Alan Moore Knows The Score

“It's nice to hear all the old songs, isn't it?”

--the Devil, The Black Rider

I was surprised to hear the old songs in Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Century: 1910 (Top Shelf, 2009). I probably shouldn't have been. The chapter title, “What Keeps Mankind Alive” distracted me, but I kept reading my water-damaged copy and ran smack into, “Mack the Knife.” Like the chapter title, it's a song from Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera.

In 1910, Mina leads the league—Raffles, the dapper cat-burgler; Carnacki the Ghost-Finder; Orlando, Virginia Woolf's ageless hermaphrodite; and Allan Quatermain, Jr.—against an occult threat, the coming Moon-Child. Moore and O'Neill try to capture the feel of the era—the early Twentieth Century's eroticism and spiritualism. The cover's even kind of Klimt.

But I'm not really thinking about Crowley or Klimt. I'm thinking about music in comics. Captain Nemo's daughter, Janni dives into the ocean to escape the life Nemo has planned for her. In England, she takes the name, “Jenny Diver.”But Moore has taken the name, too, from The Threepenny Opera. In German, she is Seeräuber Jenny or “Pirate Jenny.” And she isn't the only The Threepenny Opera character in Century: 1910. Mack the Knife himself* and Suki Tawdry frame the book in song. Jenny's Nautilus (the Opera's ship with eight sails), becomes the Black Raider, which in such a cabaret context, sounds a lot like the Black Rider.

In a review of Tom Waits, Robert Wilson and William S. Burrough's The Black Rider, an adaptation of Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freishütz, Edward Rothstein writes:

The real ancestor of this work may be not Weber's opera but John Gay's "Beggar's Opera," which in 1728 played an iconoclastic role in London. It passed over the typical escapades of royalty in favor of the actions of the city's criminal underworld. It deliberately undercut the dominant operatic style; an excerpt from Handel's
"Rinaldo" was satirically sung by a chorus of thieves.

The work was designed to undermine. Its polemical charms were updated in "The Threepenny Opera," in which Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht entertained the bourgeois audience of Weimar Germany with a related tale. Weill captured the spirit of the German cabaret; the catchy, mordant songs satirized the very audience that gave them acclaim.

Moore and O'Neill's book shares the same ancestry. The polemical charms of Beggar's Opera and The Threepenny Opera and even, The Black Rider, herald MacHeath's return, warn against the unforeseen consequences of a rape, are sung on the gallows and then by a chorus of prostitutes and their protector at the story's end. These dire lyrics resonate with the League's dread of a coming apocalypse, but they also provide structure for the story. I have written about music in comics before. I said that in Lilli Carré's The Lagoon, the creature's song was unknowable. In Moore's book, knowing the tune is helpful, but unnecessary and the Brecht/Weill songs' didacticism melds pretty well into a libretto for a comic operetta.

In fact, the lyrics' silence might make them less didactic. Musicologist Susan McClary says that the emphasis on lyrics in so much folk, political and religious music reflects a distrust of music's direct effect on people's bodies (McClary. “Same As It Ever Was: Youth Culture and Music.” Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Pop and Rap, eds. Evelyn McDonnell and Ann Powers. (New York: Delta, 1999)). But in a comic, words and songs are silent and images are visceral, so all the corporal raunchiness comes through color-separated and directly into your brain. And in Century: 1910, there's plenty of raunchiness, lots of erotic and sacred breasts and nipple slips. Jenny Diver is becoming a wrathful goddess and I suspect there might be more Crowleyan Scarlet Woman action in the next volume. (And if you were wondering, there's at least one repeated motif, the question mark that keeps appearing whether as a curled mermaid, Orlando's robe or a pattern on Mina's dress).

As with the previous League books, there's a final collection of prose that will build in importance and revelatory power. At least, it should. And it is cosmic, erotic and full of pop culture promise, including The Story of O and the punishment of Fletcher Hanks' Stardust. The prose should also bridge the decades between this story, set in 1910, and the next, set in 1969, then from 1969 to now.

The volume is laying so much groundwork for later that it doesn't really feel like a story in itself. At the same time, so much is compressed in the volume. I feel like it could be a longer work with more time for these characters and their adventures. Maybe there will be. As it is, the Jenny Diver and the evil cult stories sit a little awkwardly together. Are they competing narratives or counterpoints? Was The Threepenny Opera a rack to hang only this volume on? But while I hate writing about parts rather than wholes, I will just trust that the story will be awesome in its whole because, as the song says, fancy gloves wears Moore, so there's not a trace of red.

*Sung here by Bertolt Brecht

Tags: 1910s , 1920s , 2000s , adaptation , adventure , Alan Moore , audio , Bertolt Brecht , cabaret , collaboration , England , erotica , Fletcher Hanks , Germany , Gustav Klimt , John Gay , Kurt Weill , League of Extraordinary Gentlemen , LGBT , London , Lotte Lenya , music , musicals , occult , opera , rape , rape revenge , Robert Wilson , sex , sex work , the moon , thieves , Tom Waits , transgender , UK , Weimar , William S. Burroughs