Why The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is Alan Moore's Magnum Opus

Had Alan Moore just stopped writing comics after the 1980s — during which readers were introduced to Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell, Batman: The Killing Joke, and Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? — it would have been enough or as we say at the Passover Seder, "Dayenu."

Over the course of a single decade, Moore not only established himself as one of the most brilliant storytellers of the last hundred years, but he also helped reinvent an entire medium, turning the humble comic book into a profoundly respected art-form capable of marrying story, character, and illustrated visuals in radically new ways. "I was always trying to find what the medium was capable of and to push it as far as possible," Moore told The Guardian in 2011.

Thankfully, he did not retire and continued to gift the world with the succulent fruits plucked straight off the vine of his fertile mind. While fans differ on the matter of favorite books, we'd like to argue that Moore's magnum opus — a veritable playground of the imagination, if you will — is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, particularly its first two volumes, which served as the basis for the loose film adaptation of the same name released in 2003 (stream it on Peacock right here).

Why The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is Alan Moore's best comic

Created in tandem with the late illustrator Kevin O'Neill, the DC-published graphic novel exemplifies the famous quote oft-attributed to the great Pablo Picasso: "Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist."

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen sees Moore simultaneously paying homage to the established power of the written word and the perennial literary touchstones that shaped humanity's modern creativity before ingeniously twisting it all out of shape by uniting a band of beloved fictional characters like Allan Quatermain (King Solomon's Mines), Mina Parker (Dracula), and Captain Nemo (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) into a ragtag team of Victorian-era superheroes tasked with protecting the interests of Great Britain.

"I thought about the actual point of generation of the superhero genre and most of it seemed to be nineteenth century fiction," he explained to Tripwire Magazine in 1998. "If you look at the first generation of superheroes right up until Stan Lee created the Marvel titles in the sixties, this is evident. The Hulk is obviously Jekyll and Hyde, you’ve got a nod to Wells’ The Invisible Man in Fantastic Four’s Invisible Woman. I decided to go back to the source and once I’d done that, I put my mind to assembling a cast, thinking about what kind of world they might inhabit.”

It's also offered Moore and O'Neill to unabashedly flex their expansive knowledge of fiction (both the well-known and the obscure), history, and antiquated writing styles and publishing practices. The references contained within the first two volumes of League alone are so dense, in fact, that it took a pair of unofficial, yet Moore-approved, companion tomes by Jess Nevins — Heroes & Monsters and A Blazing World — to untangle them all. During that aforementioned chat with The Guardian, Moore explained that it was basically Nevins' job to "explain how clever" he and O'Neill were being within the pages of League at any given time. He continued: "Also, Jess is very thorough and he sometimes picks up wonderful connections that were not actually there but which I really wish that I had thought of."

The final piece of the brilliant puzzle is Moore's jaded, postmodern critique of the posh and proper values of late 19th century England and the deplorable acts carried out in the name of maintaining the nation's global empire. At the end of Volume 2, for instance, the League helps the government (fronted by Mycroft Holmes and 007 ancestor Campion Bond), helps repel the Martian invasion of Earth from H.G. Wells' The War of the World via the deployment of a biological weapon engineered by none other than the reclusive Dr. Moreau.

The capsule containing a dangerous hybrid of Anthrax and Streptococcus will kill innocent humans in London, of course, but Bond doesn't seem phased by the impending collateral damage. "Officially, the Martians died of the common cold. Any humans died of Martians," he says while casually lighting a cigarette. In two short sentences, Moore completely subverts Wells' optimistic view of humanity's resilience and its longstanding relationship to the natural world by revealing it to be nothing more than a hollow cover story devoid of any true beauty. 

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which now spans several sequels and spinoffs, is chock full of those jaw-dropping moments that reaffirm Alan Moore as a cut above the rest — an extraordinary gentleman who never fails to show undisputed mastery over his craft. 

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is now streaming on Peacock.