read the full quote in context in the interview response he's giving (wherein he also criticises adults going to see The Avengers movie as them basically going to see characters originally intended for eleven-year-olds), he appears to be making the point that adults basically aren't letting their tastes develop beyond the kinds of stories and characters that were intended for children. His 'then' examples of works for adults include overt political themes and awareness, experimentation with form and medium, depiction of sexuality and other 'adult' themes, and so on, whereas his 'now' works are basically children's stories. Good children's stories, perhaps (although probably not from Moore's perspective), but stories intended primarily for children rather than adults. It's a 'decline' from Moore's perspective in that rather than seeking out works which will in some way challenge or provoke them on an adult level regarding themes and ideas that are adult in nature, adults in the 21st century are basically not moving beyond children's literature, and the culture is increasingly (in his view) pandering towards this rather than prompting adults to challenge themselves with more complex literature and stories. Now, obviously you can disagree with this (although TBH I kind of think Moore has a bit of a point on this one, and I'm a grown man who still watches Doctor Who), but the issue in this case seems to be partly that the quote isn't being provided in its full context.
    • I had read the interview and I got this (I think, I can't really remember). My issue is that the examples he provides don't make sense to me as fair comparison points. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's not as if Performance was a pop-cultural phenomenon on the level of either Avengers or Harry Potter. Challenging and experimental fiction is still being made and crowd-pleasing, simplistic works were made even back then. The big diffrence seems to be that instead of making stories with merit and simplicity of fairy tales for adults, we market (more so than before) actual fairy tales for adults, which seems like hair-splitting to me.
    • In the past I too was rather critical of Moore on this, but I have spent time trying to understand Moore's ideas as best as he lets us see them. In that, I think the main root of this disagreement is that Moore has a rather different concept on time and life goals. From his internal logic, I think his theory makes sense. As you grow older you creatively and discovering your tastes should expand from the simplistic to the complex. Here at a website like TV Tropes, it is pretty open that a lot of us don't entirely share Moore's philosophy and theory but I don't think some places are going to be as open to admit it holds up from his viewpoint.
  • I can't pretend to know what goes on in Moore's head, but I chose to read it not as "Harry Potter and Thomas the Tank Engine are inherently bad works", so much as "fiction is treated in a very different way in modern culture". Note Norton's derisive sniping of "the franchise express" and Harry's fall from grace paralleling the sanity backslides of certain Former Child Stars, or Tempest's treatment of superheroes as a tiresome fad kept on life support for profit. Nowadays (at least, one could argue), fiction is often subject to a lot of tepid, shallow and consumer-driven cashgrab adaptations that sink gradually into obscurity because the adaptors haven't managed to capture what was originally meaningful about them.
  • This troper is willing to grant Alan Moore the agreement that in creation The Threepenny Opera and Performance had higher aims than Harry Potter did. I don't see that as a problem but I think we can agree this is probably the case. However I also feel this narrative is aimed at Moore's anti-capitalism stance and lets other forms of authority off the hook for their own damage. A lot of fiction today may be overlooked because it can't make a corporation big stacks of cash. But how much fiction has also been overlooked because academics found it beneath their standard and kept it out of the discussion? I'd love to read more of the obscure works Moore peppered the New Traveler's Almanac with, too bad some of them are rather hard to come by these days. Maybe some of us would like this to be an area more of that "as above so below" could be applied, and capitalism and academia could help with that. If they cared.
  • I think Moore attracts this kind of criticism due to him often being close but with contradictions to where a lot of other people think. Moore himself has spoken up about his dislike of school especially when it comes to class prejudices and League clearly depicts schools as indoctrination centers, which is pretty common among anti-academics. But while a lot of Anti-academics are also Anti-Intellectualism people, Moore doesn't entirely agree with that. So it appears odd someone who rips on the system likes certain parts of the system. Likewise League attracted people who read a lot. These people are also likely to be literary equality people. Moore clearly wishes there to be an objective division on how challenging a work is to its audience. He defended his writing of Century with this very idea. But to the literary equality people who probably cheered Moore for the use of all those Victorian era references, they found themselves let down by Moore's seeming putdown of more modern fiction and his seemingly lack of knowledge of references. While this isn't to let Moore off the hook for some of his own claims of order that are heavy on hypocrisy. I think this is the root of why people genuinely find themselves attracted to his work yet so often let down by how he goes about it.
  • If we can also be slightly less charitable to Moore for a minute, I think there's more than a simple Nostalgia Filter at play here. It's also easy to see how he, or anyone really, could come to the conclusion that all new media is crowd-pleasing and simplistic and all old media was masterful; better works tend to have more staying power throughout history, and the only older works a person will generally see are those they deliberately seek out online or in libraries because they heard they were good or to their liking, whereas you have no choice but to hear about current popular media due to advertising and word-of-mouth, so it's easy to start thinking that the 1600s was all Shakespeare, the 1940s all Citizen Kane, and present day is only Harry Potter. Its the same form of Survivorship bias that makes some Americans think all British comedy is Blackadder and Monty Python; all the crap stuff never made it across the ocean.

Where's Carthoris?

• Though John Carter of Mars appears prominently in the first issue of the second volume, his love interest Dejah Thoris apparently dies before the story starts (it's implied that she was killed by the Molluscs). But then John Carter's children, Prince Carthoris and Princess Tara, are also never seen or mentioned. So then...were they never born in this universe?
  • This might be referring to the end of The Gods of Mars in which Dejah Thoris is imprisoned in a room that can only be opened once a year.
    • That doesn't help — Carthoris was born before that, and is a major character in The Gods of Mars.
  • Or maybe they aren't seen or mentioned...and thats it? Hardly means they don't exist.

Nemo underplayed

• Does it bother anyone else that Nemo does basically nothing for the entire series, yet is still considered a full-fledged member of the team. He goes out to help once, gets mistaken for a servant, and then spends the rest of the mission adamantly refusing to carry his own weight. The only help he brings to the table are all his cool toys, and if the League had enough clout to not only identify Nemo AND goad him into working for them (a pretty damn impressive task, if 20,000 Leagues is to be believed) you'd think they'd be able to reverse engineer most of it, or find someone else with similar tech who was more of a team player.
  • I was kind of bothered by that too, and it seemed to me that Moore maybe didn't know whether he wanted to deconstruct Nemo or present him in basically the same way as the source material, and so the end result is that Nemo doesn't really mesh with other characters. It's kind of odd too since Ozymandius of course of Watchmen is a great deconstruction of your "Ra's al Ghul" type of Affably Evil Well-Intentioned Extremist / Omnicidal Maniac of which Nemo is kind of the original.
    • Okay let me think
    • 1- Nemo saves Mina and Quatermain from being lynched by the locals in Cairo
    • 2- Nemo provides the League both with transport and a HQ (the Nautilus)
    • 3- Nemo recovers the other League members from the Thames following their escape from Fu Manchu's lair
    • 4- Nemo figures out that something is wrong with M and dispatches Griffin to investigate, thus revealing Moriarty's involvement.
    • 5- Based on Griffin's intel, Nemo deduces Moriarty's plan (note that Mina, the team leader, and the one who usually figures this sort of thing out stares dumbfounded during this)
    • 6- Nemo provides the balloon, harpoon-machine guns and general battle-plan for the league's assault on Moriarty's airship.
    • 7- Said harpoon-machine gun, combined with Nemo's hatred of all things English makes him even more effective in slaughtering Mooks during the climactic battle of volume 1 than the superstrong, Nigh Invulnerable Edward Hyde (an awed Quatermain notes that "Nemo's worse than Hyde.")
    • 8- Throughout most of volume 2, Nemo's Nautilus is the only thing Britain has that fights the Martian tripods on an even field, and probably would have been successful in holding them off, had Griffin not explained the concept of a submarine to the Martians, leading to them deploying the red-weed to cripple it.
    • So yeah, Nemo pretty much did nothing...
  • Nemo's stereotypical Indian appearance, and he works for the BRITISH EMPIRE generally voluntarily. I just can't get over with this massive contradiction with 20,000 Leagues.
    • I'm not sure what you mean by that. MILLIONS of Indians worked for the British Empire. The only contradiction is between Nemo's stated goals (i.e. the destruction of the British Empire) and what he actually does (i.e. he ends up working for the country he has vowed to destroy).
    • Except he spends much of the time complaining about it, uses the opportunity in the first volume to destroy as many Englishmen as possible, and notes several times that he is in it purely for his own survival. The fact that he quits without wanting to hear any explanations or excuses at the end of Volume 2 also hints that he had been wanting to quite for some time - Hyde's brutality and the Empire use of disease weaponry were the final straws.
    • Confirmed in the most recent series as we learn he's been raising his daughter to carry on where he left off. In the end it turns out she's WORSE, though with what she's been through you could argue the people she went after had it coming.
    • Nemo explains in Volume 1 and in the Black Dossier, Mina's own journal notes reveals that he joined the League because he was getting old, he disliked domestic life and resented the fact that his wife gave him a daughter instead of a son and that he was longing for a great adventure. He explains himself that he no longer feels connected to any nation, India included.

