Today in Comics History, July 25, 1931: Aunt May scolds Peter for writing to a racist and pretending to be the executor of his estate

from Providence #11 (Avatar, November 2016), script by Alan Moore, pencils and inks by Jacen Burrows, colors by Juan Manuel Rodriguez, letters by Kurt Hathaway

A Wodehouse a Week Special: "What Ho, Gods of the Abyss" from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier

Happy Halloween! On this night that's kooky, spooky, and altogether ooky, let's while away the time after gathering candy and before our visit to the stomach ward of the local hospital by checking in on our old Halloweeny pal, Mister P. G. Wodehouse. It's been one year to the day since old man Jenkins died in that strange house on the hill under mysterious circumstances I reviewed P. H. cannon's pastiche novel Scream for Jeeves, a loving if not always successful mash-up of Wodehouse and H. P. Lovecraft. Coincidentally—or not, you make the call!—virtually one year ago today Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's much-delayed, eagerly-anticipated The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier was finally released, and I ran home excitedly with it, crawled into my big armchair, strapped on my 3D glasses, and eagerly devoured it (note: not literally).

My take on LoEG: BD? (Sorry, not callin' it LXG, no how, no way!) Well, I liked it, liked it a lot, enough to name it #20 on my Fun Fifty of 2007. I liked Moore's take on James Bond (probably a version closer to a real-life 007 than any movie version), its clever reimagining of my favorite map in the world...



...and the thrill-ride that takes Mina Harker and Allan Quatermain from grey and dreary Post-Orwell Britain to a literally eye-popping fantasyland beyond the realm of imagination. Like the earlier LoEG volumes, it rewards re-reading for its variety of prose, denseness of ideas, and the whirlwind parade of guest stars from literature, film, comics and popular culture. As always, you can't tell the players without a scorecard, so Jess Nevins's annotations for Black Dossier are, as always, especially useful—altho' much of the fun is in figuring out references on your own. The thrill and delight in recognizing one of them gives a "Where's Waldo?" feel to the book but doesn't overwhelm the plot. (I myself was delighted to see the comic The Winged Avenger on a newsstand in the book)

The reason I most enjoyed Black Dossier, however, is that Moore and O'Neill weren't content to just produce another comic book sequel—Black Dossier truly goes one step beyond the originals by presenting us with a history of the League's world in titular secret documents: a lost Shakespeare play (on yellowing paper illustrated with period woodcuts), a pastiche of 1950s British picture-comics telling the life history of League member Orlando (from the Virginia Woolf novel), picture postcards between the original cast members, a not-suitable-for-little-stuffed-bulls Tijuana Diary, an excerpt from a Kerouac-styled Beat novel of the League's universe (that one's sadly pretty unreadable). Each of these pieces, and the many more that accompany them, are presented in a specific visual design style that emulates the originals that they're parodying or referencing, giving us the feeling that we're not looking at a hardcover graphic novel, but actually a scrapbook—the true Black Dossier. The original two LoEG books may have celebrated the great characters of literature and pop culture, but Black Dossier goes one step further and celebrates the medium and the art of storytelling, publishing, and visual entertainment as much as it does its protagonists. Moore would have even gone one further and added the element of sound to the mix if the book had contained the original planned flexi-disc.

But what's this got to do with A Wodehouse a Week, you muse? One of Moore's segments is the four-page Wodehouse pastiche "What Ho, Gods of the Abyss," written by "The Rt. Hon. Bertram Wooster." Like Scream for Jeeves, it's a blending of the light-hearted comedy of P. G. Wodehouse and the chilling dread of H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu (or, as Bertie mishears them "Cool Lulu") horrors, set at Aunt Dahlia's familiar old manse Brinkley Court.

Moore has the general narration style and character voices of Wodehouse down pretty pat, right to the traditional Bertie story-opening:

Friendship can be a rather sticky wicket now and then, as when one's anxious to assure one's chums that one does not regard them as a hideous embarrassment, when one actually does. Old hands amongst you will have no doubt guessed ahead that the source of my discomfort was that same Augustus, he of the Fink-Nottles, whom I've previously lamented in these pages.

He even throws in running Bertie jokes and references:

'...That man has been a font of knowledge when it comes to folk traditions from rural America, which I believe that I may write a piece on for Milady's Boudoir.'

This was a weekly periodical, intended for the sensitively reared. Of which my Aunt was proprietor. I looked her in the eye and said 'Tish-tosh,' which I am not afraid to state that I had intended as a cut.

