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Legends unite for a new take on the Victorian boy's own adventure genre.

Comics legends Alan 'Watchmen' Moore and Kevin 'Nemesis The Warlock' O'Neil unite some legends for a new take on Victorian boy's own adventures in the The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volume 1.

"Alan Moore knows the score" - Pop Will Eat Itself.

Extraordinary crimes against the Empire require the services of extraordinary avengers – and they don’t come much more so than this band of characters plundered from the pages of some of the most widely read literary ‘standards’ of the twentieth century.

Created by Alan Moore (the critically acclaimed author of Swamp Thing, Watchmen, From Hell, V For Vendetta, Lost Girls, Tom Strong and Supreme, among many others) and artist Kevin O'Neill (best known in the UK for 2000 AD’s Nemesis the Warlock, Metalzoic, early Ro-Busters and The ABC Warriors), ‘The League’ is a truly ‘extraordinary’ invention.

Avengers Assemble!

The League members are each staunch individualists - outcasts in fact - with chequered pasts and singular gifts that have been both a blessing and curse. Now they must learn to trust each other and work as a team for the very hope of civilization.

The premise of the original six part series follows the formulation of a group of special operatives assembled by Her Majesty’s (Queen Victoria that is – this is all set in an alternative steam punk British Empire of 1898 that never was) Military Intelligence Division. Their mission: to protect said Empire - and it’s subjects - from all manner of undesirable villains, each utilising their unique abilities.

Effectively creating a Victorian superhuman team in the mould of The Justice League (or, as this is Britain we’re talking about here, more properly modern hero team The Establishment, or the loose amalgam of UK-based superheroes from the pages of 2000AD’s Zenith – with it’s villains, the extra-dimensional Lloigor stalking straight out of the pages of H.P Lovecrafts’ Cthulu Mythos stories. Moore gives the readers of the comic book a first class ride through high adventure in an era that’s passed into the culture through films, television, books and comics – populated by some of the best characters ever written.

The tried and tested method of the superhero team-up has been a staple of the comics industry dating back over 50 years with the likes of X-Men, Justice League and (TV’s) The Avengers being among the most notable. What makes The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen stand out is the fact that the group of heroes (if they can be classed as such, some of them are distinctly anti-heroic, both here and in their original incarnations) are characters that inhabited the fictional worlds of authors including: H.G Wells, Jules Verne, H. Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker.

What Mr. Moore gives us is effectively the predecessor of more recent superhero teams. The closest current work doing this sort of thing in another way – transposing the time scale to the 1940s and the present day – is Mike Mignola’s Hellboy comic book. Well worth a look if the League fires your interest. In particular if you like the gibbering cyclopean horror of the aforementioned Lovecraft – and without having to wade through his legendarily stodgy prose!

Wearing its influences heartily on its’ sleeves, the graphic novel ends with a taster of things to come – just as the League think their troubles are over and the case is closed strange cylinders appear in the skies headed for the Earth, seemingly from Mars. Could it be that these legends of fiction are set to face off against Wells’ Martian war machine? Only time (and the next volume of the collected edition) will tell!

But who exactly are these character that stand between the British Empire and its foes. The thin (extraordinary) line looks like this:

Miss ‘Mina’ Wilhelmina Murray (played in the film by the star of TV’s La Femme Nikita, Peta Wilson): The beautiful but frosty leader of the League, the ex-wife of Jonathan Harker, and the victim of an attack by a bloodthirsty foreign count. Mina habitually wears a scarlet neck scarf to hide her horrific injuries. In Moore’s incarnation Mina initially regards Quatermain as a great hero, having read about his exploits in her youth – but becomes disenchanted upon finding him a fallen hero - almost unrecognisably wrecked - in an opium den. Wilhelmina originally appears in Bram Stoker’s famous novel Dracula

Allan Quatermain: The once celebrated colonialist and explorer, now an elderly, bereaved father and husband. This man of action is in something of a decline - addicted to opium and laudanum, Moore writes him as a post-heroic, fallible figure, unreliable to start with, but who comes through as a natural action man when thrust into danger.

