I got mine on Saturday, at the SPXpo in Stockholm, bought it directly from Chris Staros who said I was the second person to have actually purchased one. I was going to wait until Bristol so I could get one freshly signed by Kev 'O Neill, but the first person to ever have purchased one was getting all smug at me, so I hotfooted over to the Top Shelf table and slapped my krona down on some Jeffrey Brown books. It's entirely possible that I was entirely lied to about the whole 'second person ever' thing, but I choose not to verify this so as to keep my story intact.
So I've read it, how about the rest of all of you? It is a very difficult book to discuss with the unblooded neophytes who stand on my present roster of family and friends. Maybe you guys?
SPOILER! (select to read)
It is a fine read, no doubt. Though I think it really helps to know quite a bit about The Threepenny Opera, since for the first time Moore actually writes over an established canon rather than alluding to it or dropping a few wry retcons on its head. It works for the most part, though - 'Pirate Jenny' as an actual event that happens was surprisingly fitting, though a lot of the Jack The Ripper movie references slipped right over my head while I was trying to figure out how MacHeath could have both been in the original Threepenny Opera AND Century. The lyrical changes to 'What Keeps Man Alive' don't really add much, but you really only could end this chapter on a song.
Odd bits were Mycroft Holmes actually leaving the house, Ishmael's bloodlust at the end (though I've only read a quarter of Moby Dick so far, so it's probably my assumptions about his character that were wrong) and Allan suddenly becoming all lyrical and poetic in the 1910 part of 'Minions Of The Moon,' but it felt right to cram another Threepenny lyric in there.
I'm very proud of myself that I managed to spot a Fletcher Hanks character being described, also in 'Minions Of The Moon.' I even managed to spot it before Paul Gravett and Jeffrey Brown went up on stage and told everyone about how crazy-weird Fletcher Brown's stuff is.
The rape quotient is impressively high for such a short outing - we've got a brutal gang rape that the story is framed around, Aleistair Crowley-manque threatening to rape Allan, an incidental pirate-rape that I think is played for laughs and Orlando / Bio musing that he would rape himself if he saw himself as a lady. Good show! I might have missed a few.
Speaking of Orlando, he is an utter shit when he's on the job. The tensing up of his and Mina's relationship, and the strange surge of attraction / apprehension between him and Allan is artfully done, with a sad payoff in the 'Story Of O' bit in 'Minions.' Oh, and I'm drawing a complete blank on Vull The Invisible, other than that he was a British superhero of some kind in the 30's.
I suppose I should go and read some Iain Sinclair books now.
As a related aside whatever problems were affecting The Black Dossier being released at mass retail in the UK seem to have been resolved as a mate in Manchester was able to pick up the paperback for a tenner from a large pile of them in the Waterstones there a few weeks ago.
Okay. You should all have your copies by now. It's also been floating around those villainous torrent sites for ages. Do we have thoughts and feelings and what-have-yous?
Good day all. I've spent the last week absorbing the latest League Of Extraordinary Gentleman book, noticed a general lucklustre response to it on the web and thought I'd survey the ol' Archive.
Anybody read it? Am I the only person who loved it? And is anybody else finding themselves in the position of having to track down and watch their dad's favourite movies and TV shows? The number of times my dad tried to get me to watch 'Performance...'
And as for the Big Cameo - how did that go down? I'm an outsider to that whole franchise, I'm afraid, so I had to look it up afterwards. I hope it doesn't mean that Moore is going to do the obvious thing and paint Harry Potter as the antichrist. There's charmingly-out-of-touch and then there's low-hanging fruit.
Lastly, a lot of Moore / Morrison comparisons have flared up recently, and I learned on some kind of magic/local podcast the other day that Moore professes to have not read any of Morrison at all, bar from the very early stuff. Wonder what he's bitter about this time.
This'd work better released in one go, rather than further adding to the disjointedness of the narrative by introducing big gaps.
I'm liking it, but it's gone past the point of being able to surprise. The basics of the world have been established, we've moved to a point where the references are forced to be more oblique due to IP issues, and the characters are bobbing through the storyline rather than leading... not that they weren't more reactive than decisive in the earlier material, but you got a story in each volume. Authors should be very wary about 'teaching' an audience that closure is a myth, because most people look to books for escapism.
Reducing things to a pool in which Mina's the only semi-sympathetic character and anyone else interesting gets lost in the time leaps doesn't exactly help either.
First impression was very boring. It was difficult to follow the thread of what exactly Mina & co are doing - plot seemed to take a back-seat to trying to cram as many references as possible into the book. Plus it seemed to run on shock value - oooh, Mina's getting fingered by a Harry Potter villain; oooh, they both **** Orlando all the time; oooh, Orlando keeps talking about his dick; oooh Mina's ****ing a girl for information; oooh, there's a guy sucking another guy off on the first page. It does remind me of Morrison on a bad day (e.g. most of the Invisibles) - very bratty, very "how controversial can I make this?".
Call me a philistine, but it's lost the tight story-telling of the first two volumes which complemented the fictional conceits so well. It's just a bunch of random shit happening to Mina while Allan and the deeply irritating Orlando do ****-all.
As a Cliffclaimer, though, I was fairly cool about both Black Dossier and the first issue on first reading and liked them better as they went on (even if I still vastly prefer the first two volumes). However, I'm not actually finding much of an urge to actually go back and re-read #2.
I found God. Then I lost him. He'll probably turn up down the back of the sofa someday.
"The early bird gets the worm, but the early worm is ****ed."
"I'm not oppressing you Stan, but you haven't got a womb. Where's the fetus going to gestate? You going to keep it in a box?"
I got this today and demolished it in no short order. Now comes the fun part of Googling all the references. Think I got all the big obvious ones.
Overall, I thought everything was handily tied up. It was a lot more direct and focused than the previous Century books though the moon story ended with a bit of a thud.
Weirdly, the ending was quite a bit like the 1999 movie. I guess it is a nice way of tying up Allan's story on any day of the week. Liked the mention of his other two graves, particularly.
Prefer Nevins' more thorough annotations myself but according to his Tumblr he's not got a copy yet. Jess!
SPOILER! (select to read)
EDIT: Totally didn't get Thunderbird-10 there in Q'mar. That makes the whole scene so much more horrible... that the efforts of International Rescue has been wholly appropriated in that way is somehow more upsetting than Orlando snapping and massacring everyone.
Nice find. Not going to be as complete, but the style's engaging. Looking forward to having chance to re-read the books as a set and go through the annotations alongside.
Thoughts on what Haddo was referring to by "subtle game" ?