Trouble is, Moore has the style down, but not the patterns. Take a quick peek at this first two-page spread—don't pay attention to the words itself, but look at the length of the paragraphs:



...and now grab a gander at a randomly chosen couple pages from a real book by The Master himself:



Moore's prose is dense, with long, deep, descriptive paragraphs and virtually no dialogue; Wodehouse's is short, sharp, and peppy, featuring short paragraphs and fast-alternating lines of dialogue. I've said before that Wodehouse's books sometimes read like plays (he himself commented that he was writing musical theatre without the music) because the back-and-forth conversation frequently monopolizes the page for so many lines that it becomes a dialogue. I'm not familiar with Lovecraft's literary style—is Moore specifically copying the pacing and paragraph construction of Lovecraft here? If so, that's very clever, but as a Wodehouse pastiche, it rings oddly because you never see a true Wodehouse book that's mostly narration and very little dialogue.

The League shows up in the middle of the Jeevesian do to put things right:

They were a dashing crew, I must say, even if they did appear to have a girl in charge of them, a pretty little thing called Min, with steely eels and a thick muffler around her neck despite it being then the stifling height of summer. With her was a wiry gentleman around her age, whom she called Allan, and another person, called Orlando Something, who despite his deep voice and deportment looked to me the very spit of Gussie's fatuous fiancée, the appalling Madeline Bassett o the limpid eyes and weeping-spasms.

Despite departing snappy dialogue for eldritch description, Moore's got a pretty good handle on Bertie's narrative voice, and there's some spot-on bits that not only had me nodding my head in their approximation of authentic Wodehouse, they made me giggle:

My aunt and all her pals were twitching and convulsing on the clipped grass, foaming at their mouths and jabbering in tongues, with not a stitch of clothing on between the lot of them. I'd feared that Morris dancing might result from all this folk tradition lark. But naturism really was the limit.

Of course, poor Gussie Fink-Nottle gets the worst of it, as usual:

'...If what I have heard of this abominable creatures is correct, Mr. Fink-Nottle's most essential self is at this moment being carried to the place called Yuggoth that they mentioned, possibly some other planet or dimension, in the confines of a copper cylinder. Put simply, sir, I fear they have removed his brain and left him here like a boiled egg that's had its top sliced off.'

'Oh bother, have they really? Do you know, I thought that I was feeling muzzy.'

Gussie sat up slowly in the armchair, lifting one hand gingerly to feel around inside his open and demonstratably deserted cranium. His goldfish eyes gazed up imploringly towards my manservant. 'I say, you couldn't fix my lid back so that it wouldn't show, Jeeves, could you? If Miss Basset saw me like this I should never heard an end to it.'

Wearing a look of incredulity that bordered on the insolent, and muttering about a tube of glue he thought he might have, Jeeves led the pair of us back to the house past what survived of Auntie's soiree.

That last bit, by the way, is the only piece of "What Ho, Gods of the Abyss" that rang truly false with me. Sure, one might suppose that faced with the ultimate evil incarnate, even Jeeves might be shaken enough to drop his usual unflappable decorum. But you know, I'd prefer Jeeves to be the unshakeable, the unsinkable, the non-plussed supermind he is in the Wodehouse books. Here's a counterargument to a shaken and stirred Jeeves from a real Wodehouse (Aunts Aren't Gentlemen):

'Jeeves,' I said, when I had returned to the Wooster G.H.Q., 'I'm afraid I have bad news.'

'Indeed, sir? I am sorry to hear that.'

One of his eyebrows had risen about an eighth of an inch, and I know he was deeply stirred, because I had rarely seen him raise an eyebrow more than a sixteenth of an inch.

Now that's the real Jeeves. But Alan Moore's version ain't bad, and the general concept—although done previously by P. H. Cannon—makes a spiffing excursion into Moore and O'Neill's heavily-celebrity-populated world. I've always thought Jeeves was among history's most Extraordinary Gentlemen...now we have proof.



I may have waited a year to review Moore's Wodehouse pastiche, but you reap the spooky benefits of my delay! How's that? Because The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier just came out in paperback this week at your local comic store, and will be in stock early next week at Amazon and other fine bookstores around the country. (Just click on the link to your right to pick up a copy!) It's the perfect adventure into the world of spies, spaceships, and spooks, capped off with a spectacular (if over-the-top nonsensical) 3D end section. Like it or love it, you have to admit Moore's not resting on his laurels he's given us something new and dramatic that expands the scope of the original League novels. May he continue to surprise, outrage, and entertain us.

A Wodehouse a Week Index.

A Wodehouse a Week Special: Scream for Jeeves

Happy Halloween, everybody! On this darkest of nights, what say we entertain ourselves by snuggling up in our cozy armchairs and reading some spooky, chilling tales...like, f'r instance, a Jeeves and Wooster story? But Bully! I hear you say (with your mouth all fulla candy corn) Jeeves and Bertie stories aren't scary! And there you have me. Wodehouse's work is nothing if not light and airy: a few scary aunts and threatened marriages aside, there's not a sliver of fright in the lot of 'em. So instead, let's wander off the well-lit path of Official Wodehouse Canon into the dimly-lit and spooky, dead-tree-laden dark woods of fan fiction, shall we? And like much fan fiction, it can be a scary, scary place...