Smoke if you've got 'em

• What's the deal with that scene in volume one, where the League is sitting around a table in the Nautilus and everybody but Jekyll is smoking? Why are they all smoking there, when there is no indication that any of them smoke anywhere else in the entire series?
  • Deliberate Values Dissonance. When a Victorian character sits and thinks, he or she lights up. Sherlock Holmes' pipe is simply the most notable example — and as far as Watson was concerned, it was notable only because of his foul-smelling Turkish tobacco. Remember, this was the era when smoking was compulsory for students at some schools.
  • Griffin, and Quartermain are seen smoking in several other scenes. Nemo is smoking a cigar and its likely that like many other cigar smokers he only smokes occasionally. Murray is shown smoking during the Black Dossier.

Is the Invisible Man really that crazy?

• Griffin. Crazy yes. But he never struck me as suicidally crazy. Yet he willingly sides with a species seeking to wipe out mankind, assuming that they'll let him live when they no longer need him? If he was playing both sides against the other it would make sense but he ONLY helps the Martians. And makes his treachery very obvious when he attacks Mina but lets her live. You'd really think he'd have been a bit smarter about the way he went about things.
  • Thinking really isn't his strong point. Remember how Nemo sends him on a fact finding mission to learn who M is? And he instantly forgets everything he heard? Or the time he kills a policeman solely for his outfit, wafting along dressed like that where anyone can see him? Don't forget he views himself as an entirely different life form; it might not have occurred to him that the Martians would put him in the same camp.
  • Griffin switching to what he thought was the stronger side makes sense, but what really bugged me was how he thought was ever get his point across to the aliens, let alone before they just simply killed him before he could. I mean, they obviously don't speak our language, and he attempted to illustrate a complex double cross in exchange for his life through pictures in the sand that would only really make sense to us.
    • His sketches presumably wouldn't really be that difficult to pick up on, not least for a species that had developed interplanetary travel, since he's pretty much just drawing the solar system; big round thing is the sun, smaller round things are planets, they're currently on the third smaller round thing from the big round thing, and the stick figures are those two legged things they're currently massacring a lot of. It's not exactly a hugely complicated concept you need the Rosetta Stone for. As for his double cross plan, it's hardly that complex; you let me live, I'll give you what you need. The Martians are intellects far vaster than any human's, and he's not exactly summarising À la recherche du temps perdu there; they can no doubt pick it up. As for why they didn't just kill him, they were probably startled by the fact that an invisible man had just walked into their base and started chatting with them.
    • This is also a reference to another H.G Wells work; in The First Men in the Moon, Professor Cavor proposes to communicate with the Selenites who live within the moon in a similar way, by starting off with universal concepts that all intelligent beings would eventually pick up such as geometric shapes, and ends up doing so when he's eventually brought before them. So whether or not it would work in real life, they're clearly established to be occupying a fictional universe where it can work.
  • Griffin probably figured that if the Martians turned nasty, he could just sneak off - the Martians can't see him any more than the humans can. He's also completely insane, and generally seems to think that his invisibility makes him immune to consequences (witness his reaction when Hyde reveals that he can see him), so he probably didn't think he was in any danger.
  • According to Word of God, Moore couldn't resist the symmetry of having a character created by H. G. Wells join forces with another set of characters created by H. G. Wells, so there's a meta-motivation there as well.

Design of the Nautilus

• The Black Nautilus in Century 1910: Look at the panel in which it appears and then compare it to the "classic" Nautilus MkII from the original stories, and the cutaway in the Black Dossier. Is this a newer Nautilus or a rebuild of Nautilus MkII, or did Nemo simply upgrade the one we see? With lots and lots of guns? I can understand the changing of the hull section between the eyes and the Ruleof Cool spiky bits across the back, but the forward hull and the tentacles are confusing me; At first, I was happy that we finally found out the main use of the two that are stowed in the Hull, but the place where they are stowed has vanished, as well as the various docking apparatus and the Ruleof Cool blowhole. The number of tentacles has changed (seriously, count them) and the configuration also - they used to roll up at the end and now they roll down! So yeah. I feel robbed - I wanted * The Nautilus* to show up, but the more I look at it, the more it is apparent that something has changed. Is this an oversight on O'Neil's part, or the first stage in the "Ship of Theseus" that the Nautilus must surely undergo before the final chapter?
  • The smokestacks, at least, are explicable. In real life, early submarines often ran on the surface and dived only to sneak up on a target or escape pursuit. That was partly because of their limited air and power supply for underwater movement, and partly because running on the surface is faster and puts less strain on the hull than running underwater. In any case, these submarines used normal fossil-fuel engines when on the surface, relying on batteries and electric motors underwater. Build a Victorian submarine with steam engines and you're going to need some kind of smokestack.

Your appearance may vary

• Why does the color of Mina's eyes and hair change in every book?
  • Her eyes have always been green and her hair was brown in the first two books, and dyed blonde in the Black Dossier. They looked the same in Century, as well.

What measure is an A-lister?

