Notes on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen #5

(The image to the left is © copyright 2000 America's Best Comics. The text here, except where otherwise credited, is © copyright 2002 Jess Nevins, and may not be duplicated, in part or in whole, without my permission.)

(Additions and corrections are of course appreciated; post here or send them to me at jjnevins@ix.netcom.com)

(most recent updates: 10 March 2002; updates in blue)

Cover. Apart from being scenes from the comic, I confess that this cover does not ring any bells with me. Christopher Sequeira suggests that it might be a reference to Detective Weekly, a British magazine which published the adventures of Sexton Blake. Steve Flanagan says "I think it is a pastiche of the embossed two-colour covers often used on illustrated books." I've a few of these types of books myself, and now that Steve points it out, I realize he's right.

Inside Front Cover. "Sporting journals" like the National Police Gazette were common during the late Victorian era; the public had great enthusiasm for papers and magazines of seemingly every type, and those devoted to the manly sports were among them. As it happens, there actually was a National Police Gazette, which began publishing in 1845 and which covered both crime and sports. It was an American publication during the Victorian era, however, produced in New York and focusing on the events of New York County.

"Some Deep, Organizing Power..." This is a Holmes quote; he is describing Moriarty when he says, in "The Final Problem:"

As you are aware, Watson, there is no one who knows the higher criminal world of London so well as I do. For years past I have continually been conscious of some power behind the malefactor, some deep organizing power which forever stands in the way of the law, and throws its shield over the wrong-doer.

The Sidney Paget drawing illustrating the death (at that time) of Holmes and Moriarty can be found at Death at Reichenbach Falls. O'Neill has faithfully duplicated it the scene here, as you can see.

Page 2. Panel 1. In "The Final Problem" Holmes and Watson are walking on the path seen on Page 1 when Watson, a Doctor, is summoned back to the hotel by a note requesting his help in consoling an Englishwoman dying of consumption. The note is a ruse, of course, as Holmes realizes here.

Panel 2. This style of conversation, where both of their thought processes are the same, and they independently reach the same conclusions, is seen in "The Final Problem."

Watson was actually married in 1890, although I suppose a year's worth of marriage counts as "newly married." Terence Chua points out that according to W.S. Baring-Gould, Watson was married in September 1888, making his marriage a little under two and a half years.

Panel 4. Likewise, the idea that "there's nothing personal in this" is seen in "The Final Problem." Moore is hewing rather close to the original text.

Panel 6. Moriarty's joy in the "golden, mathematic logic of it all" is a reference to his background. Moriarty is described in "The Final Problem" (hereafter referred to as TFP) as

a man of  good birth and excellent education. endowed by nature with a  phenomenal mathematical faculty. At the age of twenty-one he wrote a treatise upon the binomial theorem, which has had a European vogue. On the strength of it he won the mathematical chair at one of our smaller universities, and had, to all appearances, a most brilliant career before him.

Panel 7. The note that Holmes is writing is his farewell to Watson, given in full in TFP.

Page 3. Panel 2. Note the figure on the case in Holmes' hands. Watson, in TFP, describes it as "the silver cigarette-case which he used to carry." It has the same figure, crowned with a question mark, who appeared on the cover of issue #1 of League.

Tphile speculates that the cigarette case, with the figure on it, is a “message to Mycroft that Moriarty is responsible.” I’m not sure I buy that, but it’s an interesting thought. David Crowe wonders if it might be a symbol of a previous League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Page 4. Panel 1. Holmes, in "The Adventure of the Empty House" (hereafter TAEH) the story in which he returned, says that Moriarty "drew no weapon" when he rushed Holmes. But I suppose Holmes, when he returns, may misremember the events of Reichenbach Falls. Holmes' move, throwing Moriarty over the edge, is, in his own words, "baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling."

Page 5. Panel 2. In TAEH Holmes says of Moriarty's fall: "With my face over the brink, I saw him fall for a long way. Then he struck a rock, bounded off, and splashed into the water."

