This Weeks Comics

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century #2: 1969

Moore wants to challenge the popular view of history where it consists of easily identifiable reference points and narratives normally determined by the buying habits of the middle class. In Century history is instead portrayed as a vast, messy splurge, with too many moving parts to be easily reduced into stable, and resultantly dominant, narratives. The guy can’t show free love without showing the non stop woman and Vril show – we’re always asked to accomodate both. Like an endlessly edited and re-edited Wikipedia article you have all these different conversations running at the same time and it gives a really fascinating overview, a highly complex overview, of the culture at the time the comic’s set. 

Amy Poodle from the Mindless Ones blog

 I love the Mindless Ones and their inspired critical takes on comics. One of the blogs that made me want to start my own.

Haven't yet had the chance to read the comic myself.

Postscript (8/8/11): When I finally did read it the following day, my first response was that this must be one of the best things I've read about the 60s. And maybe it isn't quite that good. I've read a fair bit about the 60s by this point if I think about it, but it's still pretty damn good.

Of course, when we say the 60s, we're only really talking about a specific strand of the culture of the 60s. The confluence between the new pop music, youth culture, the occult and the counter culture. Which was I think really only 'the 60s' for a relatively small group of people. It's interesting how, as the series has progressed, the appropriations from (mostly) popular culture of the era at hand have become less focused on interrogating the texts themselves and more about a commentary on the culture and the time of which those texts were a part. As fun and exciting as the first two League adventures were, the series has become a lot richer. Also, if the various online responses I saw to the Black Dossier are anything to go by, much more concerned with Britain's twentieth century culture. More insular. Perhaps a response to Alan Moore's well publicised spat with DC. Who knows. It's interesting that the series has developed this way.