• Moore Didn't put Dracula or Sherlock Holmes in the original books because he feared they'd "over shadow" the rest of the team, yet he had no problem with James Bond and Big Brother Overshadowing The Black Dossier's story line in the slightest!
  • And they didn't. But Dracula and Sherlock Holmes have been done to death in this sort of Victorian patische style. And they technically did have an effect through Moriarty's 'death' and Mina's backstory, so does it even matter? Also, Big Brother was only in the background of The Black Dossier.
  • But The War of the Worlds makes up the entirety of the second volume.
  • And a general Victorian fictional clusterfuck crossover with Dracula as a major player would basically be, er, Anno Dracula.
    • This raises up interesting ideas of how far one can push lit cross overs, since everyone has as much right to use the characters if you wanted to cross over, people are bound to have similarities. But if this ever turned into a lawsuit, Disney and Universal could have a lawsuit field day over all the people that crossed over the same public domain characters and had similar events and relationships.
    • I think the point was that they'd overshadow the main characters even as side characters. James Bond, Big Brother and the Martians were supposed to be big parts of the story.
    • Let's call a spade a spade here. Moore's main characters are clearly his more self-serving deconstructed versions of Mina and Alan. (and then Orlando). Other characters could have been in their place. Truer to the Text versions could also have been there, but in the end Moore did the story the way he wanted to. Also a bit of the divide on the film, if YOU would rather see no powered woman Mina lead the league and loaf old Alan slugging through life, good for you, but are we really surprised that some people preferred vampire and badass grandpa to that?
  • Also, Sherlock Holmes shows up in a flashback. Not to mention his brother Mycroft is an important character As is Moriarty, of course.
  • Moore's interest is in Deconstruction, in the original Dracula, Mina is the real hero, the one who has serious character development while the Count is largely a distant villainous figure, so foregrounding that over the Spotlight-Stealing Squad was The Plan all along. Then Sherlock Holmes in Conan Doyle's book was cold and had No Social Skills outside his friendship with Watson, not the kind of character that can fit in a Crisis Crossover like this, outside of Rule of Cool appeal.
    • While it certainly is true that deconstruction is the very meat to Alan Moore's work, this troper disagrees with any assertion it can't be done in other ways. Moore chose his versions of these characters in a lot of cases choosing to showcase their biggest flaws. While this may seem really cool or really lame to the individual, it's Moore's choice not that he had his hands tied.
  • Simple answer is — it's Moore's choice, since he's the one writing the thing. Moore decided that doing a Victoriana pastiche involving Sherlock Holmes and Dracula showing up as main characters battling each other / someone else was something he wasn't interested in doing because it had been done a lot before and he thought it would take away from the things he was interested in doing, so he didn't include them. In later volumes, Moore decides it'll be interesting to contrast James Bond with the earlier pulp adventure heroes who inspired him, so Bond shows up. Like any author of any work of fiction, Moore's writing about what interests him, and that's all the motivation he needs. You can disagree with what Moore is and isn't interested in and what he chooses to and not to include, and that's fine, but it's not gonna change the fact that Moore's writing this, not you, so you either put up with it or you stop reading. Or you write your own version where Holmes and Dracula do show up, of course. Those are pretty much your only choices here.
  • Plus, well, it's not like Moore doesn't have a bit of a point at least here. There's not exactly a deficit of Sherlock Holmes pastiches and Dracula appearances out there in popular culture. They are pretty much the Victorian pulp fiction characters that everyone knows, remembers and loves. They do kind of demand all the attention. It would have been very easy, if Sherlock Holmes and Dracula were in there, to essentially turn the story into yet another Sherlock Holmes-vs-Dracula mash-up with all the others kind of tagging along a bit. Alan Moore was more interested in giving some arguably lesser-known Victorian pulp characters a moment in the sun for once.
  • It's kind of amusing in that context, while Sherlock and Dracula are more popular than the League, Nemo, Hyde, Griffin and Mina (at least as the girl from Dracula) are all still very high on the pecking order for their era. Quatermain is mostly down due to Indiana Jones taking his pop culture place for adventuring. So it seems strange to be arguing they deserve this "break" more than other hundreds of guys who haven't seen reliable space in a school or new book store for decades.
  • Maybe, but again — take it up with Alan Moore, it's his story and his decision.
  • It's also not really so much about "deserving a break" as much as these are the characters who suited Moore's original purposes, which was to bring together a whole load of Victorian pulp heroes together to form a kind of nineteenth century superhero team. The characters Moore chose were those who in part fit the archetypes he wanted to play with — you've got a "Hulk"-style personality switcher, an action man, a gadgeteer, a stealth sneaker and the obligatory woman. Holmes could have fit in as a detective, but presumably Moore didn't want to put him in for reasons discussed above.

Doctor Where?

• If this series is supposed to be a hodgepodge of western European fiction, why have I not seen a single 1950s British blue police box in an unusual place?
  • You didn't look close enough.
    • Look closely at all of the little details on the map of the Blazing World in Black Dossier. It's in the upper-right corner.
    • Cite example or it didn't happen.
    • I believe the Almanac in vol. 2 also mentions the Silurians.
  • The 1960s haven't happened yet, and Dr. Who started in the '60s. If Moore writes a sequel to the Black Dossier, maybe the Doctor will make an appearance.
    • The '60s chapter of Century. Expect it.
    • And true to form, while a police box doesn't appear those of us with familiarity to the classic series may recognize a certain gentleman in a black coat and bow-tie who shows up in one panel of "Century: 1969"...
    • As well as a Dalek during Mina's Acid trip in Hyde Park.
  • 2009 has the Eleventh Doctor pop up in the background.
    • With what is apparently the First Doctor walking with him. Sometimes, I love time travel.
    • And two panels before that, Captain Jack Harkness can also be seen.
    • Additionally, UNIT and a certain group in Cardiff are mentioned.
  • And Daleks show up again at the epilogue of Vol. 4, in the context of "Oh, no, not another alien invasion. Sigh."

Isn't Hyde supposed to be short and thin?

• It bugs me that Mr. Hyde is illustrated as a big, brutish man. In the original material, when Dr. Jekyll became Mr. Hyde, he actually shrank, so it would follow that Mr. Hyde's transformation would still follow that. It's just weird that Alan Moore would ignore this bit, but pay close attention to everyone else in terms of their original characterization.
  • Well, it shall bug you no longer- Hyde, I believe during his speech after raping Griffin to death, expands upon his origins. He indeed mentions that, at first, Jekyll was actually quite fit, and he was practically a "dwarf"... But, as he was all Jekyll's excesses, powered by all his emotional and biological drives, he quickly grew bigger and stronger as moral old Jekyll, deprived of these same motivations, withered away. Over time, he simply grew more powerful, more deviant, and generally larger.
    • Moore's decision to make him hulk like though as a creative choice can very much still bug us for many more years on
    • It shouldn't, since the series is basically a superhero comic transplanted into a Victorian setting, and any superhero tropes are probably included for the sake of parody.
    • Jekyll also mentions in Volume 1 that Hyde was originally smaller than Jekyll, in a "can you imagine?" sense.
    • Also remember the idea of Hyde growing comes from ONE interpretations of one line in the original story. Others use the same line just to assume Hyde got healthier not taller and muscular. As originally Jekyll was the heartier and healthier individual and Hyde the smaller and sicklier. Moore seemed to go with the idea he turned hulkier with time others just see this as Hyde getting heartier as he became the dominant personality.

Campion is easily forgiven

• Why is Campion Bond still around in Volume 2 and not in some jail cell or executed? He worked for Moriarty and betrayed Britain, and if Griffin hadn't followed and spied on him, he and Moriarty would have succeeded.
  • Lampshaded by the new M on the penultimate page of Volume 1: "It is often useful to have employees one knows to be treacherous" (probably not the real reason, though, it does seem likely that Mycroft was somehow involved in Moriarty's schemes).
    • If anything, the implication is that Mycroft was opposing Moriarty and his plans; Moriarty remarks that he received his promotion to the head of British Intelligence over the protests of "embittered toads" like Mycroft, which suggests that the two weren't exactly buddy-buddy (since Moriarty is, as far as he's aware, talking only to a trusted underling and so has no real reason not to be forthcoming about it). Not that Mycroft clearly isn't a bit amoral at the least, but what little evidence there is suggests that he was opposed to Moriarty's plans and took over once Moriarty had proved himself a nutcase willing to bomb his own country.
  • In addition to the above, Bond was working for Moriarty in his official capacity as Moriarty's aide in British Intelligence; he no doubt managed to weasel out of punishment by following the "I was just obeying orders!" defence. By 1910, however, it's made very clear that he's been reduced to little more than a dogsbody who gets the tea, so presumably they decided that punishment via humiliating him and completely stymying any possible chances for career advancement was satisfactory for whatever part he played.

Anachronisms

• In the first volume of Century, The 14th Earl of Gurney is named as a possible Jack the Ripper suspect. Century takes place in 1910. But The Ruling Class, from which the Earl of Gurney is taken, is set in the 1960s.
  • I haven't read / seen the original work, but the 'Earl of Gurney' is presumably a hereditary title, so the one who appears in the 1960s is probably a later descendant (unless the later one is specifically identified as the 14th Earl, in which case we can probably chalk this one up to a continuity error).
    • He is indeed specifically referred to as the 14th Earl of Gurney.
    • Explained by Alan Moore thinking the movie took place in around 1910.
  • Macheath is always saved from execution by something contrived. Having a character from 1972 appear her to confess to all of Macheath's crimes is the most contrived means of conviction Moore could have possibly put.
  • You can argue it's even more than that as The Threepenny Opera is anachronistic anyway. But Moore always made use of some Broad Strokes to timing anyway. The Ruling Class one is just the most explicit.

