 | Having sent the League up against London's worst in the first volume, Moore takes matters to a whole new level in the League's next adventure. The story opens on Mars as humans John Carter (hero of a series of pulp fantasy novels by Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs) and Gulivar Jones (from Edwin L Arnold's separate though conceptually similar stories) unite with an alliance of Martian races to repel one particularly warlike race. These prove to be the aliens from H G Wells' War Of The Worlds, who then proceed to attack Earth as recounted in Wells' story.
As with much of Wells' work, War of The Worlds suffers from a nasty streak of naturalism, with the humans (or at least the Brits) being essentially defeated and saved only because the invaders succumb to Earth's bacteria. Moore gives the story a far more satisfying and romanticist spin, as the League seek out Dr Moreau (from a somewhat lesser known Wells novel in which the title character experiments with creating hybrid animals). As the Brits get clobbered, Moreau creates a very special hybrid, arming the League with a very special secret weapon...
As with the first volume, Moore respectfully and cleverly works around the established continuity of the characters. Thus Dr Moreau's appearance in 1898 England despite his apparent death on his island is plausibly explained, and the League's actions and indeed existence remain secret from the public, giving the protagonists of Wells' novel no reason to suspect the invaders' demise to have been caused by anything other than natural bacteria.
There are also several genuinely surprising twists, notably one of the League members turning traitor, and a genuinely noble and heroic moment on the part of Mr Hyde (normally the darker and villainous alter ego to the essentially good but flawed Dr Jekyll).
Like the first volume, this is on the surface an entertaining comic book superhero romp, but afficionados of 19th/early 20th century adventure literature will appreciate it on a whole deeper level.
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The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, volume 2 by Alan Moore