Tonight's special Halloween offering is the professionally-printed but still unauthorized Scream for Jeeves: A Parody (1994) by P. H. Cannon, a loving if unorthodox homage and mashup of two initialed writers who probably never suspected their worlds could collide: P. G. Wodehouse and H. P. Lovecraft. I'll pause a moment to let that sink in, shall I? P. G. Wodehouse and H. P. Lovecraft. And, as we'll see in a while, a little dash of A. C. Doyle has been added to the bubbling mixture in the cauldron.

Scream for Jeeves (and I think that's a brilliant title) is a slim volume of three short stories and one historical essay—so brief that I read it all in one single one-way trip to Manhattan on the subway instead of the usual round trip. The conceit is that Bertie Wooster and Jeeves's right-ho Georgian world is the same in which Lovecraft's horrific dark ancient god Cthulhu is breaking through, and Bertie keeps bumbling into the mind-shearing events that precede a horrific bloody invasion with his usual cheerful aplomb (and the life- and sanity-saving help of Jeeves). I'm not as familiar with the world of Mister HPL as I am with Mister PGW, but Cannon certainly has his lead characters and especially the voice of Bertie Wooster down pat, even as he confronts things man was not meant to know:

'I trust you slept well, Mr. Wooster,' said my host, as he pushed the kippers about the plate in a morose, devil-take-the-hindmost sort of way.

'Like a top, old sport. Like a top.'

'I was harassed by dreams of the most horrible sort. First there was a vision of a Roman feast like that of Trimalcho, with a horror in a covered platter.'

'Could it have been something you ate?' I said, sounding the solicitous tone. I didn't want to hurt the old fellow's feelings, of course, so I refrained from saying that the fish sauce the night before had been someone below par. In truth, the cook at Exham Priory was not even in the running with Anatole, my Aunt Dahlia's French chef and God's gift to the gastric juices.

'Next I seemed to be looking down from an enormous height upon a twilit grotto, knee-deep in filth, where a white-bearded daemon swineherd drove about with his staff a flock of fungous, flabby beasts whose appearance filled me with unutterable loathing.'

'Could it have been something you read before retiring? "Mary Had a Little Lamb" perhaps? Mind you, that one's about a shepherdess, not a swineherd, but it's the same sort of thing, don't you know.'

'Then, as the swineherd paused and nodded over his task, a mighty swarm of rats rained down on the stinking abyss and fell to devouring beast and man alike.'

'Rats! By Jove, this is getting a bit thick. My man Jeeves thinks rats may have been the party to blame for your cats carrying on the other day like they had broken into the catnip.'

In fact, throughout the stories, Jeeves serves as our guide to the dark doings; he's remarkably well-informed (well, of course!) about ancient beasts and demons and is well-read in the work of Arthur Machen. Thanks to Jeeves, no real harm comes to Bertie throughout the course of their dread adventures—at least nothing that a stiff g. & t. won't whisk away later on:

Within an hour the altar stone was tilting backwards, counterbalanced by Tubby, and there lay revealed— But how shall I describe it? I don't know if you've ridden much though the tunnel-of-horrors featured at the better amusement parks, but the scene before us reminded me strongly of same. Through a nearly square opening in the tiled floor, sprawling on a flight of stone steps, was a ghastly array of human or semi-human bones. Not a pretty sight, you understand, but at least there was a cool breeze with something of freshness in it blowing up the arched passage. I mean to say, it could have been a noxious rush as if from a closed vault. We did not pause long, but shiveringly began to cut a swath through the ancestral debris down the steps. It was then that Jeeves noticed something odd.

'You will observe, sir, that the hewn walls of the passage, according to the direction of the strokes, must have been chiseled from beneath.'

'From beneath, you say, Jeeves?'

'Yes, sir.'

'But in that case—'

'For the sake of your sanity, sir, I would advise you not to ruminate on the implications.'

It's not great art and certainly can't stand up to the best of Wodehouse (or likely even Lovecraft), but it has a certain appeal, and it's just the right length. Sort of like a headline from The Onion, the concept is funny enough on its own without delving too deeply into exploring it, and three short stories running 64 pages total are just enough. It's tough to imitate Wodehouse without slipping into total parody, and Cannon carries it off most of the time, although occasionally he piles on so many of Bertie's self-references to actual Wodehouse events (Florence Craye, the article Bertie wrote for his aunt's magazine, Sir Roderick Glossop) that it just seems like he's including them just for sheer trivia's sake. And he's not above inserting an awkward, groan-inducing pop-culture reference when Bertie linguistically tangles with a foreign landlady:

'Ah, Mistair Jeeves, I so glad you come.'