Page 6. Panel 2. In TAEH Holmes says,

I stood up and examined the rocky wall behind me. In your picturesque account of the matter, which I read with great interest some months later, you assert that the wall was sheer. That was not literally true. A few small footholds presented them- selves, and there was some indication of a ledge. The cliff is so high that to climb it all was an obvious impossibility, and it was equally impossible to make my way along the wet path without leaving some tracks. I might, it is true, have reversed my boots, as I have done on similar occasions, but the sight of three sets of tracks in one direction would certainly have suggested a deception. On the whole, then, it was best that I should risk the climb.

Panel 6. Holmes' addiction to drugs has been noted before, both in the canon ("The Man With The Twisted Lip," among others) and outside of it. The subject is given the most attention in Nicholas Meyer's The Seven-Per-Cent Solution: Being a Reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D. (1974), in which Sigmund Freud helps cure Holmes of cocaine addiction and, after lengthy sessions of psychoanalysis, reveals the root of Holmes' drive to see justice done. (It involved an unhappy childhood and his father murdering his mother)

However, the allegation that Holmes is a sodomite was (for obvious reasons) never made in the canon and has rarely been made since then. In some ways it's a reasonable deduction; Holmes' distaste for all women (with the notable exception of Irene Adler) is well-known, and his close friendship with Watson is a given. But there's no evidence within the canon for Holmes being of a Uranian disposition. Holmes is sexless; he's a dispassionate character who would never give in to primal feelings like lust. Ronald Byrd notes the following:

I remember seeing an old movie (the one with the female German spy, I think) where Holmes, for some reason lost to me, led a theater manager or somebody to believe that he and Watson were gay.  I recall the aftermath argument between Holmes and Watson, when Holmes minimized the joke by pointing out that Watson could produce many women to, uh, testify otherwise (Watson:  "Damned right!").  When Watson returned the question, Holmes grew silent.

Watson:  "Holmes, perhaps I'm being presumptuous, but...there HAVE been women, haven't there?"

Holmes:  "You are correct, Watson...you are presumptuous."

Ronald Byrd follows up with "As a brief and un-serious aside to Moriarty's "sodomitic" remark, Holmes, via the Baker Street Irregulars, DID keep himself surrounded by bedraggled youths who would do anything for a shilling..."

Page 7. Panel 6. In TFP Holmes, on the verge of capturing Moriarty and already having survived two attempts on his life, shows a fear of "air-guns." He may have been speaking of Moran's "air-rifle," which is described in TAEH: “`An admirable and unique weapon,’ said he, `noiseless and of tremendous power: I knew Von Herder, the blind German mechanic, who constructed it to the order of the late Professor Moriarty.’"

In TAEH Holmes survives an attack with a boulder by Colonel Sebastian Moran.

Panel 7. Moran being a member of British intelligence is not a new concept, as it happens. We know, from TAEH, that Moran was in Afghanistan and the Himalayas during the 1870s and 1880s, and that therefore he must have been involved in the Great Game--intelligence work--against the Russians. So Moran being a member of Military Intelligence Group Five, aka MI5, is not unthinkable.

However, it should be noted that MI5 was only created in 1909 as the internal wing of the Secret Service Bureau. In 1891 the branch of the British government mainly responsible for espionage work was the Intelligence Division of the Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service.

Of course, it’s quite possible, in the world of LEAGUE, that Moriarty got a jump on matters....

Page 8. Panel 1. Stephen Geigen-Miller, among others, notes the question marks here and following and wonders if the man with the question mark head image, seen on Holmes' cigarette case on Page 3, Panel 2, might be a "code or symbol denoting `agent of British intelligence.'"

Panel 2. Three names are visible on the sheets of paper on Moriarty's desk. The first is "Blake," although this may be one of a couple of Blakes. It may be Lieutenant Edward Blake, the hero of Blake of the "Rattlesnake" or the Man Who Saved England. A Story of Torpedo Warfare in 189- (1895), written by Fred T. Jane. (Jane, by the way, was the man responsible for the Jane's series of defense manuals). Blake of the "Rattlesnake" is the rousing story of Britain defeating the French and Russians in a mostly-naval war.

