Sometimes something is so good that you can't get past it. And sometimes that's a bad thing, because, for instance, the second side of Sabbat's 'Dreamweaver' album is superb but I was always too wrapped up in side A to ever flip the record over to listen to it. Sometimes, however, it's a good thing because it isn't easy, for instance, to remember what happened in the second half of 'Full Metal Jacket'. For most of our memories, it ended with Vincent d'Onofrio dead in the shower. This book falls somewhere in the middle, because the first volume of 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' was so outstanding that any writer would be hard pressed to follow it and even the great Alan Moore couldn't catch lightning in a bottle once more.

The good news is that he doesn't really try. Instead, he changes the tone. For all the betrayal and doubt in the first volume, it was generally a positive book. The heroes are, for the most part, Doing the Right Thing, even if they're hardly without their own failings. The bad guys are defeated and the future is an opportunity. We surely leave the book with the British Empire in a better condition than it was in when we started reading. That's emphatically not something that can be said for this second volume, even if we successfully defeat the Martians in the central War of the Worlds.

And, of course, that's only the first reference to Victorian literature that we're going to encounter. The first human face we see belongs to Gullivar Jones, from the book by Edwin Arnold, a 1905 precursor to a better known novel, Edgar Rice Burrough's 'A Princess of Mars', which arguably launched the planetary romance genre. John Carter, from that series, is the next human face we see. They're combining forces, perhaps with other references I didn't catch, to battle the race of native Martians we know from Wells. They win too, in part due to help from the Sorns from C. S. Lewis's 'Perelandra' trilogy, prompting their enemy to leave Mars.

The catch, needless to say, is that they come to Earth, where we're not as prepared to battle them. And here, with Martian ships crash landing on Horsell Common and M assembling once more the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, we might be excused for assuming that the band is back together again and we're about to experience another ripping yarn from the pens of Messrs. Moore and O'Neill. However, even this early on, in the first of the six comic books collected to comprise this volume, we can tell that it's going to be a different sort of story.

'The War of the Worlds' is highly regarded as a science fiction novel, but it's also a story of horror and I got a lot of horror vibes from this first chapter. The book began dark and only got darker, the dark reds of Mars giving way to the black of night on Horsell Common, but it's dark in theme too. The name of the pub that the League stay at isn't only called The Bleak House in reference to Dickens, but just from the sense of dread that the name hints at. This immediately feels pessimistic, unfolding like a horror comic, even before Hawley Griffin, the Invisible Man, secretly defects to the side of Mars.

There are other nods, not only to fictional characters but to real life ones, like the Mad Mahdi, who had led the Sudanese rebel warriors against General Gordon. I recognised a few but needed to look some up to find out who they were and where they came from, which is far from a chore. These books are rabbit holes for me, because for every Colonel Blimp they nod towards there's a William Samson, Jr. and I had a blast as always researching these little details. The former I know from the Powell & Pressburger film, an English standard, but the latter turns out to be an undercover British spy in India known as the Wolf of Kabul, who was a mainstay in boys' papers like 'The Wizard'.

My favourite references here were unexpected ones and, as horrific as they are, they were joyous to me and, no doubt, to other British readers of a certain age. M sends Mina Harker and Allan Quatermain to the South Downs, where they're tasked with obtaining H-142 from a scientist working there, as this may be the weapon they need to win the war with the Martians. This scientist turns out to be Dr. Moreau, of the Wells novel, but Moore's genius was to cast his hybrid creatures from anthropomorphic characters in children's literature. I recognised Rupert Bear, Tiger Tim and the primary characters from 'The Wind in the Willows', somehow missing Mother Goose and Puss in Boots.

Other happy scenes around this point in the second half involve Mina and Allan getting it on, which I'm not entirely upset about, even if it seems rather gratuitous. Maybe they're there as a counter to Hyde's method for dealing with Griffin, which is brutal indeed. I'd suggest that what Hyde gets up to next may be there to redeem him somewhat, but it isn't. It's just there to set up a neat joke that I ought to have seen coming but didn't. That's the renaming of Serpentine Park in London in his honour, becoming the famous and historic Hyde Park.

And so it goes. There's gold in these hills, as it were, with Moore's unrivaled imagination and depth of research into Victorian genre literature not only creating fantastic scenes in fiction but suggesting in a subversive way that many British cultural landmarks, both fictional and in reality, should be seen in the different light he shines upon them. However, it's still a highly pessimistic book, darker and more adult, with plenty of mature content, whether nudity or bad language, that sometimes seems overdone and even out of place. The former isn't, to be fair, as anyone who's read 'The Monk' might point out, but the latter is, especially when Moore also adheres to Victorian convention, in G--d's name and such.

The result is that this feels better in my mind a couple of weeks on that it did while I was reading it. It's a second dip in the well that works for the most part, but less well, all the way to the bonus material, in this instance, 'The New Traveller's Almanac', a deep dive into the world not only of the current League of Extraordinary Gentlemen but of others. It's really an attempt for Moore to attempt to shoehorn all the references he could find into a single narrative structure, a serious accomplishment but a massive infodump all the same. It would have been easier to consume as it was serialised in the original comics than in collated form in this graphic novel.

After this came four further volumes that I haven't read. Black Dossier was next, outside the series as it's numbered but still clearly part of it otherwise. Then Volume III: Century got ambitious in both size and scope; Nemo Trilogy comprised three stories following Captain Nemo; then Volume IV: Tempest did the unenviable job of wrapping everything up in grand fashion. The main reason I haven't read them is because I don't own them either, but I may have to remediate that omission at some point soon. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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