'Wooster's the name, my good man...er, woman.'

'Is just in time. Doctair Muñoz, he have speel his chemicals.'

'Well, I shouldn't worry if he spilled his chemicals on the woodwork or marble. I daresay no one will notice.'

'All day he take funnee-smelling baths.'

'Oh, really? Perhaps he got soap in his eyes and grabbed the jar of hydrogen sulfide instead of the bubble bath.'

'He cannot get excite.'

'He can't get outside? Yes, I know, Randy told me, but—'

'And the sal-ammoiniac—'

'Sal who?"

'Qué?'

I was prepared to play Pat to Mrs. Herrero's Mike as long as I had to, but at that moment Randy arrived and put the kibosh on the cross-talk. 'Don't mind her," he explained, as he clouted his landlady affectionately on the occiput. 'She's from Barcelona.'

Sherlock Holmes is under the magnifying glass as well in these parodies: he pops up in the final of the three stories, thinly disguised as 'Altamont," Holmes's pseudonym in the Conan Doyle story "His Last Bow." That inclusion means Cannon can examine three authors instead of merely two: the last third of Scream for Jeeves is taken up with an essay entitled "The Adventure of the Three Anglo-American Authors: Some Reflections of Conan Doyle, P. G. Wodehouse, and H. P. Lovecraft," which is a nice-enough little piece if it were a salute or admiration, but Cannon attempts to be too scholarly and winds up failing to convince us of any of his arguments, especially when he begins by pointing out the similarities of Doyle, Wodehouse, and Lovecraft are that "the supreme fictional achievements of each are roughly comparable in size: Doyle's Sherlock Holmes canon consists of 56 stories and four novels; Wodehouse's Jeeves saga embraces 34 stories and 11 novels; and Lovecraft's core corpus, including his Mythos cycles, amounts to two dozen or so stories and three novels." He goes on to point out that such a superficial similarly proves nothing, which begs the question of why he begins his argument with it. The rest of the essay is devoted to drawing parallels and connections between the three authors. Unfortunately, most of the arguments can connect two of the trio but not the third, and much of it is based on post-facto circumstantial POV evidence that would get his work kicked off a Wikipedia page—for instance, he spends a hefty paragraph pointing out that Stephen King likes Lovecraft and has written a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, and that actor Stephen Fry has also written a Holmes short story and has played Jeeves on television. He also spends a good deal of energy discussing racist language and attitudes in the work of the three authors, an argument that I don't think holds water (although I'm understandably prejudiced in favor of the idea that Wodehouse very seldom usages of the n-word were done innocently and in keeping with vernacular slang of the time rather than racism or hate). And then there's this specious argument:

Finally, like Bertie and his chums, Lovecraft had a penchant for assigning his friends funny nicknames, such as "Klarkash-Ton" for Clark Ashton Smith, "Melmoth the Wandrei" for Donald Wandrei, "Hilly Billy' Crawford for William L. Crawford, and "Sonny" or "Kid" or "Belknapius" for Frank Belknap Long, Jr. I rest my case.

Still, don't judge the book on the essay but on the fiction itself, which is amusing and competent. Cannon has the voice of Bertie Wooster down pitch-perfect, although those I've only read a smattering of Lovecraft in my time (it's a little too intense for a small stuffed animal!), he's got that unnerving sense of despair to a T as well. Wodehouse's books spin around the sparkling dialogue and Lovecraft's around the ponderous descriptive prose, and Cannon pulls off a tidy and artful balance of the two, especially bringing two such light and cheering characters into a dark world that is heavy with dread and encroaching despair. Like Lovecraft's work itself, the horrific End of Days events don't manifest themselves concretely in Scream for Jeeves—but the ever-present maddening pull into darkness and crushing dread of his world are wonderfully and elegantly portrayed, and it's an nifty solution to have Bertie black out conveniently whenever anything really horrific is about to happen, only to hear later on from Jeeves that it was all for the best that you did not observe the circumstances, sir. Let that be hope for all of us when the demons start climbing out of the fiery cracks in the broken earth: it's all just a nightmare that can be easily erased by a lingering hot bath and a stiff drink, and the quick wits and incalculable knowledge of our own gentleman's gentleman. After all, if Jeeves can stave off Honoria Glossop from marrying Bertie, then Cthulhu and his quivering tentacles aren't going to make him go 'boo.'



Scream for Jeeves was published by the (aptly named) Wodecraft Press and distributed by the Necronomicon Press, the publishing house where all the ISBNs end in 66-6, but you don't have to go to heck and back to secure a copy. Even though it's out of print, there's still plenty of used copies scurrying about like rats on the internet, and all you have to do is click on the Amazon link to the right and order yourself up a copy. Make sure you pay for it with Visa or MasterCard; never click on the "immortal soul" option when choosing payment at checkout.

A Wodehouse a Week Index.