The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 2 #2: People of Other Lands

[superboyprime]

"I thought wouldn’t that be fun, if you have these characters and put them together in a super hero team. And all right, we need a woman, there’s supposed to be some genius woman in Sherlock Holmes. The only woman that Sherlock Holmes had time for. But she was a bit obscure. You know… so I thought, Mina Harker. We’ll have her be changed by the events of Dracula and she’s divorced Jonathan and she’s become a Suffragette." - Alan Moore

Comments

[icon_uk]

I've always loved that conversation between Hyde and Mina.

[wizardru]

Yeah, it really is a great scene. Hyde is a monster and knows he is, but also finds himself a more deeply conflicted being than he thought he was. Mina IS afraid of him, but she isn't afraid to stand up to him and he respects that. And as Hyde says...she has encountered someone worse.

[icon_uk]

And the fact her hand goes straight to her throat and ever present scarf the moment he says it.

[crinos]

....Alright, Griffin is just a fucking idiot here.

So his plan is to walk up to a pair of murderous aliens who don't understand English, and try and form an alliance with them through crude pictograms. Then just leave assuming that they are going to take the offer, that they even understood an offer was made, these creatures whose only reaction they ever showed anyone was incinerating them. Hell the only reason he got out alive was because they didn't see him approach, and by the time he revealed himself he was too close to use the heat ray without hitting the Martians.

[alicemacher]

Griffin is insane, so it doesn't surprise me he hasn't quite thought this through.

That said, the scene does remind me of Moore's Swamp Thing story, in which the alien Pog successfully communicates with Swampy through pictograms. It helps of course that neither party is hostile and that Pog doesn't actually want anything from the swamp creature; he's simply explaining why he and his crew are there.

[laughing_tree]

I don't think he leaves. I think that's just the 'camera' zooming out. There's only one trail of footprints, and there'd be two if he walked off.

[lego_joker]

Interestingly enough, I believe Alan Moore's daughter Leah wrote an Irene Adler-centered comic for Dynamite.

Granted, it was part of Dynamite's super-fanservicey "Well, at least we're not Zenescope" line, but it can't be all bad, can it?

[filthysize]

Amusing how at the time that he started this comic, Mina Harker was considered more well known than Irene Adler. And I guess he's right. Coppola's Dracula had just come out a couple of years previous. It's likely the opposite today.

[kore]

Bram Stoker's Dracula came out in 1992 though, and I thought this was 2002?

[filthysize]

LOEG was first published in 1999.

[kore]

OK, but 1992 is not a couple of years previous to March 1999.

[filthysize]

Ok, change my original comment from a couple to 7.

[kore]

Your whole point was "Mina Harker was considered more well known than Irene Adler" because "Coppola's Dracula had just come out a couple of years previous." I doubt Mina Harker has ever been more well-known, especially in pop culture, than Irene Adler.

[filthysize]

I am correct.

[kore]

I love the drawings of the Martians and the "Ah, youthful reader!" bit. But that Hyde sounds way more like Frankenstein's monster than Hyde. He wasn't huge either ("There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something down-right detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point. He’s an extraordinary looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way").

And I don't think Irene Adler was ever obscure -- she was popular from her first appearance and she's been in so many adaptations.

[lordultimus]

There's a line that line Jekyll makes about Hyde growing in stature, as though conscious of a more generous tide of blood. It's debatable as to whether he meant something like this or that he's just becoming healthier compared to the skinnier dwarf form he starts off as compared to the more hearty stocked Jekyll.

I think the idea with Hyde's development is that he starts out a psychopath, but since he was only just born he changes as he grows older, though he never becomes a good person.