Alan Moore and Frank Miller are the backbone of American Superhero comics. What they did in the 1980s on books like Swamp Thing, Watchmen, Daredevil, and Dark Knight Returns changed the general perceptions of the Super Hero Genre. There is a perfect mix of sophisticaton and intensity in those seminal projects that unleashed a whole new way of doing Super Heroes. Better yet, they were huge financial successes that suggested that "mainstream" comics don't have to be for kids anymore.

Let's ignore, that there's something very wrong with thinking that comics HAVE to be "Super Heroes". That's a scar to American Comics that came from the Red Scare 1950s. But, regardless, Moore and Miller took what they were given and legitimized it.

Frank Miller was more of the Jazz player. His comics had an organic flow and constant search to capture emotions at their purest. Alan Moore was far more calculating and meticulous. His way of writing was like putting together a swiss-engineered atom bomb. When it worked, it was a masterpiece... but no matter how perfect Moore's "instructions" were, they relied heavily on the craftmanship of the Artist in collaboration.

Alan Moore always seemed at his best when he was paired with a fellow Englishman. There must be something in the experience of being English that brought a fellowship to the pairing that us Americans could never attain. Maybe it's the cynicism, or the chastising humor.

Alan Moore's latest work with Kevin O'Neill on "The League of Extraordinary Gentleman" has been wonderful. Ignore that awful movie. "LoEG" brings life to classic British genre characters in an exhaustively composed world that assumes that every major English literature "classic" character lived in the same world. In th first few books you had Dr. Jekyll, the Invisible Man, Captain Nemo, Quartermain, and Mina Harker (from Dracula) together as a sort of Victorian Super Hero team.

In the latest book, Black Dossier, we skip to the 1900s to follow a mysterious couple who have gotten ahold of the "Black Dossier": a rare collection of various text, articles, comics, and literature that directly or indirectly refers to the adventures and legends surrounding the personalities from the many groups that, over time, were called the "League". As the couple, whose on the run, reads through the Black Dossier, you read the book with them. So the book is a clever combination of comic chapters and segue ways through the entirety of the Black Dossier whose contents eventually give you a broad picture of the League's many members and adventures.

Throughout the course of the book, you end up reading Moore and O'Neill's interpretation of Political Cartoons from the 1800s, Pornographic Tequila Bibles, a "lost" Shakespeare Play, an excerpt from a Beatnik book, and many other texts. To fit in theme, the various sections are designed to emulate the look of published pieces of the time... going so far as occasionally changing the texture of the pages to fit in with the appropriate look.

The book ends in glorious 3D (it's not THAT glorious... color 3D never looks good) and includes a nice pair of red/blue lense 3D glasses.

Overall it's a very ambitious and fun experience that pushes the boundaries of Comics. It's not striving for the perfection and craftmanship of Moore and Gibbon's Watchmen... but I don't think that's what they were going for. It looks like Moore and O'Neill wanted to have be a bit more freedom and have readers join them on their crazy little romp through their distorted version of Pulp Genre Britain. It's a bit dense, but those with patience and an open mind will experience one helluva of an adventure.