Stop #4: Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

One of my favorite chapter books as a preteen was a Great Illustrated Classics version of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. I remember being in fifth grade, reading the last chapter again and again during free/reading time. There was something about it that thrilled me on a visceral and emotional level, something about Dr. Jekyll slowly losing control of himself and letting his evil side out again and again despite his best efforts that kept making me return. It was something so inherent in the tale that a children’s version couldn’t water it down, and that hit me even harder when I read the Stevenson original for the first time after college.

I don’t believe I’m alone in feeling such an attraction to the tale. Stevenson wrote the novella as a mystery. It takes nine chapters for Stevenson to get to the revelation that every modern reader knows already. Yet we keep coming back to it. Adaptations add elements (like the love triangle in the Jekyll and Hyde musical) or change the viewpoints to keep us guessing, however I believe moments like this …


It was a fine, clear, January day, wet under foot where the frost had melted, but cloudless overhead; and the Regent’s Park was full of winter chirrupings and sweet with spring odours. I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me licking the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin. After all, I reflected, I was like my neighbours; and then I smiled, comparing myself with other men, comparing my active good-will with the lazy cruelty of their neglect. And at the very moment of that vainglorious thought, a qualm came over me, a horrid nausea and the most deadly shuddering. These passed away, and left me faint; and then as in its turn faintness subsided, I began to be aware of a change in the temper of my thoughts, a greater boldness, a contempt of danger, a solution of the bonds of obligation. I looked down; my clothes hung formlessly on my shrunken limbs; the hand that lay on my knee was corded and hairy. I was once more Edward Hyde.

… are what has allowed the novella to compel us despite the spoiled twist ending.

I’m not a genius literary scholar, or even an ordinary literary scholar. I won’t pretend I have the true answer to the subtext of the novella, whether it’s about good and evil or animalistic urges or if I’d been picking up on some weird sexual metaphor since my preteens. What’s undeniably true is that what our modern society’s art is a little bit more obvious in its treatment of what we find horrible. When we first meet Mr. Hyde in Stevenson’s novella, he bumps into a small child and responds by stomping all over her.

So Alan Moore ups the ante in the League for Mr. Hyde’s behavior by having him commit rapes. While I hate how often League has relied on rape as a plot point (We’ll talk about Lord Voldemort later.), I think the scene after Mr. Hyde rapes and kills the Invisible Man in the second volume is great. I’ve heard criticism of that scene and Moore’s choice, but I think it makes sense that Mr. Hyde, who is the essence of evil in a person, would do something so horrible. There’s a certain irony that he does it for the noble cause of getting back at Griffin for hurting Mina.

This has been the long way around to saying that just like how the original story has been a favorite of mine for years, I really enjoy the character in League. They aren’t the same, of course. Stevenson’s original doesn’t have the same biting sense of humor. But Alan Moore seems to have been more diligent in explaining away the differences between the original novella and what ended up on the comic book page than he was with Mina. Didn’t Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde die? Moore has that explained away. Wasn’t Mr. Hyde shorter? Alan Moore has an explanation for how he made him a behemoth, too.

The latter explanation is my favorite part of the second volume. Moore has Mr. Hyde say Dr. Jekyll had few sins, but that since he has been allowed to grow with no restraints, both in his size and his evil deeds. It goes slightly beyond Stevenson’s story, but if you return to the novel, you can easily see it working. Like when Dr. Jekyll says in the last chapter:


indeed the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of reflection, and began to look round me and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of me. Many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views that I had set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame. It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than any particular degradation in my faults, that made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man's dual nature.

Mr. Hyde says in the comic book Dr. Jekyll had homosexual fantasies and didn’t return a library book, but you can see that working as well.

Of course, how does one reconcile Mr. Hyde’s noble actions in the second volume with his monstrous nature? I’ve talked about how much Moore’s version matches up with Stevenson’s novella, but why am I okay with the parts where it doesn’t?

When Moore created his first League team, as well as all subsequent teams, in some way he was forcing other authors’ characters into the stereotypical team roles. Sometimes that works well, like when he makes Mina the leader instead of “the girl.” Other times, like when he makes Orlando the namedropping comic relief, it feels sadly reductive. Mr. Hyde’s role is the strong, Thing-like heavy, and those characters always aren’t as monstrous as they seem to be. Mr. Hyde may be terrible, but he’ll never be as terrible as Hawley Griffin, who has made the choice to fulfill his desires with no consequences out of his own greed, rather than a misguided wish to be pure. So the Invisible Man lives long enough to become the villain, while Mr. Hyde redeems himself in his respect for Mina and his sacrifice, and is remembered with a statue and a park.

