the Black Dossier?

[Joker]

that's ******ed...just call them volumes 3 and 4...jesus...

 

[C.F. Kane]

The idea is that the League volumes are going to be released in monthly issues, and the Black Dossier is a stand-alone graphic novel.

 

[Mladen]

man, its not going to be released (legally) outside the US.
RIP. OFF.

 

[DBM]

I bought this, but haven't read it yet. I just can't bring myself to read it though because I'm afraid it's awesomeness might actually hurt me. Maybe later today I'll get up the nerve to read it.

 

[Red Mask]

This is an outrage! No release outside of the U.S.A? It's intolerable!

 

[C.F. Kane]

A review of Black Dossier

Link

“The Black Dossier” - A Review

Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier has been hailed in some quarters as a masterpiece, in others as Alan Moore’s worst excesses all combined into a single dense volume. I’m not sure yet where I stand on this axis, but a few things about the book puzzled me.

- I realize that Moore’s taste for literary tomfoolery is well-known at this point, but I thought the grown man on page 56 clearly butt****ing a stuffed bear and referred to both as “Christopher” and “Robin” was fairly over-the-top. Yes, Alan Moore, we know, Victorian children’s literature is rife with sexual innuendo, blah blah Freud blah blah blah, we got it, okay? Christ, wasn’t three hundred pages of a Dorothy/Alice/Wendy tantric threeway in Lost Girls enough already?

- Likewise unsubtle was the photograph of Dan Didio on page 104 with a big handlebar moustache drawn on it and a crudely drawn word balloon saying “I like *****ing.” Really, was that necessary? I mean, it was kind of a stretch to suggest that Mina and Quartermain considered it “important evidence.”

- I know Moore enjoys references to other literary works, but including Anna Livia Plurabelle from Finnegans Wake is either Alan Moore bragging that he is the only person on the planet to have actually read Finnegans Wake all the way through and know what the **** it is about, or alternately Alan Moore lying about same, and I could have done without either.

- That having been said, I’m willing to bet that in Finnegans Wake, Anna Livia Plurabelle does not have sex with a mutant donkey space invader.

- The addition of The Outrageous Hitler-Man to the team smacks of smartassedness, as his only superpower is “the power to enrage.” Also, I’m not sure where the hell Moore is going to pretend that The Outrageous Hitler-Man’s literary roots lie, although I understand Jess Nevins claims that The OH-M is actually a seventeenth-century Welsh folktale. Of course, Jess Nevins also claims that Alan Moore doesn’t send him kickbacks, so, you know. Grain of salt.
- I’m still not sure why page 81 was edible.

- Everybody has already said their piece about the three-dimensional portion of the book, and I think the idea was clever and well-executed. Except for the one panel where a figure looking suspiciously like Alan Moore points at you and says “now YOU are part of the League, by proxy of imagination!” Honestly. Just sell fake membership cards like everybody else.

- Does Allan Quatermain have to speak in Victorian English all the way through the book? Towards the end of the book, when the setting is the 1960s, he starts to sound irritatingly like Mr. Burns. The reference to the Beatles “not being true vaudevillians” seemed kind of forced.

- I don’t have much criticism for Kevin O’Neill, who is rightfully acclaimed as a genius sort of artist. I didn’t even mind the pornographic woodcuts he kept hiding in the background, presumably at Moore’s insistence. However, I draw the line at hidden pictures of Twiki from the old Buck Rogers TV show.

- The first letter of every page in the book spells “**** you, Grant Morrison. Yeah, you heard me, **** you, Mister “God of All Comics.” I’m the man, not you. I’m the guy who’s won actual literary awards. All you’ve done is some rubbish non-linear narrative and rewritten some crap Superman stories from the Sixties. I ****ing ended the Superman story, right? “Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow?” I did that in a day and a half while I was high on coke. You heard me, you Scottish ****. Let’s see some Hollywood producer rape YOUR work and turn it into ****ty movies designed to lull people into a catatonic consumerist sleep.” I can’t help but think this is rude, even if it is horribly hard to find.

