Moore and O'Neil's latest installment of their now famous League (the hardback in the series), is visually splendorous but inevitably boring and poorly plotted. Moore gets lost in his references very early. As for Kevin O'Neil (the artist behind this adventure): well, he never fails to please as the artist behind LXG, and here is no exception--if you're solely for the art, well, go get this book.
In LXG Volume One, Moore sets his unique, humorous and decidedly adult twists on these pulp characters just as he adeptly links their worlds into a sprawling fictional universe. In LXG Volume Two, our old friends grow into the dangerous risks, possible loves, and superheroic potentials that Moore sets up--and they already seem like old friends by this point, if somewhat terrifying old friends. But where Moore's original Leagues seem like celebrations of old pulps and other fantastical tales, Black Dossier seems less a celebration and more an indulgence into Moore's impractical world views and towering intellect. And although Moore certainly has these former traits in spades, they are not, nor have they ever been the only things that make his work so transcendent, and perhaps more disappointing still: Moore is intelligent enough to know this, and he is neglecting his obligations as a story-teller in this book.
The Black Dossier in some ways is an ultimate reunion for his fans: at the end of Volume II Moore separates his age-defying lovers, Allan Quatermain (from King Solomon's Mines, among others) and Mina Murray (or Mina Harker, from Bram Stoker's Dracula), and here we find them lovers united and stronger in love than ever--but much to the failing of this volume, he leaves this far in the past, and begins with a vague explanation of the dangers that this couple now face. Stealing the Black Dossier, a hidden (if strangely neglected) file filled with Allan and Mina's past exploits, the couple flee from a stable of newly arranged Extraordinary gentlemen, a petulant, misogynistic, gadget-infested James Bond among them. And then Allan and Mina begin reading this Dossier, and when they open this folio so too must the reader, turning the page to find prose, postcards, illustrated books, and many other wonderful little mediums BESIDES comics within. And, as some of loyal Moore readers know, Moore is stuffy and a tad too purple when writing prose. When he writes his comics, these incredibly wordy and descriptive passage fall into his instructions for his artists, but here Moore crams and crams, and he is as dense, if not denser, than any of the mediums (and the popular writers in said mediums whom he emulates) which he works in. In Moore's other volumes he offered his prose as ancillary, if mildly entertaining backstories to his major throughlines. In Black Dossier, these subsections are in the majority, and though most do not exactly serve the plot (but do serve to hash out Moore's new characters, of which we don't care much about, because Moore hasn't properly introduced them to us in his comic), the reader will certainly be clueless unless they pay close attention. More often than not, however, I felt much like Allan Quatermain on first reading these lengthy gender-bending, sex-filled, and satire-filled passages: I fell asleep.
One immediately experiences the overwhelming sense that a host of esoteric penny-dreadful, pulp, and children's lit references are populating this world--a host of references that the average reader will have little knowledge of. And where Moore deftly engages his readers in finding out such things ONLY IF THEY WANT TO in his previous Leagues, here the reader is all but lost if they chose to skip the once optional subsections.
Moore's a master plotter, capable of juggling multiple story-lines and character-developments and twists and turns. We know this because we have read him doing it. And we also know Moore's exhaustive, beautiful implementations of research. But we also know Moore's literary, philosophical, and pomo metafiction tendencies.
Moore is at his best when checked by his propensity for the telling of a good yarn, and his love for visual storytelling: unfortunately, Moore's intelligence here gets the best of him, and though he throws in a token dose of action and sex for levity, he mainly mires under the crippling weight of trying to keep every single character of pulp fiction linked together, not in the potential for interesting dynamics between characters, or the occasional "low-minded" plot-point that makes most readers turn pages, and keeps most books (and especially comic books), as dynamic and compelling as they are.