Original art for THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN (2003), by Tym Stevens.
A digital graphic homage to The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, by writer Alan Moore and artist Kevin O’Neill.
I write reviews for films, and create an original piece of art for each one.
Review of THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN (2003), by Tym Stevens ©
Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s series of graphic novels are actually the long arc of one extraordinary woman through all pop culture.
Phillip Jose Farmer posited that classic literary action heroes existed in a shared universe in his Wold Newton books. Moore and O’Neill expanded this to a reality where all of literature actually happens concurrently; their stories center around a Victorian “Justice League” of The Invisible Man, Mr. Hyde, Alan Quatermain, and Capt. Nemo, led by Mina Murray of “Dracula“. Mina is the narrative throughline that threads across a century of eras, characters, genres, source media, and styles.
The creators essentially have fun reexamining modern hero archetypes from their primal roots in books, strips, pulps, comics, serials, films, and TV. Theirs is a celebration of where everything came from, and subversively, what else can be done with it. Besides reverently adopting period styles, and weaving a complex tapestry of in-jokes and cameos, they challenge and upend both the inherent biases in the sources as well as readers assumptions about their conventions.
Farmer opened a door to many elseworlds. Nicholas Meyer’s book “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution” teamed Sherlock Holmes with Freud within actual Victorian history. Warren Ellis and John Cassady’s ‘Planetary‘ comics refracted 20th century pop genres into one funhouse mythos. The film adaption of The League of Extraordinary Gentleman (2003) was a failure: the creators skipped reading the source material to crank out a clumsy formula action film centered on Sean Connery that missed all the points. But this was balanced out by the TV series ‘Penny Dreadful‘, which got it more right with surrogates: like Mina, Eva Green leads a team of Victorian tropes against overarching evils. (The show could also have been called ‘The League of Universal Monsters’, or maybe ‘The League of Extraordinary Coincidence’!) And Paul Malmont’s novels “The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril” and “The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown” team up ’30s and ’40s Pulp writers for adventures in the style of their own work.
Artwork and Review, © Tym Stevens.
Review on Four Color Films site.
