Alan Moore talks new League of Gentlemen project

By John Freeman on 23 January 2007

(with thanks to Matthew Badham): Alan Moore has just been interviewed about his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier project over on World Famous Comics.

“There’s an immense amount of stuff in the Dossier,” he outlines, revealing the book spans much of the League’s centuries-spanning history For example: “A prospectus of London, features upon previous versions of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Les Hommes Mysterieux from France, and Der Zweilicht-helden from Germany. There’s an account of The Surrogate League that British Intelligence tried to put together in the 1950s, and which was a complete disaster. There’s everything that you could ever want to know about any incarnation of The League. And this is the source book material; this is the actual Black Dossier.

“Imagine a source book that has got lots of interesting snippets from here and there in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’s three or four hundred year history,” he says. “But, these are presented in some unusual ways. For example, when we want to talk about the founding of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which involved Prospero, then we include a lost Shakespeare folio for a play called Fairy’s Fortunes Founded, which Shakespeare commenced to write in 1616, which was the year of his death, and thus never completed. So we have got the opening scenes of Fairy’s Fortunes Founded reproduced in the manner of a Shakespeare folio as part of The Black Dossier, fully illustrated and featuring some pretty good Shakespeare, if I say so myself.”

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John Freeman

John is the founder of downthetubes, launched in 1998. He is a comics and magazine editor, writer, and Press Officer for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He also runs Crucible Comic Press.

Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine and Overkill for Marvel UK, Babylon 5 Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, and its successor, Star Trek Explorer, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics; and has edited several comic collections and graphic novels, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”, and Hancock: The Lad Himself, by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page.

He’s the writer of comics such as Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs”, with Dave Hailwood.