Most likely, though, it is Sexton Blake, created (probably) by Harry Blyth and first appearing in 1893, in Halfpenny Marvel #6. Blake began as an ordinary, if intelligent and successful, detective, but after a year or two his publisher decided to make him a Sherlock Holmes copy, which is how he achieved his greatest success. Blake has been published more or less without stopping since 1893 and has had more stories written about him than about any other character. More information on Blake can be found on my Sexton Blake page.

The second name is "Klimo," which is a reference to the hero of Guy Boothby’s “The Duchess of Wiltshire’s Diamonds” (1897). Klimo is a brilliant detective, influenced by Holmes in certain ways, who is so bored with the lack of opposition that he devises and carries out a theft (of the titular diamonds) simply to give him something to do. Klimo is actually the gentleman thief Simon Carne, who is posing as Klimo to better help him steal.

The third name, partially obscured, is "Nikola," as in Doctor Nikola. Nikola was created by Guy Boothby and appeared in five novels, beginning with A Bid for Fortune, or Doctor Nikola's Vendetta (1895). Nikola was a Moriarty-style criminal mastermind who plotted to take over the world; it stands to reason that he would be seen by Moriarty as a dangerous rival. More information on Nikola can be found at his entry in my Victoriana site.

Aaron Smith points out something I should have gotten from the start: "Moriarity has come to the fairly obvious conclusion that if he could survive, so could Holmes. These are the names of people he has Moran examining to see if they are Holmes in disguise."

I'm not sure what the device next to the cavorite might be; it might be the anti-gravity backpack seen in Frank Stockton's "A Tale of Negative Gravity” or a pneumatic phone (one of those Victorian intercom thingies, as Kurt Wilcken suggests), or...well, any number of other things.

The idea that British intelligence would have recruited Moriarty while he was still in college, 30-40 years before the events of League, is something of an anachronism, at least in real-life historical terms. British intelligence, in the 1850s and 1860s, consisted only of the Topographical and Statistics Department of the War Office, and were widely viewed–and not without reason–as being “harmless but rather useless.” They were very much a shoestring operation run by amateurs, without the funds or organization to carry out recruiting. But, again, this is the world of the League, where many things are different....

Page 9. Panels 1-3. Henry Spencer contributed the following:

Some years back, I read a spy novel -- I think it was The Other Side of Silence, by Allbeury -- about Kim Philby.  The novel's suggestion was that the various peculiarities of the Philby case could be explained if Philby had been originally recruited (in his college days) by British counterintelligence, to infiltrate the Russian spy network in Britain... recruited precisely because he was a known Communist sympathizer and therefore had a good chance of success.  But this bright idea worked too well, since Philby really did feel about as much loyalty to Communism as to his country, and toward the end, Philby himself couldn't have told you who he was really working for -- whether he was a clever infiltrator in a spy network, or a clever spy pretending to work for counterintelligence.  This matches up well with Moriarty's comments.

In the past, many fairs held at Battersea most weekends.  Battersea Fun Fair (built for Festival of Britain (1951 - way after LoEG)) was a permanent feature..  The rides were dismantled after a fatal accident on 'The Big Dipper', a Roller Coaster.  Battersea Park still has a Children's Zoo, and has various events throughout the year.  Battersea Dogs Home has its open days there. The Duke of Wellington fought a duel in the park, against Lord Winchelsea. On hearing the second give the command to fire, Wellington turned and seeing his opponent's gun pointed downward, fired wide.  Lord Winchelsea then fired his shot into the air and offered an apology to Wellington.

Panel 8. It is fitting that Moriarty (the “Napoleon of Crime,” as was pointed out to me) would have a bust of Napoleon, another would-be world conqueror, in his office. Kieran Cowan notes the relevance of Holmes' "Adventure of the Six Napoleons."

