The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen

[poliphilo]

It's maybe not something you confess to in these parts but I'd never read a comic book before. At least not since I was nine. The comic book I tried to read then was a Western adventure. I loved westerns but this one floored me. It was partly because I didn't know how to read a book where the illustrations weren't illustrations but carried the text and partly because the story was more warped and adult than anything they showed on TV-  and ended on an image of a Boot Hill grave marker that was so creepy I couldn't bear to look at it.

45 years later I'm trying again.  I'm reading Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and thinking it's fab. It helps that, like Moore, I'm just crazy for all those late 19th century adventurer types. Allen Quartemain was my hero when I was about twelve and it's great to meet him again. I like it how his opium habit serves as a passpoirt from his morally-uncomplicated world to ours.

The story is fluff, but that's not the point, is it? The point is atmosphere. The point is dreamscape. Moore and O'Neill's mythic, steam-punk London is a place you could lose yourself in. And the dream goes deep. It's a collaborative work. The dreamers who have helped in the dreaming include Haggard, Doyle, Verne, Wells, Stoker, Dickens, Poe, Hogarth, Dore, Cruikshank, Phiz, Beardsley, Hokusai, Utamaro, Lang, Hitchcock  and- no doubt- all sorts of people I've never even heard of.

I've been wondering why it is that great comic books make lousy movies- and I think I've just hit on it. It's about speed. In a movie you have to go at the director's speed- which these days is insanely fast- while if you're reading a comic book you're going at your own speed and can pore over the pictures and pick up the cool details in the corners and let the ghosts in the text talk to the ghosts in your brain. To do justice to Moore and O'Neill's vision you'd want a director prepared to go at Bresson's pace or Ozu's and- well- that's just not going to happen, is it?

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen the movie. All I really know about it is that Sean Connery thought the director was an ass and that they fought a lot. The book is really rather fabulous.

[jfs.livejournal.com]

Don't for the love of all that is holy go see the movie if you've read the comic books and liked them.

Really.

It's an okay movie, but it's not in the same league as the comics, and makes changes that make no sense just for the sake of it.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the warning. I'll steer well clear.

[jfs.livejournal.com]

Unrelated to LXG, but related to comics, one of the things that Scott McCloud talks about in Understanding Comics is the gap between frames.

As he says; if we see a man raise an axe in frame 1, and we see it buried in someone's head in frame 2, we fill in the gap between the frames. Good comics play on that, using it to make the reader become invested in the story in a way that few film-makers or novelists do.

It's not better or worse, but it it something that's common in comic narrative and relatively rare in other ouvres.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

So the reader of the comic becomes as it were a co-creator- imagining the action he/she hasn't been shown?

Yes, that's a very good point.

[jfs.livejournal.com]

Exactly - at the very least, a good comics artist can draw the reader in deeply by offering this co-creation.

Doesn't happen in all comics - but then not every film-maker is a Hitchcock.

[senordildo.livejournal.com]

Connery apparently objected to Quartermain being a drug addict, and things just went downhill from there. Too bad it's his last film--I always wanted to see him in King Lear, but he wasted his last years in the movies.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Is that it? Then Connery is a chump.

I've always thought Connery's film career was underwhelming. For someone who's been around so long and appeared in so much he's made very few first rate movies.

[senordildo.livejournal.com]

The same could be said of many old school film stars, such as Clark Gable, the one Connery probably resembles most. But I went and looked on imdb to refresh my memory, and Connery appeared in a handful of pretty good films: From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, Marnie, The Hill, The Offence, Zardoz, The Wind and the Lion, The Man Who Would Be King, Robin and Marian (one of my favorites), Time Bandits, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and The Russia House. The problem is that his choices within the last two decades have been truly poor. (They still are--I think he made a mistake by refusing to appear in the upcoming Indiana Jones film.)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I agree about Robin and Marian; that's my favourite Connery film. And you've left out the Untouchables.

But there are good films and there are films that are better than good- films that define the zeitgeist- and- apart from the early Bonds- I don't think Connery has ever appeared in one of those.

[senordildo.livejournal.com]

I think riding the zeitgeist once is good enough--like Gable, Connery did it once. It's hard to think of many movie stars who did so repeatedly, especially since when we look back at a star's best films, we often do so out of their original context. Jimmy Stewart did so a few times, but even in his case, films like Vertigo or The Naked Spur weren't regarded as zeitgeist-shaping movies at the time of their release. In retrospect that we look at them as genre classics.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Vertigo may not have made much of a splash when it was first released, but it's now regularly voted one of the greatest movies of all time. Stewart had at least three distinct personae- the all-American everyman, the western hero, and the screwed-up sonofabitch he played for Hitchcock. For me he's the actor of the century.

I don't think there's anything in Connery's back-catalogue (alas) that's going to be reassessed the way Vertigo has been.