Thanks to Santa Claus, I’ve now finally read the first two volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and will be starting The Black Dossier tonight. I’ll spare a proper review, which isn’t something of which the internet needs another, and instead link to Jess Nevins’s great annotations. What strikes me most about the series is that they’re entirely enjoyable without an encyclopedic knowledge of Victorian fiction. I’ve read Dracula, The Invisible Man, King Solomon’s Mines, The War of the World, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and a number of Sherlock Holmes stories, but none of it is required to follow the story or understand the characters, and one would need to read thousands more pages to pick up on all of the references that Alan Moore has snuck in there. He could have easily made the books very dense given their premise, so I was surprised to find them entirely enjoyable without needing to read panel-by-panel annotations as I went along.