And suddenly Harry was a mass murderer

• In Century: 2009, it's clear at some point Harry Potter went on a murderous rampage, including Ron and Hermione begging him to stop in one panel, but just when are we supposed to believe the change from the books happens? I don't see a clear point to diverge from. And who was the old man who told him that his adventures were all to prepare him. I mean before he confronted Haddo/Voldermort. And was God also Mary Poppins?
  • I thought that man was intended to be Argus Filch. What I don't know is who the portly man with the bald top of his head who insults Harry was intended to be, because he can't be Snape at all, and I don't think anyone else fits.
  • The man who curses the Antichrist is a character who is being portrayed by Michael Gambon. The teacher in red is being played by Sheila Hancock. One is Dumbledore from the Harry Potter series, the other is Mrs Windergast from the adaptation of Groosham Grange.
  • It's explained that in this world, Haddo!Voldemort basically went to Hogwarts in 1969 and essentially groomed Harry to be his antichrist once he was born. As such, Moore basically seems to negate the whole 'horcrux' element, but it's stated that Harry was thirteen, I believe, which places him around... Prisoner of Azkaban? And yes, Mary Poppins is basically God. It makes perfect sense. Who better than a nanny with bizarre levels of power who descends from the clouds to look after children?
  • In answer to the previous question, the man who curses Harry before dying could be Horace Slughorn, with his look based on the movie portrayal.
  • This panel seems to be one we're still arguing over. In this world the Invisible College is various magical schools rolled into one. Ron is obvious. So far some think the crying girl is Hermione or Ginny. For the old man either Dumbledore, Snape, Slughorn or Filch. For the female either McGonagall or Mrs. Windergast from Groosham Grange.
    • HEY, wait a minute...unless I'm mistaken Moore's version of Harry Potter might be the result of an Alternate Timeline.
  • Then again, in the books Harry *was* groomed from birth to kill Voldemort. Dumbledore all but admits that to Harry before shuttling off to the afterlife. I'm not sure how Dumbledore's plans fit with Haddo's, but in both versions Harry is duped into a prophecy and groomed from birth to bring about someone's downfall. The goals are different, but the methodology is the same.
    • The Shallow Parody entry now has a bullet to point out Moore would have been better received if Haddo had possessed Dumbledore instead of Voldemort.
  • Whilst we're on the subject, does it seem to anyone else that Alan Moore created the entire Century storyline just for an extended Take That! at Harry Potter? That's... rather less than I expected from the man.
    • Might just be my interpretation of it, but it seemed to me more of a Take That! aimed at the Moral Guardians' endless accusations that Harry Potter was written to seduce children over to devil worship and black magic — mainly by showing just how completely ridiculous such claims would be if they were true. Then again, Alan Moore has been pretty crazy for a while now, so it could go either way.
    • I agree with this. I mean, isn't Moore openly an occultist? It wouldn't make sense for him to accuse Harry Potter of corrupting children.
    • Moore isn't occultist in the way most people are thinking. This interview has him be pretty candid about his whole concept of magic. Moore even poked fun at himself in Tempest when Kev asks him to do some magic that it's just part of his conceptual idea, not an actual supernatural practice. Through this lens you get more why he has the Aleister Crowley Expy as a main villain who is a failure and why he mocks Rowling's world building as sloppily made magic principles.
    • I was referring more to the constant criticisms by Mina and Orlando about Hogwarts Castle being derived from "Comforting imagery from the forties" and stale and artificial and so on, as well as outright having Haddo call Potter a banal and boring Antichrist. It just all seems so petty and shallow, for some reason.
    • There's definitely a bit of snide commentary around the characters and world of Harry Potter, but there's also a bit of sympathy there as well — the Antichrist, after all, is ultimately depicted as a lost and bewildered young man who has been lied to and corrupted by everyone around him for reasons he never fully understands and is ultimately callously destroyed without every really knowing why. It's possible that Moore, as much as he clearly disdains the source, is commenting on what he sees as a rather sweet little idea being twisted to form part of a massive juggernaut that seeks to milk everything of value out of it before dismissively casting it aside.
    • Seconding the Take That! theory.
    • A lot of Century seems to be a Take That! against what has become of a whole of fiction, but if we can do a Deconstruction of Moore's own thesis, we need to realize something. If he is trying to relate that the older times when his older literature was making up the world it was better and that the further implosion of others had a negative effect, then there's a very elephant in the room question. Where exactly are a lot of the popular books of the modern era in the League world? Certainly some would be harder than others to include, but the lack of references to a bunch of the modern big hits questionable. Is Mr. Moore afraid to touch that stuff on legal issues, or is he just an old man that's ignorant that there's more to modern literature than what he sees being made into blockbuster movies?
  • Moore's attack on Harry Potter is simply part of his deconstruction of The Hero. In every era, you had a certain hero that represented the values of that period. Like Allan Quatermain was the hero of the British Empire, a coward at home, but a hero when he's fighting foreigners and hunting animals. Moriarty dissed Quatermain as a poor successor to Sherlock Holmes, the hero of the rationalist Victorian era. Then Quatermain attacks James Bond as being a poor hero in the Fifties, a time post-Cold War where the adventure hero isn't a detective and an explorer/hunter but a spy. So Moore is seeing that as a shift in values. Then you come to the 90s and millennial and the popular hero of this generation is Harry Potter, a teenage boy who got a destiny and fame at birth, and is manipulated by adults in his own narrative. So in terms of Deconstructive Parody, he sees a decline in what is considered heroic. In an earlier era, to be heroic, you had to be smart (Sherlock), you had to be a man of action (Quatermain), then you had to lie for a living (James Bond) and now you have to be famous (Harry Potter). So basically, that's where it comes from. It's more a meta-commentary on changes in heroism.
    • The variety of The Hero Harry belongs to is kind of a Changeling Fantasy: discovering you are not normal. If Moore hadn't done Harry Potter, he might have done Percy Jackson or Sophie Foster.
  • That interview Moore gave to Comics Beat in 2013 made it VERY clear that he does not think very highly of Harry Potter, and in fact cites the novels as proof of the decline in quality he perceives in modern pop culture. So, yes, it's a very mean-spirited "Take That!" on the franchise.
  • It's also a critique of different concepts of magic. It would become more apparent post Tempest the ruling magic of League world is Moore's.

Where's Don Quixote?

• Where is Don Quixote? He is the main character of the first modern novel in history, which is widely considered to be the best of all time, but he only gets one mention as a member of Prospero's league (and, if I recall correctly, he physically appears exactly once). It may seem like an odd complaint here, but it is just quite surprising from a man as devoted to fiction and literature like Moore and a series as devoted to the same like this one.
  • He's shown has a member of Prospero's Men
    • Yes, that is mentioned in the above, but nothing is ever described about him. He is mentioned maybe once or twice in The Black Dossier when Orlando talks about Prospero's Men and he is depicted in precisely one picture, but otherwise he is completely skipped over. Would it not be interesting to see this delusional knight errant wannabe in a world where his fantasies of giants are actually real?
    • Indeed it might have been interesting, but at risk of stating the obvious, Moore can't fit EVERYTHING in.
    • Very little is ever actually revealed about Prospero's Men other than the members, and the departure of Christian and Prospero to the Blazing World, as well as some of Captain Robert Owe-Much exploration logs in the Travellers Almanack. All that is known of the group is that they were formed by Prospero at the behest of Queen Gloriana, that they found Christian in a madhouse in London, and that Orlando was a member. Quixote isnt the only member to get virtually no exposure, Owe-Much, Amber St Clare and Christian are only mentioned in passing as well.
    • There's also the simple fact that, aside from a few side-stories, most of the stories we've seen in the League-verse have been set in the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. To be fair to Moore, it's kind of hard to make Quixote a central, important figure in a story set three-to-four hundred years after he would have died. And unlike Prospero (who is explicitly presented as a sorcerer and dabbler in magic in his story) or Christian (a traveller from/to a fantastical realm), the whole point of Quixote is that he's basically just a slightly mad old man, so it's also hard to come up with some kind of plausible fantastical reason to bring him back or keep him around that doesn't also miss the point of his original story. I assume that if Moore ever gets around to writing a League-verse story set in the early sixteenth century, we'll probably see a lot more of him.

