Curiosity wrote:
Well, I added on the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to my Amazon order.
I'll let you know how I get on with it.
Most of my response to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was, 'meh'.
I liked 'Watchmen' as it was both exciting and epic. The characters were all drawn carefully (as in getting to know them, not penmanship), and you got to know backgrounds and stories for them and you identified with them to a greater or lesser degree. The 'shades of grey' in it really worked for me, with regards to moral ambiguity. It also had this incredible story that linked in with so many things, and wasn't predictable.
TLOEG to me, missed the mark in so many ways. I didn't really like or get particularly involved with any of the characters. The closest I came was to liking Griffin.
ZOMG Spoiler! Click here to view!
I liked how he was using his powers quite terribly before he was recruited. Actually, I'm going to write the rest in this spoiler tag as I will comment on the plot a bit.
Jekyll/Hyde was kind of dull to me, and went from unreasoning beast to quite reasoned large hulking person who is very much on their side for no apparent reason. Nemo did practically nothing other than offer a deux ex machina every time they were stuck... ("A flying machine? Nobody has ever seen one, and this will make Person X invincible... oh no, wait, I have one here in my cupboard, along with a couple of machine guns that I neglected to mention until we needed to kill loads of people at once!")
Quartermain was even fairly dull. A flawed character turned into a boring hero who was pretty rubbish at just about everything.
The story, too, didn't excite me much. The most interesting things in it, to me, were Sherlock Holmes at the waterfall, The Chinese Doctor, and Moriarty's role in the intelligence servie... yet none were featured much. I know that the whole thing is shot through with literary references, but going through spotting them is significantly less rewarding, IMO, than actually reading something interesting.
The basic plot, though, was very, very basic. Group forms. Go to get special magic weapon. Get it. Give it to villains by mistake. Get it back again. Whilst you can argue that is a simplified version... it's not that simplified, and I was upset when the book ended so quickly (as it had a bunch of 'extra content' lurking at the back that I was hoping was more story... I HATE it when books do that).
All said, I didn't hate it. I'd read a second one if someone handed it to me, but I certainly wouldn't pay much for it. It's a good bit of fun, but if you read it expecting something even in the same genre as 'Watchmen' you're probably going to be disappointed.
It's a bit like, say, you read the Lord of the Rings trilogy and love it, and then someone hands you one single book from the middle of The Mallorean by Eddings. It's not a bad book per se, but it's nothing like you were expecting, and seems somehow incomplete.