The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Reading Order (Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill)
Written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Kevin O’Neill, the first volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics was published in 1999 under America’s Best Comics. During the following two decades, more volumes would eventually be released by other publishers. There were limited series, spin-offs, and several prose and illustrated appendices, all forming a single, interlinked continuity.
The story begins in London in 1898, at the waning of the Victorian era. As the nineteenth century gives way to the twentieth, the British Empire stands at a crossroads. In response to threats beyond the reach of conventional authority, a covert team is assembled from figures drawn from nineteenth-century literature: adventurer Allan Quatermain; Mina Murray, survivor of Dracula; Captain Nemo of the Nautilus; Dr. Henry Jekyll and his monstrous alter ego Edward Hyde; and Hawley Griffin, the Invisible Man. United as the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, they function as agents of imperial necessity, their abilities matched by deep personal flaws and conflicting ideologies.
Past the first volume, the story expands the scope beyond Victorian England, incorporating an ever-broadening tapestry of literary, pulp, and popular culture references spanning multiple centuries.
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