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hurrengoa
monsters and heroes, the league of the extraordinary gentlemen odlok   "In the British Empire it’s always been difficult to distinguish between monsters and heroes..."
(Captain Campion Bond, 1908)
Hero. noun [C]: child of gods and mortals; a person who is admired for having done something very brave or having achieved something great.
Monster. noun [C]: a creature formed against the laws of nature; entirely ugly and repulsive.

Monsters and heroes. Heroes and monsters. In the personal make up of a hero, in the very definition of the word, there’s always a smidgeon of monster to be found, an excellence that exists outside normality. There’s also a bit of the hero to be found in all monsters because it goes against the laws of nature, godlike by definition. That is exactly how we would describe the characters created by script writer Alan Moore and illustrator Kevin O’Neill. Heroes and monsters. “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” draws upon the classics of adventure literature. You can glimpse the likes of Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, H.R. Haggard and Conan Doyle sneaking around behind these hero-monsters. The opium addict hunter, the invisible man who rapes young girls in convents, the weak man who embodies Dr. Jekyll and Hyde schizophrenia, the turban-wearing sea pirate, the elegant lady vampire from past sins...

These type of monsters are our heroes. And they fight against other heroes – evildoers of the ilk of Moriarty and Fu Manchu who want to destroy the city of London. At least that’s how it goes in the comic. Once again Hollywood has taken paper hero-monsters and shoved them up onto the big screen. In their search for saleability they have included two American characters that don’t exist in the comic. As well as that, they have muddied up the lives of our hero-monsters in the name of political correctness (puritanical fascism in other words). Most of you who see the film will never see the comic... all the worse for you. We are more than used to lost battles by this stage... and in the end we’ve come to realise that belonging to a minority group its own special kind of charm. Enjoy the film, but just remember that if you read the comic, your enjoyment would be more complete, more liberated... because unlike cinema, in comics we can still be hero-monsters.