Hanging out with ‘Archival Al’: Decadent Community in Neo-Victorian Comics

Abstract

This article explores neo-Victorian allusions to verbal and visual materials from the fin de siècle in the first two volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentleman comics by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill (1999-2003). Drawing on recent work by Matthew Potolsky and others, I argue that Moore and O’Neill enact a form of an imagined community that would have been familiar to nineteenth-century writers and artists such as J.-K. Huysmans, Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. In this way, I claim that The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen affirms the value of neglected counter-cultural elements from late-Victorian decadence. At the same time it also offers a critique of various reactionary attempts to return to conservative Victorian values. Moore and O’Neill draw upon the unsettling power of nineteenth-century decadent aesthetics to probe and question ideologies of gender, sexuality and race.