Page 10. Panel 5 and following. This is a long shot, I know, but I'm wondering if the peeler seen here might be the murderous policeman of Thomas Burke's "The Hands of Mr. Ottermole." We know that Moore has read Burke–Quong Lee, seen in issue #3–and "The Hands of Mr. Ottermole," an exceedingly well-done story about serial killings in London, is Burke's most famous work, having been filmed at least twice that I know of, made into various radio shows, and repeatedly voted one of the 50 Best Mystery Stories Of All Time. The only reason I'm not positive that it's the policeman is that I don't have a copy of "The Hands of Mr. Ottermole" with me, so I can't verify that the policeman was actually number 813.

Well, I'm a complete bonehead. Fabrice Vigne pointed out what I should have immediately gotten:

813 is the title of one of the most famous novels (published in 1910) by Maurice Leblanc, featuring one of the few meetings between Leblanc's "gentleman burglar", Arsene Lupin, and his Holmes' parody, "Herlock Sholmes". 813 has become a magic number in the world of popular culture. An association devoted to crime literature is named "813" and have, of course, 813 members. Among other exemples of uses of this number, the film-director François Truffaut has let it appear once, as an Easter egg, in many of his films.

Steven Costa contributes this note:

Here Griffin is doing what he had done in the previous issue to the Chinese guard that he kill with his own sword. He uses whatever weapon he can find at hand, then discards it. In the Wells novel, Griffin says invisibility has limited usefullness, but is particularly useful in killing. "I can walk round a man,whatever weapon he has, choose my point, strike as I like. Dodge as I like. Escape as I like."

Page 13. Panel 3. Peter Briggs asks, "Presuming this is `Waterloo Bridge', might the disconsolate young lady be Myra from Robert Sherwood's play, fallen to a prostitute and plying her trade?" Sherwood's Waterloo Bridge was a love story between a prostitute and a naive and innocent soldier.

Panel 4. The news on the placards is Mr. Moore having a joke on us and using one of the true curiosities of Victorian-era literature to do it.

In 1898 Morgan Robertson wrote the novel Futility (republished in 1912 as The Wreck of the Titan), about the "Titan," an opulent Atlantic liner, the largest ever built, taking a cruise into the North Atlantic one April night, its passengers the elite of society. The Titan struck an iceberg and sank, taking most of the passengers and crew with it. When news emerged of the tragedy, society was outraged, for the makers of the ship had deemed it "unsinkable" and had put in far too few lifeboats, enough to save only a fraction of the passengers.

No, this is not a hoax. Robertson predicted the "Titanic" disaster with an uncanny amount of precision. Chris Schumacher notes

In the Time-Life book Visions and Prophecies it is claimed that Morgan Robertson had a psychic vision of the Titanic, which prompted him to write the book. It's collected in the bound edition of "Mysteris of Unknown", and since the books are sensationalistic tripe, I wouldn't put much stock in this being a true story; but it might be worth checking out.

Page 16. Panel 3. Nemo is referring to the events of Dracula and its aftermath. As someone who had been partially turned into a vampire, and then returned to mortality, Mina would be seen by Victorian society as having been soiled, and so a divorce would be called for. It wasn't easy to be divorced in England at this time; most people, rather than subject themselves to the lengthy and strenuous English legal process, went to Scotland for a quickie divorce. Women were not wholly without rights in 1898 England; the Married Woman's Property Act of 1883 granted women property and the right to earn their own money, and in 1898 a judge ruled that a husband never had the right to beat his own wife, so women's liberation had made some inroads in society at this time. Nonetheless, divorce was seen as scandalous and fatal to a proper woman's reputation, regardless of the cause, and being violated by Dracula would not mitigate Mina's situation in any way.

Page 17. Panel 3. Andrea L. Peterson notes

Murray says, "I won't have you two keeping me in the dark about everything!" In Bram Stoker's Dracula, at a certain point, Van Helsing and co. decided to keep Mina "in the dark" about their plans concerning Dracula, in an effort to protect her.  It was being isolated from them like this that left Mina vulnerable to Dracula's attack.  Of course, this would lead to Mina in LoEG wanting to be kept informed of everything that was going on.

Page 20. Panel 5. The "Pequod" was the ship on which Ishmael,  Queegqueeg, and Captain Ahab sailed in Moby Dick. Ishmael made an appearance in issue #4; perhaps Nemo was responsible for saving Ishmael from the wreck of the Pequod at the end of Moby Dick?

