Alan Moore talks, pt. III

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Ripping Yarns

Initially, the idea was pretty much what it looked like: let's take a group of Victorian adventurers and put them together in this rip-roaring, swash-buckling period adventure. And, so, we chose our six, five or six favorites victoria adventurers.

Captain Nemo

When we looked at Captain Nemo we discovered that, actually, he didn't look anything like James Mason in the Walt Disney versions, that in Jules Vernes original novel; or at least by the time Jules Verne had written The Mysterious Island, which was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea sequel. He decided that Nemo was an Indian prince, Prince Daka, wich, i've never realized before, an it certally gave a completely new vision of Captain Nemo and of the Nautilus; me and Kevin had a great deal of fun working in Indian design into the Nautilus so that we could have that marvellous dancing Shiva steering wheel that Kevin came up with.

The Invisible Man

When it came to characters like Griffin, the invisible man. Again, we went back to the originals and extrapolated from them. The original man, Griffin, is a psycopath. He's got Megalomeniac dellusions of ruling the world. Which, thrughout the first book, we don't make Griffin a very plesant character. By the second book he's powered-up with the martians, which I figured was natural because they were both writen by the same bloke, in the hope that this will give him supremacy over the world.

The Honourable Mr. Hyde

As we went on with the series I began to become very, very fond of Mr. Hyde. I think that is one of the best bits of characterisation that i've done lately, um, because I started to find him kind of admirable in that he actually understands the situation. He knows that he's a monster, that's just what he is, he's not lying about anything, he's being completely honest and straight-forward; in some way's he's got a much clearer grasp of the situation and a much more honorable sort of intentions than Dr. Jekyll had, so, yeah, there was something, after a bit of thought on these characters, elements that started to come forward.

Quartermain

Actually H. Rider Haggard makes Quartermain a very practical man who is not keen to be killed or injured. Most of the violence in King Solomon's Mines is meeted out by his native friend Umbopa and also Allan does have a predilection for drug abuse. There are a number of H. Rider Haggard stories where he takes this mysterious drug called Tuduki which enables him to travel into past encarnations, so, if the source of Tuduki had dried-up it didn't seem to me inconceivable that Allan Quartermain might wander into Opium adiction and be found half-dead in some drug-den in Cairo.

Collaboration with Kevin O'Neill

Kevon can be rellied upon to take my most extreme ideas an upsetting two or three stages further which is what makes him such a delight to work with. When I first came across Kevin's work, which was in 2000 A.D., back in the late seventies, I was immediately attracted to it, and, after a while of reading that particular comic, I started to get the impression that Kevin's style had been kind-of ghetto-ised, that there was a kind-of recieved wisdom around Kevin's work that, oh yeah, he's a great artist but only of funny, cartoony stuff and only on robots or aliens, for god's sake gon't give him a normal human being to draw because he's not up to it, which I didn't actually think it was true and I could always see in Kevin just this incredible flare for the grotesque that, seemed to me, to go back to the great english caricaturists and political satirists like Gilray and Howgarth, I thought that Kevin was probably in that class, in his willingness to go in for wild exagerations, in the stylishness of the way his art looked.

The ONLY artist for the league

Once I had the idea of Kevin O'neill drawing them, I simply couldn´t see anything else that would have that humor, that intensity, that sense of exaggeration, that stylissness, you know?, he was the only artist for the book, and I think he was a bit surprised, to start with, because he was being called upon to draw things that he hadn't been called upon to draw before. But once something klicked, then he was off and running, is, I think that the material that, I mean, I know I would think this, Because I have invested in press, but I genuinely do think that the material that Kevin has done on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is the best material that he's ever done.