During the Stockholm SPX this weekend I got hold of the latest League of Extraordinary Gentlemen book, Century: 1910, habitual Alan Moore oniomaniac that I am.

Upon first reading, I am somewhat underwhelmed, even if the artist and author are visibly having a ball with the contrafact, pre-war period piece.

This doesn’t detract from the fact that Moore and O’Neill are probably the best collaborative team working in comics right now. However, this being the first of three books under the Century header, there are many plot lines left hanging by the last page.

1910 further investigates some of the vast continuity that Moore and O’Neill mine from pulp literature, and I won’t pretend to catch even 10 per cent of the references to different fictional events or characters.

Many of the references I did get were (disappointingly) pointing right back to other parts of Moore’s œuvre: most obviously the Threepenny Opera by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, from which the author lifted the Black Freighter motif in Watchmen.

Weil and Brecht’s “opera” serves as a skeleton for the main plot, Moore fitting his own players into several of the parts. Mack the Knife becomes a latter-day Jack the Ripper and the delusions of poor Pirate Jenny is turned into the very real prospect of a quite different Jenny.

Even a twice fictionalized Aleister Crowley makes an appearance, or manifestation if you will, and I’m quite sure that’s the esteemed Iain Sinclair appearing as the Prisoner of London. Sinclair is thanked in the credits, anyway.

Crowley has played a major role in Moore’s magical thinking, as well as that of most Western dabblers in magic, and has appeared personally in at least From Hell and Promethea. Other Crowley/Moore connections may elude me at the moments.

Sinclair’s epic poems about London, and specifically the Whitechapel murders, were source material for From Hell, and Moore has on several occasions praised him for his visionary transtemporal writings that precede Moore’s own magic manifestations like The Birth Caul or Snakes and Ladders by decades.

If the Brecht/Weill seems somewhat dominantly out of place, it is likely because Moore is using large quotations from the lyrics as characters burst into singing, with notations circling the balloons to make sure the reader gets the point.

It’s not as bad as it may sound, taking into consideration the overall solidity of the book. Still, it is such an incongruently mixed media that it lessens the impact of Pirate Jenny’s revenge fantasy come to life.

As opulent as Threepenny Opera can be, it does not come across at max effect in this treatment, and it represents an uncommon miscalculation of the author’s tools of the trade on Moore’s part.

A thing that has naturally faded since the first two collections of LoEG is of course the Jules Vernean steampunk technology displayed as early as the fist pages of vol. one.

Sure, there is still weird science in abundance but one might expect it to be a bit more advanced by the early twentieth century. Of course, that is more dictated by the pulp works of the time than by logical progression.

As has been the case since vol. two, the things that do point onward and out from the familiar tropes are mostly contained in the text piece at the end.

A palaeolithic man presents to a woman, Bio (probably a reference I don’t get) the shattered remains of an obsidian stele. Originally of the dimensions 2x4x9, I’d hazard.

And to some delight for those like me, who are sad to see the Victorian elements of the first two volumes disappear on the horizon, the same text piece also features Captain Universe, a hint that in due time Moore and O’Neill will perform the slightly askew LoEG parlor magic on the superhero canon.

All in all a good read but so full of unanswered questions that it can’t be properly reviewed until the Century cycle has run its course.

Much like that other work of pop literary cross reference, Warren Ellis’ and John Cassaday’s Planetary, previous volumes of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen have been notoriously, chronically late for publication.

Hopefully the publishers of this edition have made sure to buffer enough material to ascertain a more or less steady publication schedule!