- Finally, although I understand the meaning is obviously one that’s supposed to be ironic, having a page labeled “How To Kill The Dreaded Nee-Gro” is just in poor taste, okay?

Other than that, though? Pretty good.

Okay, so it was sold out everywhere I looked. Come on, I’m probably pretty close.

Spoiler

I'll confess: it took me a bit before I realized that this was a joke

 

[Archangel]

Every single thing in that review sounds amazing. I really need to read this.

 

[C.F. Kane]

Every single thing in that review is a joke. Still, you could see Alan Moore doing all of those things, couldn't you?t:

 

[DBM]

This book was as amazing as I expected it to be. Moore never fails to deliver.

Something helpful when you're reading it. The Black Dossier Annotations:
http://www.shsu.edu/~lib_jjn/dossier.html

I consider myself well read and I didn't get half of the references in this thing. The Annotations page was really helpful.

 

[Joker]

I liked it, but I dont think it was as good as Volume's 1 or 2...James "Jimmy" Bond is awesome in it though

 

[Archangel]

Every single thing in that review is a joke. Still, you could see Alan Moore doing all of those things, couldn't you?t:

Aw, damn. I guess I should have actually looked at the link. But yeah, they totally sound plausible. I'm still excited to read it anyways, however.

 

[C.F. Kane]

Okay. So I live in Europe, and I ordered Black Dossier on the US Amazon site. And, it's about a week overdue. Should I be worried? If it's not being released legally outside the US would shipping authorities have any reason to confiscate it?

 

[Mladen]

Okay. So I live in Europe, and I ordered Black Dossier on the US Amazon site. And, it's about a week overdue. Should I be worried? If it's not being released legally outside the US would shipping authorities have any reason to confiscate it?

do you often order through amazon?
I live in australia, and I've usually had to wait for about two months for packages to arrive. This is why I stopped ordering through amazon.com

it may just be the regular delay. I've had a few packages opened and checked, but I think they're screening for drugs and illegal pornography.

 

[CaptainCanada]

Okay. So I live in Europe, and I ordered Black Dossier on the US Amazon site. And, it's about a week overdue. Should I be worried? If it's not being released legally outside the US would shipping authorities have any reason to confiscate it?

I live in Canada, and I just got mine; Amazon ships these things legally anywhere, so I wouldn't worry.

In general, I thought it was pretty good, although the "Where's Waldo?" literary references act can get tiresome after a while. Also notable for having more sex per page than your average Jean M. Auel novel.

 

[Aristotle]

This is an outrage! No release outside of the U.S.A? It's intolerable!

You could just have one of us send you a copy, and you pay us for it.

 

[Aristotle]

A review of Black Dossier

Link

Spoiler

I'll confess: it took me a bit before I realized that this was a joke

A testament both to that man's capacities for humor and to the monumentally bratty, egotistical, brilliant nature of Alan Moore.

 

[Aristotle]

In general, I thought it was pretty good, although the "Where's Waldo?" literary references act can get tiresome after a while.

That's half the fun of it, though, like T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," or trying to anticipate when Ice-T will show up on Law & Order: Brutal Rape Unit.

 

[Joker]

See, one of my problems with this one was I dont know much about literature from that time. I got most of the refferences in the first two volumes, but this one other than the main characters (Jimmy, Emma, etc) I had no god damn idea who anyone was.

 

[CaptainCanada]

That's half the fun of it, though, like T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," or trying to anticipate when Ice-T will show up on Law & Order: Brutal Rape Unit.

I hate "The Waste Land." It's a pretentious piece of utter crap.

Like I said, I enjoy some, but two-thirds of the things Moore references are to things almost nobody reads, or even knows about through cultural osmosis, and it gets to the point where it feels like he's just pointing out how much stuff he's read.