Shitting on our heroes

• Is it my imagination, or does Alan Moore seem to get his kicks outta bastardizing heroic characters these days? Granted I can see why he did it to James Bond (and that was the original anyways, his successors may not have been so vile), can kinda see why he chose to do it to Harry Potter (though I still object to it) but in the newest comic he does this to Tom Swift...I hope this isn't developing into a pattern or else we may have the Evangelion of massive crossovers on our hands and not in a good way.
  • Seconded.
  • Well, Allan Quatermain is certainly dealt with in sympathy, even with his Mighty Whitey deconstructed, and Sherlock Holmes is given a very respectful depiction in his brief cameo and Michael Caine from Get Carter is awesome and Emma Peel is also treated well. So a good number of "heroes" are dealt with in a positive way.
  • To be fair, this is Moore's version of a fictionalized cross over world, so it's clearly got lots of his own preferences and hang ups often involved, which would be true no matter who the writer is.
  • Bond, Swift, and Potter could all be convenient mouthpieces for Moore to vent his frustration with modern audiences. Bond brags about selling out to Americans (symbolic him best being remembered for film appearances?), Swift mocks Nemo and other sci-fi works that came before him, Potter is from a highly popular, arguably over-merchandised modern franchise. If you're the kind of person who is frustrated by overhype, overmarketing, and perceived lack of respect for source material, these personality traits would probably grate against you.
  • To his credit, Moore concedes in Tempest that although Bond tended to commit debatable sexual assault and showed backwards views on race relations- and a lot of spy fiction glamorizes working as an assassin for shady government regimes- old Bond movies are a hell of a lot of fun.
  • Or it could be a warped kind of Rule of Funny.
  • Moore's world runs on deconstruction, so if you are a fan of any of them it surely is going to come off like that.

Did the writers think this premise through?

• The claim that all fiction is (somehow) true in the LOEG 'verse. Are they aware how much fiction exists? Including the equivalent of The Legend of Rah and the Muggles? Of which there is a lot more than of good fiction? Or did they really mean "all the fiction a substantial number of Anglos still knows today"?
  • Since Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neal are not idiots, they probably do have a fairly good idea of how much fiction exists in the world, in an intellectual sense even if they haven't managed to read all of it. However, consider how many people have existed and currently exist in the world today; according to some estimates the figure numbers somewhere in the tens of billions across the entire globe. That's plenty of room for a lot of fictional characters.
  • Personally, this troper feels that it's really more "all fiction can be true," depending on what can be consistent with each other. Of the major characters' series in just the first volume (Literature/Dracula, The Invisible Man, King Solomon's Mines, Literature/The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, etc.) none of them necessarily conflict with each other as the actual areas they cover are very narrow, in contrast to one like Assassin's Creed which almost literally covers all of history and most definitely does not involve fantastical elements like the LOEG-verse does. The further you go along in history, the more you'll find fiction that can conflict with one another and could affect the rest of it very drastically—this may well be the in-universe reason, for instance, that Harry Potter is the Antichrist, considering that he lives in a Britain which, for a time, was ruled by Big Brother. This also isn't counting fiction which takes place in straight-up fantastical worlds rather than Earth like most/all of the fiction thus far crossed-over do. Chances are, we wouldn't see a LOEG story set in Westeros or Amestris, since those are explicitly set in worlds that are not our own, unless they're visited as alternate dimensions (especially because those two in particular bear many resemblances to Earth and, in the 2003 FMA anime at least, the world in which Amestris is located is explicitly a parallel world to ours.
  • It's important to also be real, I'm not sure there would be a way to "get it right" to have it all happen. You are bound to run into continuity and timeline issues if you just keep adding sources. So you obviously are going to have to assume some of your sources weren't entirely accurate to what your true version is. Both Comic and Movie League do this. Once Upon a Time, Penny Dreadful, Anno Dracula, Into the Woods, etc ALL do the same thing. So I don't think it's too much to chastise anyone for the PRACTICE. But each and every one of the decisions you make could very much kill the interest in your merged world for individual fans. So technically anything could pop up in the League world, but it might not be exact same as source. So it's best to assume "it might be there in some form" rather than "it's all there"

Prince Dakkar Is Useless

• Along the lines of the "all fiction is true" point above, how do the massive world-changing events of science fiction fit in? For instance, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, (which is mentioned in Minions of the Moon) the point is First Contact. But in the League 'verse, aliens have been well known for over a century by 2001. And that's before we've got on to the number of works of apocalyptic fiction set in the twentieth century - surely the world hasn't ended twenty times?
  • Its shown several times that a lot of "world changing events" from fiction did happen, but had a much more limited effect than described in the source material. Big Brother took over, but only controlled Britain and only lasted for a few years, the existance of Cthulhu and the Elder Gods are common knowledge but did not cause the end of the world, and so on. The events of 2001 most likely did happen ,especially with the hints that the remains of a Monolith being the source of the immortality pool, but clearly, it did not dramatically change the world by 2009.
    • I was going to propose that Big Brother and other similar regimes had destroyed a lot of historical records, explaining why Emma Night could be skeptical of Martian invasions in 2009. However, this wouldn't explain some things, like Vrils in a live sex show in 1969... so I guess just chalk it up to an Extra-Strength Masquerade.
  • Prospero proposes that the Nautilus and Cavorite inspired the first submersibles and aircraft in this world, just as they (arguably) did in real life, Tom Swyfte's work helped influence the invention of the taser, and the Martian invasion inspired the a lot of work on space travel. All the science heroes are having some kind of effect on the advance of technology.
  • A lot of the more out-there fictions, particularly the ones that are allegorical (like Christian or the animals from Kipling's Just-So Stories) or just wouldn't fit in a facsimile of the real world (living toys of the Little Noddy stories) live secretly in the Blazing World, possibly because Puritans like King James chased them out. 2009 also shows that Britain has its own underlying Dreamtime into which a lot of ahistorical creatures and inhabitants have retreated.
  • Vol. 4 finally gets around to discussing a possible version of the post-apocalypse future, including bits of We, a war between ape-men and machines, an interplanetary conqueror who's Professor Moriarty's biological son and several alien invaders challenging him, plus some of humanity escaping to a future based on Star Trek and The Space Odyssey Series. The implication is that the status quo is well and truly wrecked.

What happened to Quincy Harker?

• Where is Mina and Jonathon Harker's son? In the epilogue of Dracula, Harker mentions that they had a kid.
  • The child could have died of some disease later, which might have even led to Mina's decision to divorce Jonathan.
  • It's also possible that he was simply never born in the League-verse. Bear in mind that the epilogue to Dracula is set seven years after the events, while Moore's chronology implies that Mina and Jonathan divorce shortly after their adventure in Transylvania. It wouldn't be the only time Moore retconned the ending of a source novel (or made some on purpose alterations)
  • All fiction is true, right? Let's look to other fictional works. As it happens, Marvel Comics details the life of Quincy Harker in Tomb of Dracula.

Celebrity Paradox?

• If Adenoid Hynkel was the one who started WW2, then how do the various references to Hitler fit in? (IE, The Doctor meeting Hitler in the episode "Let's Kill Hitler" Eddie from Bottom's last name being Hitler with his mother being called Adolph Hitler)
  • In the League-verse versions of those stories, Hynkel would have taken Hitler's place. This is confirmed in The Black Dossier, in which the events of The Boys from Brazil are alluded to, only in this universe the story involved a plan to clone Hynkel.
  • The character from Bottom, in the LoEG universe, is presumably called Eddie Hynkel rather than Eddie Hitler — not least because this would also hypothetically allow Moore to neatly sidestep the issue of using a character still under copyright to another creator, as with "Jimmy" and "The Antichrist".

What's the point of Campion?

