The Black Dossier

[sawyl]

Alan Moore is one of the cleverest writers around. Don't let anyone tell you that, just because he writes comic books, he's not every bit as well informed and exquisitely well read as Umberto Eco. Take the latest — and last? — installment in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series.

It opens with Mina Murray drinking in a British pub, immediately after the fall of Big Brother's IngSoc society. After a brief run-in with a spy called Jimmy — Bond, presumably — she and the newly youthful Alan Quatermain snarf a copy of the eponymous Black Dossier. In it, they find details of their own histories and those of the previous incarnations of the league. These include:

• The lost Shakespeare play, Faerie's Fortunes Founded.
• Some 18th century pornography in the form of The New Adventures of Fanny Hill
• A history of the first Murray League by Campion Bond
• An account of Bertie Wooster's encounter with an squamous, eldrich horror from beyond the words
• And much, much more...

The references come thick and fast. There are throwaway nods to writers as diverse as Charles Chilton and E.T.A Hoffman, to works of art as disparate as Tannhauser and The Beano, and so on. Even the background characters, perfectly executed by Kevin O'Neill, refer to fictional characters from the period.

A joy from start to finish.