It may not be Stevenson, but it makes a great story.

Is This Book Worth Reading? Yes. Furthermore, it’s worth reading even if you know the ending.
Will This Book Enhance My Reading of the League? Yes.
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales (Oxford World's Classics)

For Further Reading:

Next Post: Stops #5-7: The movies Get Carter, Performance and Villain

Stop # 3: Moonchild by Aleister Crowley

In the latest/ongoing installment of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Century, our heroes are trying to stop evil magician Oliver Haddo (in his many forms) from creating a Moonchild. In the comic, the Moonchild is described as a baby born to usher in a new age, but Haddo is planning to create an Anti-Christ. Now, I have my own theories on how this will turn out in the League, (i.e. All signs point to The Boy Who Lived.) but I’d hoped that reading the book would give me insight into where Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill are going with the series.

Alas, not really. Granted, I may have been predisposed to dislike Moonchild because I have little interest in the occult, at least in its hardcore form that actually requires study. The name “Madame Blavetsky” is a surefire way to get me to fall asleep. And while the main plot, indeed, is about two magicians trying to create a messiah, most of that story is articulated through Aleister Crowley’s thoughts on Magick, with occasional side trips of thoughts on Spiritualism, thoughts on Taoism, rather revolting thoughts on women and cat torture.

The events in Century: 1910 are clearly meant to take place before the events of Moonchild. It's actually implied that our usually-not-very successful heroes end up setting off the events which lead to the events of the story. Almost all the principal characters appear in Century: 1910, but their appearances are brief and not very fully explained or realized. Moore appears to be mixing the events with the events of W. Somerset Maughn's The Magician as well, so an Aleister Crowley analogue Oliver Haddo is the head of the plan, rather than Simon Iff as the leader. I re-read 1910 in anticipation of this review and was surprised at how much they figured into said subplot. They get drowned out by the doings of the League and the subplot with Jenny/Janni.

Coming to the book Moonchild was interesting. Crowley has such an outsized reputation as a mysterious, wicked type in pop culture (particularly heavy metal songs) that it was kind of interesting to read the book realize he’s just something of a kooky philosopher.

What he is not, though, is a good writer. Did he have to open a book like this?


London, in England, the capital city of the British Empire, is situated upon the banks of the Thames. It is not likely that these facts were unfamiliar to James Abbott McNeill Whistler, a Scottish gentleman born in America and resident in Paris; but it is certain that he did not appreciate them. For he settled quietly down to discover a fact which no one had previously observed; namely, that it was very beautiful at night. The man was steeped in Highland fantasy, and he revealed London as wrapt in a soft haze of mystic beauty, a fairy tale of delicacy and wistfulness.

It is here that the Fates showed partiality; for London should rather have been painted by Goya. The city is monstrous and misshapen; its mystery is not a brooding, but a conspiracy. And these truths are evident above all to one who recognizes that London’s heart is Charing Cross.


I showed the passage to my best friend, who is way more knowledgeable about art than I am, and the WTF faces she made while reading the passage were priceless. It’s not much of a hook. It’s long, digressive and lumbering and doesn’t have much to do with what follows.

Still, the central characters are compelling, if often irritating and unlikable. The plot concerns a woman, Lisa La Guiffira, who falls in with two magicians: the professor-like Simon Iff and Cyril Grey, who … well, I’ll let him explain himself.


Some people… have one brain; some have two. I have two. … It seems as if, in order to grasp anything, I were obliged to take its extremes. I see both sublime and ridiculous at once … I am never happy until I have identified an idea with its opposite. I take the idea of murder – just a plain, horrid idea. But I don’t stop there. I multiply that murder, and intensify it a millionfold and then a millionfold again. Suddenly one comes out into the sublime idea of the Opening of the Eye of Shiva, when the Universe is annihilated in an instant. Then I swing back, and make the whole thing comic by having the hero chloroform Shiva in the nick of time, so that he can marry the beautiful American heiress.


This all sounds very nice, but most of his time this translates to “Cyril Grey can say whatever he wants and be a complete jerk, especially to women, but he gets away with it because he’s so darn smart and special.” I’m simultaneously surprised this character hasn’t had more of a role in League due to his strong personality and am glad he hasn’t.