Vincent Mollet notes:

we all understand why Nemo keeps an anchor and a diving-suit in his lumber room, but isn't it a miner's pick that we see on his right? Maybe this alludes to Jules Verne's subterranean novels, Journey to the Centre of the Earth or Les Indes noires/Child in the cave? About Nemo rescuing the survivor from the Pequod: according to Melville, Ishmael was rescued by the ship "Rachel". But Captain Nemo, like Rachel, mourns for his children...

Page 21. Panel 2. The gentleman with the odd tattoo standing on the ship is Broad-Arrow Jack, seen in issue #4. For more information on him and image from the original penny dreadful of his tattoo, go to his entry on my Victoriana site.

Page 22. Panel 2. The "New Lincoln Herald" was the newspaper published by the colonists on Lincoln Island, the titular island of Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island, the sequel to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Myles Lobdell notes the "Fogg" on the side of the traveling case at the far left of the panel, which is a reference to Phileas Fogg of Verne's Eighty Days Around the World.

I do not know what the writing in code might be or allude to. Vincent Mollet did, however:

as Nemo is obviously a great collector of JulesVerniana, I guess this sheet comes from a novel by Jules Verne.

It's from Jules Verne's "La Jangada" (The Giant Raft). In this message, the traitor of the story confesses his crime. The extract that we partly see reads: phyjslyddqfdzxgasgzzqqehxgkfndrxujugiocytdxvksbxhhuyoohdvyrymhuhpuydkjoxphetozsletnpmoffov... The "key" is 432513 (it means, you must take in the alphabet the 4th letter before the p, the 3rd letter before the h, the 2d letter before the y, the 5th letter before the j and so on; v and w count as one letter). It reads: "Le véritable auteur du vol des diamants et de l'assassinat des soldats qui escortaient le convoi, commis dans..." (The real author of the diamonds robbery and of the murder of the soldiers escorting the convoy, committed in...)

Page 23. Presumably all of the background characters on this page, especially the one with the  cleft palate in panels 4 and 5, are actual characters from Victorian-era literature, but I don't know who they might be. Steve MacDonald wonders if the child with the cleft palate could have any relation to "those who ate the Food of the Gods from the Wells' novel."

Kieran Cowan suggests that the child pickpocket might be the titular child from Arthur Morrison's Child of the Jago.
 

Allan And The Sundered Veil

"He saw himself fighting or his life, aboard some great and frightful skyboat above a dark, benighted city; struggling in the wind-lashed rigging with a large, impossibly-constructed gun that seemed to fire harpoon after harpoon." This "impossibly-constructed" gun, then, would be the "something" that Nemo alluded to on Page 20, Panel 5; I assume this scene will appear in issue #6. Loki Carbis and Kurt Wilcken, among others, suggest that this gun may be related to the same harpoon gun that Nemo used in the first issue.

 "Now he watched a hideous sub-human beast that was absurdly garbed in the remains of what seemed to be formal evening dress, the creature bellowing and laughing hideously as it attacked some great metallic thing that Quatermain could not make visual sense of." I'm assuming that the "sub-human beast" is Hyde (on page 15 Jekyll is dressed in formal wear) attacking one of the Martian war-crafts glimpsed in issue #4. Moore still has plans for a sequel series to League, so perhaps this scene will appear at some point in the sequel.

"Now he saw the familiar small, determined woman clad in nothing but a dirty blanket, shrieking, overcome with horror in what looked to Allan's travelled eye like the interior of a dark and rural building...Quatermain saw himself, screaming as loudly as the woman while engaged in combat with a tentacled and writhing shape..." As was pointed out to me, Moore has plans for a third League series, in which Mina and Allan journey to America, meet Randolph Carter, and get involved in “Lovecraftian shenanigans.” Presumably this scene is from that third series. Christopher Sequeira notes a similarity between this scene and Lovecraft's "The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward."

