Let me be frank: There is no real critical point to this weekly endeavor, other than my own amusement. Comparing comic books to one another because they were released in the same week is arbitrary, and my tastes are so arcane and capricious that not only is objectivity impossible, but the possibility of me being consistent in my subjectivity beggars reason as well. That’s life for you: Confounding, arbitrary, maddening and endlessly entertaining in its unpredictability.
But believe me when I tell you that this week more than any other the dice were loaded, the deck was cut falsely, there was a magnet under the roulette table and that man standing behind you was a telepath reading your cards and projecting images to me of the most mathematically probable hands you could play before you played them. Which is to say, there’s no way in any incarnation of the Multiverse that anything other than Century: 1969, the new chapter of Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, was going to be the best thing I read this week. I’ve waited a long time (has it been two years?) for this book to come out, and every one of my expectations was trumped. Alan Moore is the Black Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, popping up when you least expect it and altering everyone’s perception of reality, and then disappearing back to wherever it is legitimate geniuses go when they’re not breaking our brains open like Easter eggs.
This issue tackles England in 1969, and in true Alan Moore fashion, he exalts the hippies and their free drugs and freer love attitudes even as he shows how their utopian ideal was filtered through the uglier side of human nature. Briefly (looks up at the preceding, shakes head in exasperation), Mina Harker, Allan Quatermain and Orlando exit the Burning World and enter a hedonistic perversion of Swinging London, where notorious British gangsters the Kray Brothers hang out with Basil Thomas (this world’s Brian Jones, original Rolling Stone) while Oliver Haddo (Somerset Maugham’s fictionalized version of Aleister Crowley) is attempting to birth a new moon calf (host body for his spirit) so that he can continue his long-reaching plan to hatch the Anti-Christ. The Purple Orchestra (Rolling Stones) concert in Hyde Park commemorating the death of Basil/Brian will be the culmination of the ritual, and it’s up to our trio to puzzle that all out and then stop it.
But that’s not all, because this is a Moore and O’Neill production. Dozens upon dozens of sly verbal and visual references, call-backs to earlier stories and sight gags cram every inch of art and leak out of the dialogue. Century: 1969 is a palimpsest, with multiple stories happening underneath and behind our main tale. Look for Marty Feldman, Michael Moorcock, Michael Moorcock’s creation Jerry Cornelius, daleks, and characters from Victorian fairy tales; pay attention to the references to Monty Python, Jack Parsons, Rosemary’s Baby, the Boris Karloff film “The Black Cat” and many other familiar-yet-not-quite-placeable pieces of pop culture ephemera. If I had to guess, I’d say I caught about 30% of what Moore and O’Neill hid in plain sight. There are things I recognized immediately, like Andy Capp in a crowd shot, but I didn’t quite understand why they were there. Good ol’ Andy was in the last volume of the book, which was set in 1910. Is his repeat appearance supposed to be a commentary on the timelessness of the Northern British working class, or does O’Neill just like drawing him in crowds? Either way, it matters.
And I have a theory about why the Mick Jagger stand-in here is called “Terner;” Mick released a single called “Memo from Turner” — actually he released two versions of it, one with Brian Jones and one without. “Memo from Turner” is about a psychopathically violent man reveling in the senseless carnage of his lifestyle, but there also seems to be some mockery of the lifestyle as well. So, a song with two meanings exists in two versions — very Alan Moore — and both feature Mick wearing another persona. Is the character in Century: 1969 named Terner as a nod to this dual single, or is he supposed to embody a further perversion of the fictional character, Turner? Again, in a work as layered with meaning as this, interpretation is everything. How you make sense of just one detail such as this will shape how you read the story.
These treats are not strewn about for fancy’s sake — they’re puzzle pieces you have to fit together to see the bigger picture of Century’s arc, they enhance the story’s sense of place, and they presage what’s to come in the next installment, whenever it shows up. Honestly, I don’t care when it shows up — if it takes Moore and O’Neill years to make something like this, give them years. It’s absolutely and entirely worth the wait. They’re making art, a seamless union of facts and fictions that reflects a truth about humanity and society, and that truth is this: The people with the most ambition are the people you’d least want to succeed in their ambitions. No, wait; the truth is that there’s always a little nugget of rot inside every good thing. No, that’s not entirely it either; the rot is systemic, but people make the systems so people can fight the rot and succeed where the system fails. The more I look, the more I find — and then there’s the whole modern magick element of the story that leaks into the real world; as I typed “the more I look, the more I find,” Rory Gallagher’s “Wheels Within Wheels” came on the stereo. This moment of synchronicity was foreseen by Alan Moore decades ago; at least I think it was. And that’s what the Century story does to you. You begin connecting it to points in your own life, trying to use it as a lens to make clear sense of this arbitrary, mundane and magical world we all inhabit.
You see? Century: 1969 is so densely constructed and richly detailed that you can keep finding meanings behind each meaning you find. It is a work of graphic literature that appears in comic book format because this is the only way this story could be told. There is nothing else out there in the wide worlds like it, and for that I’m grateful. The most fantastic element about it is it took me the better part of an hour to read it, and as soon as I was done I had a driving urge to read the entire series straight through to this issue again so I could see what I gleaned on the journey this time.
-Paul
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