Created by the novelist H. Rider Haggard (She), the character of Quatermain originally appeared in one of the classic ‘darkest Africa’ books - King Solomon’s’ Mines - as well as in the sequel Allan Quatermain. Played by former James Bond Sean Connery in the film Quatermain is a grizzled jolly good chap, even in his declining years. Upon being found by Mina at the start of the book’s first issue, Quatermain - though in an opium haze – reflexively saves Mina from attack at the hands of a mob, with lethal consequences

Captain Nemo: Former rebel of the British Empire and her allies, naval captain of the gigantic futuristic submarine 'Nautilus' – his own invention, many decades ahead of the technology of even this steam punk vision of Victoriana. A technological genius and devout follower of the goddess Shiva, Nemo is a brooding mysterious figure who spends a great deal of his time cloistered away on the Nautilus. He is mistrustful of – and a natural enemy of – this British Empire upon which the sun never did set. As he says when asked about his loyalties at one point (referring to the real-world events of the Indian Mutiny – or Sepoy War - of 1857, when Indian soldiers tried to expel the British from India) "The mutineers may have surrendered. I did not."

Created by Jules Verne, Nemo first appeared in the much-loved, much-filmed novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and later in the follow-up Mysterious Island. Traditionally portrayed as an anti-hero figure, he remains so here – but it is his skills as a master scientist that help the League triumph against impossible odds when aboard the villain’s flying vessel at the very climax of their adventure – for it is his implausibly rapid firing harpoon machine guns that they come to rely on in some of their stickiest moments.

Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde: The timid, pale scientist, specialising in chemistry. Jeckyll fled England after being linked to a series of mysterious deaths in Edinburgh and Whitechapel were linked to his mysterious accomplice, the violent beast-like Mr. Hyde.

Tracked down in Paris, with the aid of a local detective – and subdued (he’s in his Mr. Hyde persona – and in the midst of a murderous spree, which only comes to an end when his ear is shot clean off and he falls from a high building). Jeckyll lacks confidence and avoids trouble – chiefly concerned with whether he’ll be able to revert to his own self after each period as Hyde, he changes into his alter-ego with little provocation. Created by Robert Louis Stevenson, the scientist with the evil doppelganger first appeared in The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde

Professor Hawley Griffin: Amoral scientist and pioneer of invisibility, using a powerful but dangerous serum. Allegedly ran amok in Sussex after making himself invisible in 1897. The professor escaped being killed by a lynch mob when an earlier 'experiment' - an invisible albino man - was mistaken for the professor himself

Extrovert, arrogant and quite insane from using his own serum Griffin’s original appearance was in H.G Wells’ celebrated scientific romance, The Invisible Man. Allan Moore paints the man as a twisted, murderous wretch, who thinks nothing of senselessly killing a uniformed constable after infiltrating a secret meeting, using his invisibility to cut a man’s throat, or to carry out a series of unseen rapes. A thoroughly unpleasant grotesque character Griffin is far less sympathetic a character in Wells’ original novel.

Campion Bond: Rotund, oily, cigarillo smoking employee of HM Military Intelligence division 5. Bond can be jovial to the point of annoying

'M': Bond's superior. The League’s enigmatic recruiter is an elderly, hawk like man of vast intellect. Possibly links to powerful secret societies, M is perhaps best summed up by the phrase ‘polite, but sinister’

The 'Doctor': The ruler of the Limehouse gangs. Powerful, cunning and cruel, very little is known about the man from the Far East, a possibility that he may be the notorious Fu Manchu – who first appeared in the Sax Rohmer novels

Dorian Gray: Oscar Wilde’s seemingly ageless, doomed hero Dorian Gray, from his novella The Picture Of Dorian Gray

Here’s what critics have been saying about previews of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen:

"It’s Alan Moore, its fun, it’s clever, it’s beautifully illustrated, it’s excellent." - Enigma

"Alan Moore writes comics...and Picasso painted a bit...Immensely enjoyable. 5 stars." - Uncut

"Elevates the medium to the level of an artform." - Q

"The godfather of British comics." - The Independent

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume 1 is available now as a graphic novel in a new Kevin O’Neil cover, containing the complete first six issues of the comic. Included in this edition is a brand new text short story, - Allan and The Sundered Veil – which is illustrated in a very Strand Magazine style with occasional black and white drawings by Kevin O’Neil - which pitches the Quatermain character into a dream worlds scenario of parallel worlds where all is not as it seems – and he encounters H.G Wells’ unnamed Time Traveller from the novel The Time Machine. Also included in the collected edition is a gallery of the original and variant comic book covers from the first six issues and a new introduction from author Alan Moore.

The film version of the comic opens 17 October. You can read a feature about the film version here. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume 1 is published by America’s Best Comics, available in the UK from Titan Books.

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