Ambition, all by itself, is neither good nor bad. The greatest artistic works wouldn’t exist without vast reservoirs of ambition, but ambition by itself doesn’t guarantee anything. Even ambition combined with proven ability isn’t necessarily successful. And just because one work by a particular creator (or creators) was transcendently wonderful, that doesn’t mean the next related work will be equally so.

And that brings us to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, which, I’m sad to say, is pretty much the Tom Sawyer, Abroad of our day – a book that should have been something really special, given its predecessors’ pedigree, but which instead is self-indulgent and shows signs of existing purely because of contractual reasons.

But let me back up. There have been two League of Extraordinary Gentlemen stories so far, both of which were excellent pulpish adventure, homages to writer Alan Moore’s favorite British stories from the turn of the last century. There was something of a tendency to paint the lily even there, though – to cram in references every which way, to show either how smart Moore was or how much genre fiction he had read. But the references were only rarely important to those two stories, and the times they were – the revelation of the first “M,” for example – they were very obvious references, which nearly every reader of the comic would grasp quickly. Neither of the first two League stories was great literature, but they were excellent adventure stories, though they did imply that Moore took old pulpy stories more seriously than perhaps he should.

Black Dossier is not the third major League story; that’s still to come, in a year or three, from a different publisher in an unlikely format. It’s instead a weird hybrid of story and background, with a League story set in the 1950s wrapped around a collection of documents from the past of that history; those documents, of course, comprise the titular dossier. In the frame story, a young blonde couple steal the dossier and run away with it, pursued by nastier fictional characters. To understand the villains, the reader must recognize James Bond (not too difficult), remember Harry Lime (somewhat tougher), and have some idea who Bulldog Drummond is (exceptionally difficult). (more…)

Marvel and Del Rey announced this weekend at the New York Anime Festival that they plan to publish two new manga series based on the X-Men. The first project, scripted by the husband-and-wife team of Raina Telgemeier (writer and illustrator of The Babysitter’s Club graphic novels) and Dave Roman (creator of the comic Agnes Quill), will focus specifically on the X-Men team, with the storyline fashioned as a private school shôjo comedy. (Shôjo manga is aimed at girls and often covers popular subjects such as comedy, romance, and drama.) As the only girl in the all-boys School for Gifted Youngsters, Kitty Pryde, a mutant with phasing abilities, is torn between the popular Hellfire Club, led by flame-throwing mutant Pyro–and the school misfits, whom she eventually bands together as the X-Men. Indonesian artist Anzu will illustrate the two-volume series, which will go on sale in Spring 2009.

The nice folks at Del Rey Manga have provided us with looks at the character design sheets by Anzu, starting with Mystique:

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