Christopher Sequeira also points out that the idea of an alien swapping minds with a human body appears in another Lovecraftian story, but neither he nor I could recall which one it was. Luckily for me, a number of stalwart readers identified the stories in which this takes place: Terence Chua, CybStalker, Brian Showers, Michael Brown, Richard Flanagan, Gregory Wilson, Andrew Byro, Art Sippo, Mark Brown, and Ian Culbard named "The Shadow Out of Time," "The Thing on the Doorstep," "The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward," "The Last Test," and "From Beyond."

Ads

Page 29: The ad for the "Amaze `Whirling Spray' Syringe" was, of course, the source for the furor that delayed this issue for an additional week; it was originally the "wonderful Marvel 'Whirling Spray' Syringe" before DC, in the person of Paul Levitz, pulled the ad, reportedly for fear of offending the people at Marvel Comics. Thanks to Scott David Hamilton, I know have the original ad, brought here for your pleasure. Scott@bazilians.org adds

As for the "Marvel `Whirling Spray’ Syringe", such devices were fairly widely advertised in the 19th and early 20th centaury. A friend has a small collection of such ads, some targeted as medical devices and others at the end user. The early power (electric) sewing machines were devised as general purpose motors with many attachments for the home such as a butter churn; "medical devices" were among these add-ons. The advertising of these declined after the code words' meanings became widely known, in the later 20s and 30s.

Letters Page

"Titus Crow" is actually the creation of Brian Lumley, first appearing in The Burrowers Beneath (1975). Crow is an Occult Detective who fights against Lovecraftian foes. The more fanatical Lovecraft fans usually scorn the Titus Crow stories, as they put a hopeful spin on the Lovecraftian conception of the Elder Gods. For more information on him, go to Brian Lumley's Titus Crow site.

I'll confess to ignorance about who "Dr. August Moreau Richmond" might be. In Wells' novel the full name of Dr. Moreau is never given, and I've been unable to discover who else this might be. Alasdair Richmond, who wrote the letter, says he just came up with the name in an attempt to create something that sounded the right note of "late-Victorian super-villainy."

The Secret Code Message is, according to Geoffrey Burmester, "I adore inhaling glue during anal rutting and rimming the odd farm animal."

Chris Schumacher adds the following about the first "Answers in Brief" question:

Seeking Religious Advice (T.L.) is obviously Jack the Ripper, but it's also a reference to From Hell.
From Hell, Chapter 6,Page 3
"All of them, your majesty?"
"All of them."

"The Final Problem"

"The Adventure of the Empty House"

The Old Shikari - A Biography of Colonel Sebastian Moran

The Wreck of the Titan by Morgan Robertson

I will again include this here, as I think my Fantastic, Mysterious, and Adventurous Victoriana site will nonetheless be of interest. It is a list of 465 (at last count) Victorian-era characters and concepts who would be at home in the world of the League.

Thanks to: Trevor Barrie, for picking up on a panel mistake; Joël Berthomier; Peter Briggs; Mark Brown; Michael Brown; Geoffrey Burmester; Ronald Byrd; Loki Carbis; Terence Chua; Steven Costa; Kieran Cowan; David Crowe; Ian Culbard; CybStalker; John Dorrian, for pointing me in the right direction about that third quote in “Allan and the Sundered Veil;” Richard Flanagan; Steve Flanagan; Stephen Geigen-Miller; Steve Higgins; Myles Lobdell; Steve MacDonald; Vincent Mollet; Gabriel Neeb, for a Napoleon observation; Andrea L. Peterson; Bob Redmond; Michael Reese III; Alasdair Richmond; Steven Rowe, for correcting my mistake about the National Police Gazette; Greg Dean Schmitz, for answering my Klimo inquiry; Scott@bazilians.org; Chris Schumacher; Christopher Sequeira, for various notes; Brian Showers; Aaron Smith; Daniel Smith, for relieving me of my ignorance about who Klimo is; Henry Spencer; tphile, for a Napoleon observation; Vandaljack; Fabrice Vigne; Kurt M. Wilcken; Gregory A. Wilson; Win, of the Wold Newton Universe site.