• Is there really much point to Campion Bond other than to add more James Bond Take That! from Moore. Given the many upon many printed books, there has to be at least one not-so well likable stooge that could have that role or adapt another one into it. And for that matter the movie gives Moriarty two original stooges as well....picking one/two obscurer characters shouldn't have been that hard for Moore or the screen writers here.
  • It's "grandfathering" the character and reinforcing the connections between Victorian adventure fiction and the ways the genre would develop over the twentieth century (as well as how the modern intelligence services developed out of their Victorian ancestors); just as the literary antecedents of James Bond novels and movies were the adventure novels of the late nineteenth century, so too was James Bond's grandfather a functionary for what served as the intelligence services back then. There's also the obvious humour of contrasting the typically super-suave, super-smooth Bond with the snivelling, unctuous little toady who was his grandfather; even Bond's got some dodgy genetics floating in his gene pool if you look back far enough. Beyond that, does there really need to be a purpose any more than any of the other references we encounter? Yeah, he could have chosen some hyper-obscure character and used them for the same purpose, but he thought it'd be fun / interesting / a bit of a laugh to make him James Bond's granddad. What's the problem?
  • Some of this has to come down to preference. If you are into the deconstruction aspect, then yes that whole concept is probably interesting. If you are instead interested in it as a crossover, then the whole ancestor thing probably comes off a lot lamer than giving the spotlight to a lesser character.
  • It should also be noted that the original volume is a lot less concerned with the whole "including every single fictional character ever created by human civilization and their kitchen sink" aspect of the project than later volumes would be. The first volume is basically a "Victorian Justice League with slightly deconstructionist aspects", not a serious attempt to link together every fictional work ever devised; it's basically Moore and Kevin O'Neal having a bit of a laugh with Victorian pulp fiction tropes, so at that point they weren't too concerned with making every single minor character who appeared a specific reference from another story. The references to other characters were more just for fun and to show that this was a world where fiction was real, less an attempt at "I will include every single fictional character who has ever existed in some fashion even if it kills me." As has been stated elsewhere on the page, it's basically Moore's decision as the writer to do what interests him and what he thinks is fun; you can disagree, but at the end of the day you're not writing it and Moore probably doesn't care either way, so. It's also not the only example of "grandfathering" that occurs; for another example, at another point in the same volume, ancestors of several of the characters from Eastenders show up as street urchins.

Has Moore actually read much modern fiction?

• Something about Moore and Century 2009 is bothering me. In it it's obvious Moore is hammering us with his thesis that the fictional world has fallen apart. However is anyone else ticked off how few lit references there are for stuff written like 1950s-2009? I tried off-hand counting on Jess Nevin's annotations, and if my dates are right there's only like 15 or so of them, compared to the vast larger number of things from other sources. Did this comic not start off by combining lit characters, so where the hell are the rest of the stars of all those decades worth of books? If you want to say our fiction has suffered, why is the spotlight not on them? And if you are trying to say that film-centrism has stolen the soul out of fiction, why not use more of those characters to make the point? What i'm basically getting at here is more or less what's wrong with Alan Moore on this? Is he afraid other authors are more likely to sue him so he makes us deal with bastardized Harry Potter and guys people like Ian Sinclair and Michael Moorcock out of fear, or is he just that much of a jerk he doesn't read much of anyone else modern work to be able to work them into the League world?
  • A bullet earlier also addressed this. It's again Moore's choice. For whatever reason he clearly has chosen not to include as many literature references after a while. Which I think is a tad unfair. While the book may not be the force it once was, we do have a thing called Amazon (among others) that doesn't make it that hard to find all the new fiction that comes out. I don't know if I agree with Moore's general thesis of fiction or literature in general. But i can see how some people would have preferred he'd have stuck to things with printed books. (Since so much has been novelized, you wouldn't have to cut that much out all things considered)
  • Copyright considerations are definitely a concern, but ultimately as mentioned above Moore's writing about what interests him and offering his view on the world, just as any writer does. As far as Moore's concerned, a lot of modern fiction doesn't really interest him, and he thinks it's indicative of a decay in culture. To be honest, I don't really agree with him on this either, but he's the one writing it, not me; he's under no obligation to reflect my own views of the world back to me. And if he doesn't think modern fiction is as interesting to include as fiction from the 1890s-1960s, that's his decision / viewpoint.
  • Following the conclusion I think we can also admit Moore probably did change his opinion on this direction as he wrote the series. By the end it seemed he was making a much wider brush at "fictions" more so than any medium specifically. Obviously here at this website we'll probably have our own debates as we try to square the interpretation to what we know about Alan Moore's philosophy the more useful narrative from the others is seemingly now settled around "fictions are dangerous".
  • I think Moore ls letting his communist hair down here especially with Sherlock Holmes himself saying that "extraordinary gentlemen" might not be such a great idea. Moore may feel this is his Watchmen moment of popular fiction. At least in his mind that fiction glorifying people who are better than just being an average human isn't all that great an idea even beyond just his super hero bugaboo. Why exactly Moore would believe in equality among people but not in art made by said people, is obviously a curious hill to plant a flag. Though in general his view of "normal human" and "acceptable behavior" is probably going to score him heat from just about all sides.

Orson Welles- illuminati confirmed?

• Is there some reason that so many of the villains in the series have some connection to Orson Welles? He voiced Moriarty, did a radio show of War of the Worlds, was Harry Lime, and was Charles Foster Kane. He even played Cagliostro once, which, since Crowley claimed to be him reincarnated, works as a kind of "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" way.
  • Well, Moore isn't particularly fond of cinema for numerous reasons (see Cinema Purgatorio, each instalment of which can basically be boiled down to "and here's another reason why classic cinema's awful"), and Welles is very closely identified with the cinema, so there's possibly that. Ultimately though, I think we have to chalk this down to the simple fact that Welles was a hugely prolific and in-demand actor and many of his roles are pretty iconic, so if you're creating a Massive Multiplayer Crossover bringing together iconic characters from literature, film and television, you kind of have to work hard not to include characters who were brought to life by Welles at some point. While there may be some subtextual meaning behind the inclusion of Harry Lime and Charlie Kane, when it comes to Moriarty, the Martians and Cagliostro I think we have to be wary of seeing meanings that aren't there and simply chalk it up to "at some point in his hundreds and hundreds of jobs, Welles happened to play this character as well" unless Moore himself tells us otherwise.
  • There's also the simple fact that while Moore doesn't like a lot of cinema, he has expressed some admiration for the works of Orson Welles, so it's as much a tribute as anything else.

You have to give two weeks' notice

• At what point did the League split off from British Intelligence? I mean, clearly Mycroft's outfit (Diogenes?) isn't MI6, since that didn't exist until around WWI. Did he and MI6 just have some kind of Cardinal Richelieu-vs.-M. Treville relationship?
  • An annotation in The Black Dossier suggests they "broke contact" from British Intelligence around the end of the Second World War, probably due to the authoritarian nature of the post-war British government in this universe.

How does V For Vendetta work?

• So if everypiece of modern fiction coexists at the same time, is the Guy Fawkes mask still used as a symbol by Anonymous?
  • Assuming there's no fictional equivalent of Guy Fawkes with a mask that can be substituted for the real person or a fictional equivalent of Anonymous to adopt the mask, then presumably yes. In this continuity (since V For Vendetta doesn't seem to take place exactly as it did within the League universe), V is probably affiliated with whatever the League's equivalent of Anonymous is.
  • The fictionalized version from William Harrison Ainsworth's "Lancashire novels" could have possibly been used. Given the fact John Dee featured there too, i'd be surprised if Moore wasn't familiar with it.

Define "most iconic figures"

• While this continues thoughts echoed in earlier bullets, at this point it deserves a new one. So now that we know Volume 4: The Tempest is allegedly the ending to the series as well as Alan Moore's comic career we've been treated to some interesting claims. It sounds like it'll tie up some ends from various times and move forward. We can probably assume we will be getting more of what we saw in Century: 2009 in terms of Moore's thoughts on how culture is going, but we also have this line. "With a cast-list that includes many of the most iconic figures from literature and pop culture," So tropers, over or under how many characters originating in the lit side of things from the 1960s-2010s do we expect to even show up here?
  • Moore unfortunately seems to not pay much attention to more recent literature (Harry Potter and a few similar works being the main exception). The vast majority of characters who end up showing up are either from stories written before the modern era or from nonliterary sources (eg: David Palmer). Heck, the only new work of fiction that's been outright confirmed to play a role in Volume 4 is We, which was written in the 1920's. So yeah, we probably shouldn't expect too many 1960s-2010s literary figures to show up.
  • So far with 5 of the 6 issues it's been interesting that while many of the big figures are AWOL as to be expected there have been some nice to see book references mixed in. We here at tvtropes haven't made as big about the lack of Marvel and DC references but Moore daringly has adding more with them too in this last go-round.

