Anthony Rintala, Eclectrician
One of the rising arguments in support of the sequential art style popularized
by comic books and graphic novels is not merely a genre of storytelling but a
medium of its own. Supporters of this medium’s “neither fish nor fowl” approach
to storytelling in the twenty-first century argue that it operates at the
overlap between text and image that most relates to readers’ media relationship
with the world. If you can absorb the internet, you know how to read comics, and
if you can make comics work for you, you can become more savvy to the narratives
of mass media, he has argued. In his textbook-slash-love letter to sequential
art, Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud explains, in fact, how the
majority of the work of reading the medium takes place in “the gutter,” the
blank space visually separating any two frames. In the gutter between one panel
in which a gun is drawn and a second where a figure clutches its chest, it is
the reader who creates the thunderclap gunshot, the muzzle flash, the whip-pan
tracking of a camera, the sense of surprise, the thud of impact, and the spray
and then spread of blood. McCloud argues that only the reader can make any two
logically unrelated images cohere into narrative. This interactive storytelling
takes place multiple times per page of any comic book, with little of the
expositional signposts on which film or traditional text are so reliant.
In discussing the methodology of sequential storytelling, critics and fans will
inevitably reference Alan Moore’s body of work. Not only have some of his books
been held up as benchmarks of the medium, but his major works of the 1980s (a
cycle consisting of his collaboration with various artists on MiracleMan,
Swamp Thing, Watchmen, and V for Vendetta) are given
credit for reinvigorating the art and changing the demographics of who actually
reads comics. He is also often marked as a high-water line before the
appreciation of the more mature themes and styles he helped popularize inspired
the following generation of writers, artists, and publishers to spiral down
toward the lowest common denominator. Alan Moore is one of the creators both
noted and blamed for making comic books “dark.” The revolution he helped
inspired in plotting, content, and characterization within the medium has come
to overshadow the still-remarkable efficiency he has at working so closely with
an artist that the gutter is so enjoyable and rich an area for an reader to
work, utilizing visual and textual leitmotifs to span the gaps between drawn
panels as often as cause-and-effect or mere logic.
This is one of the reasons, perhaps, that The League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen, Moore’s long-running collaboration with Kevin O’Neill,
translated so poorly into a movie. Beneath the whimsy of its surface elements
and central concept—characters from Victorian-era literature team up into a team
of super-spies—there is a remarkable complexity to how the story can be read. Of
course, Hollywood will find its own lowest common denominator and focus on
action, décolletage, and special effects instead of committing to a Technicolor
celebration of the very concept of British story along with what is now a
thirteen-year mash-up of everything that Moore and O’Neill have learned about
comic art experimentation.
Century: 1969 is the proposed penultimate book of the Century
stories, following 2009’s Century:1910, and also of this rich
collaboration, which has also included the first two complete series (the former
relating the League’s defeat of a scheme by Moriarty and Fu Manchu; the latter,
their actions during The War of the Worlds), and The Black Dossier,
a multi-textual series of short pieces of the League’s twentieth century
adventures which included, for example, one story in which On the Road’s
Dean Moriarty—here, in the manner of the League stories, revealed
to be a descendent of Professor Moriarty—fighting the shuggoths of H.P.
Lovecraft’s Cthulu Mythos stories, written in a loving pastiche of
Keruoac’s voice. Part of the joy of modern comic book storytelling is the
interconnected narrative built from decades of stories in a persistent world. An
issue of a Batman comic this month will connect to last month’s but may also
connect to a Superman story from 1957. A reader finds that knowing all of the
stories benefits each new one experienced. Single stories may take years to
tell, one chapter at a time. What Moore and O’Neill have done is to recreate
that connectivity by hijacking all of fiction and placing those stories into the
world of the League in a way that has roughly matches our own historical
narrative, often by transposing historical figures with their fictional
surrogates. So, Century: 1969 finds England still scarred by a World
War II fought against its world’s version of Adolph Hitler, Adenoid Hynkel from
Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, who brought Germany to power by
turning it into the perfect, soulless city-state of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.
