Tor.com comics blogger Tim Callahan has dedicated the next twelve monthsmore than a year to a reread of all of the major Alan Moore comics (and plenty of minor ones as well). Each week he will provide commentary on what he’s been reading. Welcome to the 57thinstallment.
In every meaningful way, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is the oldest of the America’s Best Comics lineup, and yet it’s the last series I’m writing about as I review the Alan Moore work from that Wildstorm/DC Comics imprint.
Why? Because it’s the best, and I’ve saved the best for last. But it’s also the longest-running and most current, with a new volume of the series coming out as recently as last summer and another spin-off—Nemo: Heart of Ice—planned for early next year.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is both old and new, recent and old-fashioned, filled with characters ripped from the pages of Victorian literature and thrown together in quasi-superteam fashion, with the fate of the British Empire at stake! Some folks even pooled their money to make a misguided big-budget fan film starring Sean Connery. Those folks are called 20th Century Fox, and even though 2013 will be the tenth anniversary of that movie, I suspect you may not hear any celebratory rumblings. But you never know. I can see the tagline already: “LXG times 10! Better than Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, at least!”
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