The Black Dossier: brilliant or terrible?

I was lucky enough to borrow a copy of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier from the library, despite the fact that it just came out a bit more than a month ago. I finished it today and I was looking at some reviews of it online, which seem to range from the usual Moore superlatives to just general confusion. It's difficult to imagine that even the most hardcore Anglophile wouldn't have at least some trouble reading this, and I suspect many people picking up this book expecting to see another admittedly eccentric but mostly linear action adventure will be very shocked: this comic book contains probably more prose than pictures, and what's more, the prose is absolutely, incredibly dense, I mean we are talking throwaway allusions to Gravity's Rainbow and Louis Feuillade films here, meaning that you will probably spend around six times as much time reading portions of the titular "Black Dossier" than you would reading the actual narrative. That is probably the ratio of how much time I spent, although I don't know if casual comic fans, who are known for their disdain of books without pictures, are even going to take the time to read Moore's uniformly brilliant riffs on some of the greatest writers and thinkers in human history.

I thought it was great. It's probably the best comic to come out all year, and it's certainly the most ambitious (it might even give that dense-masterpiece-to-end-all-dense-masterpieces Watchmen a run for its money in that regard). I scoff at those that say that it is too high-minded or too gimmicky. Yes, it does come with 3-D glasses, but they are essential to the last part of the narrative. Yes, a lot of it verges on straight-up pornography, but if you're trying to appropriate the style of erotic novelist John Cleland, what else are you going to call it? Also, the art is great, and I must give props to Kevin O'Neill for having the perfect art style to capture all this incredible detail.

There are so many great things about this book. Among them: the postcards showing the origin of Orlando (of Virginia Woolf fame); having Harry Lime pop up as the new M; making James Bond into the 1950s equivalent of a bro, complete with date-rape tendencies; the excerpt from "Sal Paradyse's" novel The Crazy Wide Forever, which is completely worthless and unintelligible just as I imagined Paradise's writing would be; Les Hommes Mysterieux and Zweilicht-Helden, the League's respective French and German equivalents, of whose members I won't give away; the fact that the German fascist dictator during World War II was Adenoid Hynkel; and the Pynchon nod, among other things. I still have mixed feelings about the ending in 3-D, which basically ends with a soliloquy by some guy who looks a lot like Moore talking about how these characters are so majestic and brilliant and will live much longer and have more of a pervasive influence than any of us will ever have. In fact, the final section sort of reminded me of a more highbrow version of the South Park episodes that took place in "Imagination Land."

Still though, this is a great comic. Pick it up if you're interested in a completely new take on the form. I understand that there will be more adventures of the League in the future. I don't know how Moore is going to top this, but I'm sure he can.