"I mean, let's face it, Jimmy. You're no Sidney Riley."

This will be old news to any comics fans in the audience, but last week I finally found the time to catch up with Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s most recent League of Extraordinary Gentlemen collaboration, The Black Dossier, which was recently published in paperback.

And I thoroughly enjoyed it too, I must say. Quite a different proposition from the two previous LOEG mini-series, it takes Moore’s penchant for multi-layered cultural cross-referencing to new heights, creating a book that works less as a conventional action/adventure yarn, and more simply as an obsessive matrix of imaginary interchanges between the whole spectrum of popular fiction up to the year 1958, as relatively short comics sections are used to string together a collection of lovingly realised alternate world literary pastiches and artefacts, covering everything from a fragment of a lost Shakespeare folio to an extract from Sal Paradyse’s groundbreaking beatnik novel “The Crazy, Wide Forever”.

So thick and fast is this manic referencing that the initial feeling of stupidity at not being able to pick up the origin of each passing character and location is swiftly put aside as you realise that scarcely anyone is liable to be well-read enough to grasp the whole lot (this list, though incomplete, proves helpful), and when, say, Wilhelmina Murray and Allan Quatermain pay a visit to the Birmingham Space Centre in their flight from a British Intelligence team that includes both 'Bulldog' Drummond and Emma Peel, you find yourself less concerned with whether they make it out alive, and more with whether or not Moore will manage to cram in a reference to Professor Quatermass and his Rocket Group (shockingly, he doesn’t, but here’s hoping the League get to make a visit to Hob’s Lane in some of the new escapades promised later this year).

Needless to say, in Moore’s capable hands, the whole thing is a cornucopia of wonders for any fan of weird fiction and popular culture, and highlights for me included some of Oliver Haddo’s occult musings, composed during his solitary retirement in Hastings, the epic, 3000+ year biography of the immortal Orlando, and Bertie Wooster getting into a tight spot with the Great Old Ones in “What Ho, Gods of the Abyss?”

Best thing of all though? – the well-deserved treatment dished out to a certain English spy who we’ll know simply as “Jimmy”:



(If you’re planning to pick up a copy of The Black Dossier, why not give Amazon the heave-ho, and help Page 45 or Gosh stay healthy?)