I've been putting this off for a while because not only am I so disappointed, but I'm actually
angry too. But last week I got my League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier Absolute Edition. A book, incidentally, which I've had on order for over two years!
Were this to be like an ordinary Absolute Edition, I wouldn't have minded the delay. Absolute Editions are absolutely beautiful and I sort of have two already. I have The
New Frontier Absolute Edition (which the
new DTV animation was based on) and while not labelled as an Absolute Edition (it was before the Absolute range was created) I have the 2003 JLA*Avengers crossover in a format that was the template for DC's Absolute range.
Absolute Books are oversized (about 30% bigger than normal tradepaperbacks/hard covers) and come in wonderful, thick, solid slipcases. In addition as well as including the comic book story pages, they also include substantial "behind the scenes" pages, with everything ranging from scripts to design sketches and annotations.
Like many of the Absolute editions, the JLA*Avengers crossover has all this behind the scenes stuff presented in a separate hardcover book placed alongside the story book inside the slipcase. This book looks at the history of DC/Marvel crossovers, has an essay on an earlier failed JLA*Avengers crossover which also reproduces all of the pencil work done at the time as well as the writers original outline submissions for each issue of the 2003 crossover, detailed annotations for each panel of the 2003 crossover story and a few
other essays.
The
New Frontier book is likewise housed in a wonderful slipcover, but because the comic book content is so big, it is only one book, but still features considerable behind the scenes content including again, annotations for each panel of the story as well as substantial design concepts and model sheets.
Previous LOG Absolute Editions have featured, like the JLA*Avengers book a second hardback book inside the slipcover with Alan Moore's complete comic book script reproduced.
The Black Dossier has none of this. Nothing. No extra behind the scenes material at all. It still comes in a slipcase, and is still oversized, but the book itself is painfully thin. In fact, it contains no extra content over the normal hardcover which was released over 6 months ago. That has 208 pages, this has 200 pages! They haven't even gone to the trouble of creating a
new cover for the Absolute Edition!
To make matters worse, being as the book is "full bleed" on many of it's pages, the binding on the Absolute Edition makes it incredibly hard to read content bleeding into the binding! This is not a problem I have with my two normal League of Extraordinary Gentlemen hard covers!
It all makes me feel foolish for waiting for the Absolute Edition to be published.
To add insult to injury, the book was solicited with the normal behind the scenes script book people have come to expect from a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Absolute Edition
and a vinyl record of a song written and composed by Alan Moore himself. I believe if you went to the Wildstorm website
after the Absolute Edition was published, it was still promising these features were in the book! But while previous, more substantial Absolute Editions have been priced at $75, this was prices at $100! Stupidly overpriced for what you get when the normal hardcover is only priced at $30!
As for the book, now that I've finally read it I'm of mixed mind. I can appreciate what Alan Moore was trying to do. You can say many things about Alan More, but he never gets himself stuck in a creative rut, and I do value him for that. Also, this isn't really a third volume, its like the segue between the "old" League of volumes 1 and 2 and the "
new" League which will be seen in the proper volume 3. This is also something Alan More and Kevin O'Neill have been very clear on, so again I can't really fault the book for that.
But it is a disappointment. There's far too much sex. Not that I'm against sex in literature and while upon first glance the LOG books are comic books, they also are (in my mind at least) 100% literature. The second volume had some sex in it, but the sex actually was part of the story. In this volume, sex is not only prevalent, but mostly without proper narrative reason. Secondly, and I do actually find this quite worrying, but personally I seem to have more knowledge and attachment to the Victorian literature "sandbox" than the 1950's in which the bulk of The Black Dossier takes place (although the second volume's almanac did expand its scope chronologically both before and after the Victorian era). I think this stems from the Victorian League being based on unquestionably timeless stories, while literature from the 1950's has in general has less impact on our culture.