Simon Iff is likable, and while Cyril Grey seems like the Gary Stu Crowley would find comfortable to slip into the skin of, it was Iff who would go on to appear in other Crowley works. Alas, in Century: 1910 Simon Iff spends more time being mentioned than having lines of his own.

Sister Cybele is also a character who appears in Century: 1910, but she doesn't have much personality in the book other than Lisa/Illiel's caretaker. The villains of Moonchild, hasn't appeared in LoEG and are fairly forgettable, but if Moore doesn’t somehow manage to link the name of their organization, The Black Lodge, in some way to Twin Peaks I will be terribly disappointed.

I’m being fairly hard on this book, I know. It feels unfair because it’s honestly very different from any book I’ve read, but so much of it is digression punctuated by something disagreeable. Lisa’s, also known as Illiel, is the mother of the Moonchild and she's a character that clearly comes from a man’s brain. She has some intelligence, but she’s flighty and matches up perfectly to the bad portrait of women that Grey paints. I can’t imagine any female reader relating to her.

Then there’s the aforementioned cat torture.

I also hate how the book doesn’t end so much as fizzle out. Don’t read any more of this entry if you don’t want to be spoiled. After the Moonchild is born, Lisa abandons it and it’s whisked away. Then World War I happens and the male characters go off to fight. Crowley wrote the book during the war and was interested in getting America involved, but it’s still a hell of a way to end and one that doesn’t seem to fit with everything that came before. I suppose you could say that the Moonchild ushered in the war, but that seems incredibly generous and I may be affected more by how Moore interprets the Moonchild than what Crowley wrote.

Before I close this entry out, I do want to show you guys something. As much as I’m convinced that Harry Potter is LoEG’s Moonchild, here’s Crowley’s description of the baby.


She was a beautifully made baby, with deep blue eyes; and she was born with four teeth, and with hair six inches long, so fair as to be silvery white. Like a tattoo-mark, just over the heart, was a faint blue crescent.


Okay, so it would be better if the crescent birthmark were yellow/gold and on her forehead, but Sailor Moon is the anti-Christ. You heard it here first.

Is This Book Worth Reading? It has its moments, but I’d say in general no.
Will This Book Enhance My Reading of League? At this point, not really, although it could explain a little better who some of the minor characters are and why they weren't able to create the Moonchild right away. You can probably just work from the concept of “evil child must be born.” I may change my mind depending on what happens in Century: 2009, however.

For Further Reading:
Moonchild by Aleister Crowley

Stop #4: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Stop #2: A Princess of Mars, The Gods of Mars and The Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

So, the new John Carter film has opened to mixed reviews, which in of itself seems surprising because the pre-word of mouth became incredibly skeptical for a number of reasons, not all of which I understand. On the one hand, the film has a generic-sounding title compared to the book it was based on and lackluster trailers. On the other hand, a ton of people seemed to have loved this story when it was called James Cameron’s Avatar.

All kidding aside, I have a lot of affection for Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs’ second best-known creation. John Carter – Southern gentleman, Confederate Civil War veteran and sentient Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robot – makes his appearance in the first issue/chapter of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’s second volume. It is not an accessible opening. The story begins on Mars before the Martian invasion of Earth as shown in H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, and doubles as both an opening battle and a way for Moore and O’Neill to paint their portrait of Mars: a strange, Arabian-influenced mashup of the Barsoom novels, Edwin L. Arnold’s Lieutenant Gullivar Jones and C.S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet. It’s a really intricate opening, but Moore essentially drops you into very unfamiliar territory and we don’t meet up with the team we’d gotten to know from the first volume until the last page of it.

Reading A Princess of Mars gave me a real appreciation for what O’Neill does in that issue/chapter. He perfectly nails the green men of Mars and the thoats they ride. I still need to read Arnold and Lewis’ work, but I felt like I “got” that section when I re-read it after reading the first Barsoom book, and I enjoyed it a lot more.

The best way to describe the Barsoom novels is meatheaded. I mean that in the best possible way. The first three books are a rollicking, nonstop adventure where John Carter meets a bunch of strange aliens, earning the trust and eternal friendship of some while viciously slaughtering others. Yet despite the destruction and bloody death, despite how John Carter once says he doesn’t feel bad about the people he kills because he’s awesome at fighting and he’s proud of it just like someone would be proud of their knitting, my mental image of Carter is still of an overgrown kid whacking invisible bad guys with a foam bat. There’s an innocence to the whole thing that makes you just roll with the “Woo! Fighting is awesome!” tone of the books.

