THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN VOLUME II #1

By: Tony Whitt
Review Date: Monday, August 05, 2002

Nearly four years ago, Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill brought together the most unlikely "superhero" team ever to grace a comic book. Taking some of the most famous figures in Victorian speculative fiction - calling anything from that era "science fiction" doesn't work somehow - Moore created one of the best miniseries ever produced, in many ways rivaling his legendary WATCHMEN series. Now, after a wait that seemed like forever, the first issue of the second volume is out, and the question on everyone's lips is: is this long-awaited sequel as disappointing as, say, DK2?

And the answer is...not yet, but don't expect things to start off with the proverbial bang. LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN VOLUME II concerns the Martian invasion of Earth, so frighteningly depicted in H.G. Wells' WAR OF THE WORLDS, so where else would the first issue of such a series take place but Mars itself, of course? The bad news is, because of this, we don't get to see the Leaguers themselves until the very end of this issue, descending one by one from a carriage in an amazingly filmic set of panels that would have TV viewers crying out for more if this were a television series and these were the last few shots of the first episode. The good news is, if you can ignore the untranslated Martian dialect that makes up most of the dialogue here, this "zero" issue is just as entertaining as anything from the original series.

Fans of Victoriana will be pleasantly surprised to find Moore expanding his scope and including a character from a work which is not exclusively Victorian and which is not British: Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter, Warlord of Mars. Makes sense, though, doesn't it, since Carter was supposedly on Mars around the same time as the invaders? There are also some wonderful surprises in Moore's reinterpretation of the Martians themselves, and they make perfect sense too: there are no less than three separate races, and the Wellsian invaders are the most hated of them all, the Molluscs. Finally, it makes sense that the Molluscs, whose true motives we never really learn in the Wells novel, should invade the Earth out of spite for John Carter himself.


O'Neill in particular outdoes himself. His cityscapes in the first series were a visual treat every issue, but he does an equally exceptional job with the barren wastes of Mars, Carter's enormous Martian army, and the Molluscs' attack tripod. Because Wells' novel was a satire on turn-of-the-century British foreign policy, Wells himself didn't go into vast detail about the Martians themselves, but O'Neill does, taking much the same license with artistic detail as he did in the first series with the appearance of the Nautilus.

Of the entire issue, the only real disappointment is the text feature, the first part of a record of the exploits of the earlier Leagues compiled by Mina Murray. In trying to match the writing style of the Edwardian era, Moore does something he's never done before: he's boring. Still, if the text story in the first series is anything to go by, Moore's slow-starters are often the best enders. Besides, it's in the preface to this record, written in the 1910s, that reference is made to Mina as "one of the two remaining members of the five-strong team assembled in the early months of 1898." Eep. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say - so don't grow too attached to these guys. The Martians are coming, and they're not taking prisoners.

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