The summer of love in Swinging London witnesses not the awakening of England
from decades of conservative repression following the war but from decades of
INGSOC repression because 1984 actually took place in 1948. One panel
of this book involves a reverse shot of what a character is watching on TV and
it is a vortex of references to Rolling Stones songs, the original The Flash
comics, Flash Gordon serials, the deaths of Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix, and
other references wrapped into a succinct, cruel pun as though they were all one
and the same.
This density of context is what sets the League stories apart from
their peers. The deceptively simple plot involves our heroes trying to stop
Satanic magician Oliver Haddo from possessing rock star Terner during a concert
at Hyde park. Except that our heroes are the gender-swapping Orlando who has
been associated with the League since Spencer’s Queen Gloriana (a fairy who
fills the space of our Elizabeth I) first formed the League; Mina Murray, whose
life was extended by her assault by Dracula; and a chemically rejuvenated Allan
Quartermain, each of whom have been assuming various personas to disguise their
immortalities. They have also found the pop culture-influenced world stage alien
to their hard-cover mindsets. Haddo, an avatar of Alestair Crowley from
Maugham’s The Magician, has been possessing the bodies of all of the
literary Satanic magicians of the twentieth century in turn as he jumps from
body to body. Terner is blatantly Mick Jagger, or rather, both Jagger and a
character that he was playing in the film Performance. Hyde Park was,
of course, named after Edward Jeckyll’s alter-ego, who died fighting Martians in
an earlier episode of this very story. And these are just the more obvious
references. Every character, item, and concept is a mash-up of literary,
cinematic, musical, or pop arts and each panel is chock-a-block with colorful
references to stories the reader will recognize or that no one ever should. It
is no wonder that a series of books has been published that does nothing but
annotate these stories. What is fascinating is that the curator and editor of
these, Jess Nevins, is able to make these annotations almost as fascinating as
the books themselves. One rack of pornographic magazines in the foreground of
one panel provides pages of annotations which lay out which character from which
short-lived British comic strip is being referenced in each title.
What is splendid about the League series is how well this dense
contextual referencing works in the gutter. O’Neill’s art on the series once
most strongly evoked the cartoons from the Victorian paper, Punch, but
here has come to incorporate the various caricaturing styles of Mad Magazine.
Recognizing Michael Caine’s character from Get Carter based on
O’Neill’s illustration adds much to the character called “Mr. C-,” especially
once it becomes clear that the character is also filling the role of Moore’s own
classic creation, paranormal investigator and professional bastard John
Constantine. Mr. C- changes the progress of everyone’s plans for reasons
explained in the text but also because he is a surrogate to so many British
anti-heroes; in the Swinging London of Century: 1969, all British gangsters are
metafictional avatars of the real world’s Ronnie Kray, the original British hard
man archetype. The richness of this referential mélange changes based on what
the individual reader brings to these scenes and the work done connecting them
in the spaces in between panels. Mr. C- intervenes both for his own reasons and
because of what he symbolizes.
Sequential art is a medium that contains the
tools for endless stylistic experimentation, but its friction between narrative
and sensory appeal make it work like poetry more so than prose. The concept of a
reader’s complicity in making the gutter rich work is very close to the process
to internalizing a poem in order to interpret it. One of the joys of Alan
Moore’s career has been his own experimentation with the similarities between
these forms and, with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, he and Kevin
O’Neill have created their own version of the symbolist modern poetry. With this
latest, and penultimate, book, they have created something like the “The Dry
Salvages” portion of T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets. There is a density and
beauty to that poem that is internal and unique that expands exponentially the
more closely you read the other three linked poems, the more you read of Eliot,
the more you read of poetry, the more you read, and the more you are part of the
world. Century: 1969 is a personal map through the art and culture of the last
century that ruminaties on the erosive effects of cultural change and the
personal debt individuals accrue when they try to keep up with modernity. In
addition, it makes a powerful argument for the possibilities of its still-young
medium.
