REVIEW: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen : Black Dossier

On a list ranging from wearing a crown of thorns to getting a blow from Scarlett Johansson this is somewhere in the middle! –Slugtron

I bought this book several months ago and then put it at the bottom of my pile after looking at it because it seemed to be more novel than comic book, and didn’t have the same cast of characters that died in the last volume. I decided to pick it up after re-reading the Watchmen on account of that book is so brilliant, and also had a lot of writing in it without any pictures.

I have heard other people being afraid to read it for the same reasons that I had, and I have this to tell them, “Just trust Alan Moore, it’s definitely worth reading.”

The Black Dossier is essentially an amalgamation of short stories brilliantly bound together to tell a much cooler story. I found it to be extraordinarily hard to get into, but then once I got into it, I couldn’t put it down. The reason it was so hard for me to get into was that when reading the first few stories, I didn’t know why I was reading them. Eventually they began to make more sense, and I got much more into them, so I guess I would just give some advice to enjoy the stories for there own being, until you start to see the bigger picture, because there is one. In the words of Alan Moore, “Keep hat firmly on, lay back, and think of England.”

Although there are some stories that I never got, and I’m not about to go back and re-read, I blame it on the fact that Alan Moore is considerably smarter than me. This book is smart, and funny, and has some really good writing in it. It goes a long way to prove that Alan Moore is good at what he does. It contains one story that I think is brilliant called “The Life of Orlando” in witch it follows a character that baths in the fountain of youth, through the last 2000 years of history.

As some of you might know, this book comes complete with a set of 3-D glasses, which I think is a really cool idea. There are some terribly clever things that they do in the book to make you participate with the glasses and how you are reading, it caused me to utter the word “Awesome” a few times, but I also had a giant headache after I was done using them. So this book may not be for the faint of heart who is interested in an easy read, but ultimately it was a good addition to the series.

Dr. Cyborg Robot M.D. Attorney at Law -five, gives this book an incredible 115 stars out of an outstanding 156.