I think the reason I’m so willing to go along with it is that, other than the problematic racial overtones which I’ll get into in a minute, John Carter himself is a likeable hero for the time period. He respects his allies and makes friends with people of all races and both sexes. A lot of sci-fi and pulp writers would make a planet where everyone walks around mostly naked into a skeevy creepfest, but John Carter is a doofus when it comes to romantic relationships and loyal to Dejah Thoris, and he never leers over her or any other woman.

As a female reader, the strength of the female characters is another draw to the novel. Even when they have to play damsel in distress (and, don’t misunderstand me, they do that a lot), they fight back while enslaved and help John Carter defeat the bad guys. They also make friends with each other, and, in some instances, defend each other from the women on the “bad” side. Dejah Thoris is allied with Sola and Thuvia in the same way John Carter is allied with Tars Tarkas and Kantos Kan. Granted, I’m not positive that the series passes the Bechdel test, but it’s at least nice to see.

The world is also very vividly drawn – I think there are reasons most artists draw the green men of Barsoom, standing many feet tall with multiple arms and tusks, with a degree of consistency. The descriptions Burroughs uses in creating his Mars are specific and memorable without being overwhelming.

However, when this entry started I compared the John Carter novels to James Cameron’s Avatar, and like that story, the Barsoom novels are about the special space honky who needs to save the native races in a land where he wasn’t born. A Princess of Mars’s first chapter starts horribly, with John Carter being chased by a group of American Indians he refers to as “savages.” Also, he’s a Confederate soldier, so you can draw your own conclusions there. He hides in a cave and, praying to the God Ares because he loves war just that darn much, he is transported via astral projection to Mars, where he has naked adventures being better and more powerful than everyone else because of how his physiognomy reacts to Mars (i.e., the gravity of Earth is stronger so he is stronger, a la Superman).

Yet despite the opening where John Carter disparages the “red men,” when the first human-like Martian appears in the books, Dejah Thoris, she looks pretty much exactly like an American Indian. He falls deeply in love with her and makes friends with others like her. In Gods and Warlord, Carter meets aliens who look like black people and Pacific Asian people. While they are hostile at first, he makes allies among a few of them, who go on to lead their own people, proving that none of them are inherently bad. In fact, the only inherently bad race seem to be the Martians that look like white men, who exploit all races of Martians by setting themselves as false Gods in a false paradise and believe themselves to be inherently superior.

Sometimes when reading this I got the same feeling I did reading The Marvelous Land of Oz. The first sequel to The Wizard of Oz, the book involves the Scarecrow being ousted as ruler of the Emerald City by a group of women from all four corners of Oz who want women to have all the jobs and run the land and have the men take care of the house. The women are defeated by a boy named Tip and his companions, all of whom are men, and all women stop working and become housewives again. However, at the end of the book Glinda meets Tip and tells him that he’s actually Ozma, the lost Princess of Oz, and to ascend the throne he must become the girl he is meant to be. It’s a book that seems to start off as an exercise in sexism but at the end makes you wonder if it’s a parody, or whether or not the contradiction seems to be on purpose.

Then again, [SPOILER] the last scene of The Warlord of Mars is a meeting where all those Martian races decide to elect John Carter the supreme ruler of the planet, so it may just be racist after all.

Is This Book Worth Reading? Yes, it’s a lot of fun. But watch out for racism.
Will This Book Enhance My Reading of League? Definitely.

For Further Reading:
A Princess of Mars
The Gods of Mars
Warlord of Mars

Stop #3: Moonchild by Aleister Crowley (I mean it this time)

Stop #1: Dracula by Bram Stoker

There are a number of works that are so ingrained into western culture that to discover them for the first time is to actively fight against what we know of them. Alan Moore seems to have anticipated this when he claimed, according to wikipedia, anyway, there were two characters he was specifically not going to focus on because of their outsized reputations. One was Sherlock Holmes. The other was Dracula.

Of course, while both characters were largely absent from the first volume of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, their presence and their stories loom large from the very first page. The volume begins shortly after the great detective’s death, and Mina Murray is the first member of the League we meet.

