I'm going to count another graphic novel as book number 26, mainly because its by Alan Moore and its a dense little piece of work. So yes, number 26 is League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier.

As I said, its a dense thing, full of large blocks of text interspersed throughout the main story. To me, this book felt like Planetary meets Fables filtered through the weirdness of Alan Moore's brain. Of course, he has already introduced us to his world of the League in two previous tomes, but this one attempts to give us more of the world's 'history' I guess, which is why it seems to me to be rather like Planetary. Especially since it seems like its the world's 'hidden' history.

Which I admit, is where I got a little lost.

We pick up the story in 1953, following a still young Wilhelmina Murray and a rejuvenated Allan Quartermaine, setting up a secret agent named Jimmy Bond. Mina gets Bond to take her to an abandoned intelligence base, where she beats him up (and deservedly so) and is able to find the Black Dossier, a dossier on the various members over the years of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the hidden workings of the world. Mina and Allan it seems broke away from the government intelligence service, for reasons we're never really fully given.

But I was never really able to figure out if the workings were hidden? Is the actual nature of the world something that's hidden from the average folk or is the fact that Faeries were common until 1617 and that vampires do exist, etc. etc. common knowledge? I never really felt it was decided one way or another.

Anyway, the text pieces througthout the book are supposed to be sections of the Black Dossier itself. They are very well done pastiches for the most part, where Moore apes the writings of Shakespeare (not perfectly of course, but not too badly either), HP Lovecraft, Virginia Woolf, John Cleland and Jack Kerouac amongst others. Some of the characters who are also members of the League through the years are pretty obscure, and it really is only by the dint of my English Lit degree that I know who Orlando and Fanny Hill are. Not to make myself sound like a snob or anything, but that sort of thing is going to be right over a lot of reader's heads. Heck, there were some characters I had no idea who they were either. Some of the pastiches make for difficult reading, especially the one written like a 50s beat poem. If you don't know the parlance of the time, its increadibly hard to understand and even I gave up after a bit.

There's also a LOT of sex in this book. Which doesn't bother me, but makes me think Alan Moore's becoming a dirty old man. Which is also fine I guess. The ending though, felt to me kinda Fables-esque, but in reverse. While Willingham's collection of public-domain literary characters have been exiled from their home dimensions and now live amongst us on Earth (unbeknownst to us), Moore's collection of public domain literary characters are leaving their home dimension of Earth and going to live in another dimension, unbeknonst to us.

I'm not entirely sure what exactly I got out of this book. There didn't seem to be much of an actual plot like there were in the previous volumes. There was some action inbetween readings of the dossier, but I just was never sure what anyone was really trying to achieve in this. Yes, Mina and Allan wanted the Dossier because they were in it and they were afriad that the government had figured out that all these beings were leaving the world for this alternate dimension? But I never really understood why the govenment had this dossier in the first place, nor, why once it was stolen, they needed it back again so badly since the thing wasn't in a very secure location in the first place.

Basically, to me, the Black Dossier just felt like Alan Moore playing in his sandbox, but not being entirely sure what he was building.