Zenith/Thunderbolt/Whoever you are

• In regards to Volume 4 Issue 1, can those of us who aren't super knowledgeable about older British comics put this headscratcher here. Regardless of what ever Moore calls him in story, is it correct we are now assuming the seventh member of the Seven Stars is Thunderbolt the Avenger and not Captain Zenith?
  • Jossed entirely, Flash Avenger was a character in himself, who only appeared in one story that lasted four pages. Thanks to work from the annotators his only pre-Lo EG appearance was scanned here.

Shouldn't that be a double-cross?

• In Volume 4 Issue 2, Why does Captain America have a swastika tattoo when the LOEG Nazis use the double x symbol?

Problems with politics?

• In Century: 2009 it mentions the incoming President of the United States is David Palmer. OK, fair enough, he's a reasonable Obama analogue. And it's mentioned he blamed his predecessor for ongoing crises-par for the course in politics to blame one's opponents for problems and take credit for fixing them (or trying to). Except said predecessor happens to be Josiah Bartlet, who is a member of the same political party as Palmer. So why exactly is Palmer so quick to pin the blame for ongoing problems on him, especially given that he likely won thanks to Bartlet supporting him?
  • From the way events surrounding this event are depicted (an unnecessary Middle Eastern war, economic and environmental collapse, a young African-American replacing a late-middle aged white guy in the White House), Moore appears to be using Bartlet as a stand-in for George W. Bush, meaning that in the Leagueverse they're likely in different parties. This, of course, is magnificently off-base to anyone who's actually watched The West Wing (as Bartlet is clearly supposed to be an idealized Bill Clinton), but given that Moore is not particularly a fan of modern pop culture, television in general terms or American politicians of either mainstream party, this can likely be chalked up to a combination of Moore simply not doing his research and/or not particularly caring about it anyway.
  • Also, not saying this was intentional, but from Moore's anarchist POV, Bartlet, as an idealized Bill Clinton, wouldn't be that far off from Bush politically, especially considering in West Wing's timeline, is was Bartlet who lead the War on Terror in its early years.

I mean, Alanis Morissette would have been one thing

• What's the craic with Mary Poppins being God? I never got that.
  • "The development of children" is her purview- including such things as fretful baby gods. So presumably she has to make sure new fictions turn out properly-developed as well, and in a world made entirely of fiction, that makes her the closest thing to a God. That sounds a bit lame even to me, but it's all I've got.
  • There's a more negative interpretation here. Perhaps given that it seems Prospero summons Mary Poppins from the Blazing World is a sign she is just a tool for Prospero. Where if Haddo is giving the world an "Antichrist" perhaps Prospero decided to send something "god" like to handle it. Why would Moore associate Poppins with this? Because PL Travers wrote Poppins during her time as a disciple of George Gurdjieff. Another occultist who was a bit closer to Moore's philosophy of an idea space than Oliver Haddo's inspiration, Crowley.

Strange bedfellows

• So was ultraconservative Bulldog Drummond still a government agent during the socialist Big Brother regime? How exactly did that work?
  • See above about the US politicians example. You can argue in general there are multiple alignments in this series that fly against the character's stances in their sources. This is yet another.

"Lamarr the First? Second? Third?"

• Just cross checking here but if somebody who's read Satin Astro's source there seems to be some disagreement if the Warlord of Mars in her original setting is Lamarr the first or another later Lamarr. Moore clearly invented his connection to Moriarty but if Satin's Warlord is the first we'd have to fix some of the entries depending on if he's Related in the Adaptation or Generation Xerox.

As the Good book says but not what the comic says

• How are we supposed to take the monotheistic religion history in the League world? According to Haddo we seemingly set ourselves up with something not uncommon among people who toss all the religions together. The Elohim (aka the angels) were here when Lovecraft's Great Old Ones and the Monoliths from 2001 got here. So are we to assume the whole creation and Lucifer rebellion took place as told here?
  • Haddo and his cult try to make an Antichrist in the Moonchild but obviously there doesn't appear to be much help for them from either a Lucifer squad nor the great old ones. So was Haddo just trying to do his own thing there?
  • When Harry Potter turns all evil monster we have Mary Poppins show up and seems to imply she's an avatar of God. Likewise a sign of Aslan appears in the sky at the end who is a character often assumed to be the Christian God in another form. We never hear from Mary or see another lion in the sky after that. Did they not care anymore or are they not actually God at all?
  • Likewise the end of the world is not the Christian foretold one as much as it's a fairy plot. Mind you some of the above combiners toss fairies in with the rest of them, but again we had another apocalypse, no Mary, no God, no devil either.
  • I think Moore was more interested in his own thesis by the end but this one is kinda of a mess when you type it all out. As you would think God would have had something to say during The Tempest, and Lucifer was a big no-show. At least Cthulu got to pop up out of the ocean but that appeared to have been a deal between the Great old Ones and the fairies.
    • On this subject is Mary Poppins above Prospero and Gloriana in the Blazing World like an actual God or are we supposed to assume she is a part of the Blazing World because Prospero appears to summon her. If she's under them it makes sense she wouldn't interfere. If she isn't, why doesn't she even comment on the fae plan?
  • In League-verse the Elohim/Angels are supposedly now not active on Earth like Lovecraft's elder gods. I assume this counts to both the angels and demons side of the split in this continuity. Obviously this is going to cause serious problems for any work that relied on angels and demons being pretty active on Earth in their own stories. But Moore didn't exactly feature many to worry about. As we see Rosemary's Baby and Turner's daemon are explained not with any actual Satan or demon in League world but with attempts by Haddo.
  • In Moore's verse most of the fantastic being went into hiding during the reign of King Jakob (aka King James VI) which would seemingly tie into the James' witch hunts and later in life turn to skepticism and the ongoing Age of Enlightenment in the real world. Which is obviously a bit a double misnomer given that in that time there has been a lot of fiction with such beings not being in hiding. And despite most western elites denouncing such things as superstition, people believing they encounter such things in real life still remain a phenomena.
    • There's somewhat of a complication wanting of explanation there. Even just talking the fictional characters did the supernatural really start "hiding" from humanity or did humanity just get more skeptical? If we take Dracula as an example, the English characters are ripe to be skeptical a vampire exists. The Transylvanian people are under no such delusion about Dracula. On the contrast in Harry Potter, the wizarding world does seem to self segregate themselves off from the muggle world for the most part, which is in line to Moore's world building.

Implications of connecting Moonchild to Harry Potter

Moore contends the Invisible College (aka Hogwarts plus maybe some other magical schools) are the endgame Oliver Haddo uses to create his "moonchild" but there some things about this i'm confused by.

• Tom Riddle claims to work at the Invisible College before Haddo possess him. Was the Invisible College a real independent thing before this that Haddo took over?
• The point in Crowley's Moonchild is to have a woman impregnated by an ethereal being, sorta a parody of the conception of Jesus, so does that mean in this world Harry Potter's real father wasn't James Potter?
• Haddo keeps some folders on his desk of other magical children like Will Stanton. Should we assume all such magical children there were bred through similar means?

Moore on Gollywog

In the Shallow Parody entry at the moment has been written from the perspective Alan Moore used in his interview defending it. Now upon further research it appears there are at least two rather different timelines on the origins of the character, name and imagery and to this troper's best effort so far not a whole lot of primary information to say which is accurate. Does anybody have any idea where to look to settle this that is not just some politician's defense or some academic's condemnation of it? Editing these pages aside, a lot of us would probably like to know which narrative actually is accurate.