I originally read Dracula years ago after reading the League, and read it again recently for this blog post. During the first read, I remember being so enthralled by certain scenes: the ride to the castle, the introduction of Count Dracula, Harker’s near-seduction by the three female vampires, Lucy as a vampire, Mina drinking blood from Dracula’s breast and later being burned by holy water, the final confrontation. These scenes were so vivid that I couldn’t imagine why there had been so many disparate portrayals of the story. Why hadn’t moviemakers just stuck to the wonderful and clear visions that I had in my head?

Then I actually saw some of the most famous filmed versions of Bram Stoker’s novel: Nosferatu, the Bela Lugosi Dracula, The Horror of Dracula. Despite my original enrapture in the original novel, I had to admit that all of these were wonderful. Not every great work can stand up under reinterpretation, but the core of Dracula is somehow unbreakable. You can kill Mina. You can kill Jonathan (and at the end of the first act!). You can leave out huge swaths of the characters, and somehow the core story of an evil vampire preying on the innocent stays, and just as creepy as ever.

That story core can even blot out something I was disappointed by on re-read: there are a lot of … forgive the expression … dead parts to Dracula, especially near the end, when the main cast spends much of the time trying to defeat Dracula by visiting lawyers that have the keys to the houses where he’s left some dirt-filled coffins. Not that some things didn’t get better on re-read. I admire even more the ride to the castle, and how the weather reflects the mental state of Jonathan Harker and the villagers on the ride to where he will meet Count Dracula. I felt as if I were being introduced for the first time to Quincey Morris, a Texan with a penchant for Winchesters who needs to be in the next American adaptation of this story, at least. I also really gained an even greater appreciation for Mina. Even when she’s being seen through the paternalistic (and sometimes so much so that it harms her) eyes of the men around her, or talking about how sensitive and in need of their protection she is, her strength comes through. Reading the book, I thought that not only was she far braver and stronger than Jonathan, but I wondered if Lucy would have lived if Mina hadn’t had to run off to get him.

But is Mina of LoEG the same Mina of Dracula? I’ve heard the complaint that with The Black Dossier and Century Mina is hardly Stoker’s creation anymore. However, I’ll submit that in some ways, Moore’s Mina has never been Stoker’s, not really.
If you read Dracula and then LoEG, some things simply don’t match. Moore once fancifully explained that the reason he gave Mina a neck scarred as if by razors in the second volume was because that was how bats really bite, but the original novel Mina writes in her diary Lucy had the two marks “of legend.” The original novel also shows on a few occasions that the marks left by a vampire disappear after the vampire is killed. The idea that Jonathan Harker left Mina because of her scars makes even less sense when the novel ends with the couple happily married for seven years and with a son.

These differences can be a stumbling block for some, especially comics fans who are sticklers for continuity. My brother once objected to it, saying, “Who is Alan Moore to decide that they should divorce?” Well, nobody, not any more than Star Trek fans who decide that Kirk and Spock should settle down and adopt children together. But one of the joys of fanfic is seeing the “canon” story taken in a different direction. And, I have to admit, since I think Jonathan Harker’s an irritating wuss I personally am not bothered by the new direction.

You don’t have to read Dracula to understand the LoEG’s Mina, but doing so you’ll find a lot of character similarities, especially when compared to the rather weak-willed Mina in the Lugosi movie. Both versions of the character are strong, smart, resourceful, and know how to be team players. However, the character in Dracula is the only woman on a team of decent men who have the utmost respect for her, but also leave her out of the proceedings to her detriment. In LoEG, she’s a woman leading a team of dangerous men who (at first) have little to no respect for her. If you read Dracula, you can read LoEG’s Mina as a woman striving not to be put in the same position she was in her past, who wants to be in control. And, I’ll also venture that despite all its faults, it makes what happens to Mina in Century: 1969 when she takes drugs to be hip and is tormented by visions of Dracula as even more tragic.

On the other hand, re-reading Dracula also made me notice another blind spot: there’s no equivalent in LoEG to the great friendship between Mina and Lucy. Can we have something like this in a future book, please? NSA sex with Fanny Hill isn’t quite doing it for me …

To dial down the flippancy, though, I’ve always loved Moore’s Mina. I haven’t always liked what Moore’s threatened her with, but she’s a rare heroine that’s compelling and strong while still human and subject to setbacks. It’s good to know that a lot of that came from the 19th century character.

Is This Book Worth Reading? Of course. It’s Dracula. Even with some dull parts it’s a great read and a classic.
Will This Book Enhance My Reading of League? Yes, although you should suspend your disbelief when it comes to the contradictions.

For Further Reading: Dracula at Wikisource

Stop #2: Moonchild