Alan MooreKevin O'Neill
Rather than go in-depth into all the references in the text, or even try to explain the non-existant plot of this book, I will write about what a massive waste of time it was. Art aside of course, Kevin O'Neill does fantastic work as usual. Even in the 3D section of the book. It's all presentation, though, all the unpleasantness lies in the story and the book design.
We all know Alan Moore is obsessed with his prose work and forces it into his sequential work. Sometimes it works fine (Watchmen) sometimes not so much (Black Dossier). Black Dossier is not enough prose to be a novel, and there's not enough sequential art to qualify as a comic book, and the result is tedious and hard to read. In theory, it's fun to write in the styles of different genres but in practice it comes off as phony and, god forbid, amateurish. This is particularly true in the "beatnik novel- The Crazy Wide Forever" (UGH!) section of the book. It's so cringe worthy it caused me to give up on the book, once. I really have no idea what happened in those five pages! This an error in design as well as pretentious writing. The mass paperback novels they are trying to imitate are usually about 4 inches wide, so that even though the text in crammed in the sentences are an easy to read ten or fifteen words long. The Black Dossier is much, much wider and the sentences are longer but the text is still crammed in (for authenticity!). It makes reading laborious!
The strange format doesn't just affect the design of the book, but the story shifts gears and doesn't feel like a LOEG story at all. Here's the plot- Mina and a young Allan Quartermain steal the Black Dossier from Vauxhall (Military Intelligence HQ) they take a detour to Greyfriars where they find out the members of the Big Brother party, and all English spies went to this same school, and then head to the Birmingham Spaceport, where they escape in a rocket to Dunbayne and they meet their contact and they travel to the Blazing World. They were chased by James Bond, and in the prose works we learn a lot about this England and all the incarnations of the LOEG, as well as in France and Germany. Mina and Allan are actually reading the book with you, so it's all impossibly boring!
Other than to meet indirectly the character of Orlando, and to introduce copious amounts of sex there's nothing in this book that is necessary reading to understand volumes 1 and 2 of LOEG! Nothing! The essays talk about anything from the creation of Gods to Shakespeare to erotic literature to Mina's first encounter with Nemo, and in the end you are left with jumbled images of a greater story. The worst sin is that Mina, Allan (and all the rest) KNOW they are "supernaturals" of this world. That they are special and magical, because of their adventures. The other books gave you the idea that these were regular folks whose infamous exploits were recorded in books (Mina mentions reading Quatermain's stories twice!) and in a world were EVERYONE is a literature character, why are they so special? It cancels the concept of LOEG! It make's it another fantasy story.
The other unpardonable thing Alan Moore does is waste the Orwell and Lovecraft mythos. Mina and Allan were in America during the Big Brother years which seemed to have been very easy to live through, and when they return to England in 1958, it's a society shaking off a few years of extreme socialist regime as if nothing really affected them. The Elder Gods are reduced to a few mentions here and there, and a hokey short story. Of all the times to NOT imitate genre, Alan Moore forgoes the heavy and paranoid writings of Lovecraft heroes for something light and stupid.
It would have been much better if Alan Moore had written two different stories each dealing with Elder Gods and Big Brother than this self serving mess.