• Moore contends Upton created the character herself and it was only afterwards manufacturing toys that he was changed into the stereotype characters.
• Others contend Upton found a minstrel toy that she knew nothing about and used that as the inspiration of the Gollywog.
• Moore also mentioned in the interview that "he like, is clearly an appropriation of the name of Upton’s character but now given negative racial connotations that the author never intended, and now clad in minstrel attire to make racial mockery the only point of a figure that, up until then, had seemingly been intended to express the exact opposite. Upton dressed her creation in the black suit that was the standard formal attire of her day." Searching turns up illustrations of the Gollywog mostly in the colorful suit attire but some with this black attire Moore referenced. Is Moore accurate here or not? Which came first?
• Likewise the other story would have us contend minstrel toys that looked like the golliwog must have been circulation for years before hand, but if they weren't called golliwogs, what were they called? And how different was it to the Gollywog that Upton came up with.

Fiction within fiction

If all fiction is true, how does fiction that revolves around fictional works that are fiction to us work? For example, how would Sonic.exe or Squidward's Suicide play out if Sonic and Bikini Bottom respectively are real in-universe?

• You mean fanfiction? In that case, depends on the fanfiction; many fanfic writers write stories that fit into their chosen universe, and the ones that don't could be written by characters in those universes.

How do realistic works of fiction exist in this universe?

The League's world is a World of Weirdness, since all fiction is true. But there are plenty of works of fiction that strive for realism and accuracy. For example, how can a work on the "Hard" end of the sci-fi scale exist alongside superhero comics, which are the softest sci-fi around?

How do multiple takes on a single public domain character work?

Just for one example: the Almanac says Alice died after her visit through the looking glass because her organs' functions were reversed. If she died, how can the events of Alice in Wonderland (2010) or American McGee's Alice, which are also mutually exclusive, happen?

Film Only

Are our vampires different?

• So.... Didn't bother anyone else that Mina Harker, the vampiress, WATCHED A FRIGGIN SUNSET?
  • So... you're unaware, then, that in the original Dracula, sunlight did not kill him?
  • Sunlight killing vampires is a relatively recent take on the myth — in most pre-twentieth century variations, it just weakens them to a degree that they can't use many / any of their powers.
  • Who said she's a vampire?
    • Would be explained by the fact that she's still looking the same age many decades later.
  • The movie is very explicit about it.
  • The movie is an In Name Only adaptation. In the book, being bitten doesn't immediately make somebody a vampire. Think about it: it might be a little inconvenient if you couldn't feast on somebody's blood without turning them into an undead creature that's powerful enough to fight you on your own terms. It would be like not being able to eat a hamburger without it turning into some amorphous, blobby beef-monster that could hunt you down and murder you with a chainsaw.
    • All of which is beside the point: In the movie, which this Headscratcher is about, she's definitely and explicitly a vampire, and we don't know the exact circumstances of her turning anyway.
    • If we go by text though then we should assume Dracula didn't really die, as if Dracula was alive she had the risk of becoming a vampire, and since in movie League she did. The Count's out there somewhere.
    • Whether or not she's explicitly a vampire, the fact remains: the portrayal of vampires in the book and the movie is based on Bram Stoker's Dracula, where the character Mina Harker first appeared. In Stoker's version, sunlight doesn't immediately kill vampires. Because of the nature of the League 'verse, there are probably numerous breeds of vampires, all hailing from different works of fiction. In all likelihood, many of them probably are killed by sunlight—but the one that bit Mina wasn't.

All Your Powers Combined- Badass Normals need not apply

• In The Movie, if "M"'s plan was to basically steal and exploit the League's knowledge and supernatural powers, why did he even bother to invite Quatermain? It would've made a tad of sense if his plan went more along the lines of the first Volume, coaxing them into helping him subdue another supervillain, but the only real 'mission' he sends them on is directed against himself! When did Professor Moriarty become so stupid?
  • Quartermain was brought in to capture Hyde. I think M says as much during his little 'between you and me' recording.
    • He does. He says he needed Quatermain to capture Hyde. Quatermain also seems to have ably kept the League from collapsing before all the samples could be taken, which may also have figured into Moriarty's plot. It just worked too well.

Just close your eyes, idiot

• In the movie, why doesn't Dorian Grey just close his eyes when Mina shows him his picture?
  • This Dorian isn't too bright....although while maybe with a harsher rating there would be ways for Mina to fix the eyes shut problem if she really wanted to.
  • On that note, why - if looking at the picture would kill him - did he keep it in his entrance hall???
  • Characters with immortality tend to be portrayed as Death Seekers, Dorian probably kept the painting there in case he ever worked up the nerve to finally end it.
  • The entrance hall thing definitely doesn't make any sense, given how easy it would be for him to look at it by accident there, and for anybody else to see, or to steal. The fact that physically destroying the painting would also be sufficient to depower him begs the question of why they came up with the "he can't look at it" thing in the first place - like, how did he discover what was going on with the painting in the first place? How did he learn not to look at it? In the book, he gradually discovers what's going on as he starts to notice changes to it, then locks the painting in the attic but repeatedly checks on it to behold the depraved effects of his lifestyle. How did the film version learn about the power of the painting, learn that looking at it would end it, and hang it on his lobby staircase, all without ever looking at it?! I love this film but that's always bugged me about it.
  • Complete WMG here, but since Dorian’s powers aren’t fully explained, we can try and infer. I think he may have looked at his portrait at some unknown point in the past and rapidly aged, but was young enough that, even aged, he didn’t die. He may have recovered by refusing to look at his portrait and then locked it up from that point onwards. Several years (and horrible injuries) later, and a second look kills him too fast for any potential recovery.

Bulletproof but not ivory proof

• Film question. If the goons that attacked in Africa were wearing armor plating over their chests, how did that rhino horn trophy pierce all the way through to poke out of the mook's front?
  • Armour doesn't add complete impenetrable invulnerability to the wearer in every situation; presumably the horn in question was sufficiently big, sharp and / or tough enough to pierce it.
    • Interesting fact, real life bullet proof armor (especially early armor) did originally have issues dealing with penetrating, edged weapons.

Dressing up for the Hand Stack?

• So Skinner goes naked to knock out the guard outside the factory, then when they're all inside, he has his outfit back on, face paint included, the League do their Team Hand-Stack, and then Skinner goes naked again to plant the bombs. Is that not a complete waste of time?

If not Tom, then who?

• We know the producer handwaived Tom Sawyer's age by basing it on Tom Sawyer Detective than the original works, but who would be the next best options to fit with the idea of "we need an American on the team" that wouldn't be as historically jarring as Sawyer?
  • It's okay to fudge the dates a bit but in general you would be looking for American characters introduced in the 1890s or the start of the 1900s. And the biggest name one of that bunch is Dorothy Gale
  • Other less popular but interesting choices would be Henry Johnson from Stephen Crane's The Monster. Montgomery Brewster of Brewster's Millions. Humphrey van Weyden of The Sea Wolf. (he is American right? I remember he starts off in California)
  • Moby-Dick's characters should be old by that point in time but if you wanted to expand Ishmael or bring in another character that might work.
  • The comic's rape fodder Becky Randall of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm is an option. Likewise Pollyanna is a bit early in the comic, her book came in the 1910s. But could work there as well.
  • Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne are two of the bigger American writers in the early days. They tended to play fast and loose sometimes with setting. Some are clearly written in specific times, other can be moved up or down pretty easily. Moore aged up Dupin to match his publication date. Both have a lot of unnamed narrators that you could also make use of.
  • Moore also kinda sped up some Edgar Rice Burroughs works too. Tarzan and John Carter of Mars came in the 1910s. Tarzan is British but Jane Porter in the original works is American, from Baltimore. John Carter is American while Dejah Thoris is martian. If you could get the rights to either pair you'd be adding an American to the lineup.
  • At the end of the 1900s, the Stratemeyer Syndicate characters start showing up. Which if you were to fudge them a bit, you'd have the Rover Boys, cadets of Putnam Hall or Tom Swift as options.
  • How about Impey Barbicane and Captain Nicholl from From the Earth to the Moon They love to shoot things too.