I finally finished up reading League of Extraordinary Gentlemen after years of putting it off, and to be honest I'm a little disappointed. Which I guess was part of the point of Century. The story is about disappointment, and frustration with the way the world turned out when compared to the dreams writers from the Pulp era the characters of the story originated imagined it to be.
But Century 2009? That was just. . . pure distilled depression on Moore's part.
By the end of League. there's no Martians on Mars anymore, Baghdad is home to terrorists now, not genies or flying carpets. The people who are celebrated as heroes by the general public are reprehensible thugs like 'Jimmy' Bond, and heroes like John Carter, Sherlock Holmes, Allan Quartermane, are either dead, dying, or living their lives in shame. The names of great heroes from literature of the past (this worlds actual past) are mocked by being used to sell products like Ramen.
The one who gets the worst of it is Immortal transvesite Orlando. Who is still coming to terms with her own disappointment about the course of human history, and the stagnation of the literary world of League. She's been around since Troy, she's been in almost every major conflict since then., She's seen gods be born and die, had every conceivable type of sex imaginable, she's met everyone from Hercules and Spartacus, King Arthur and Merlin, to Sinbad and Adenoid Hynkel, to Horatio Blimp and Fu Manchu. She's killed so many people for both justifiable and morally dubious reasons over her 2000 plus year long life that she just can't bring herself to care anymore. Even sharing her experiences with fellow immortal soldier Colonel Cuckoo can't bring her out of her stupor. She's done everything, and now only seeks comfort in the familiar, but all that's familiar to her is war.
The world (and the public domain the characters living in it) have lost everything that made it special. Or rather, what literature had in the past that it doesn't have today.
. . . and this is Alan Moores screed against it.
League: Century 2009 Is basically Alan Moore venting all of his disappointments with the world, modern literature, fanboy communities, and comics culture out there. Moore is being a crochety old man lamenting the death of the public domain, the death of the types of heroes from the past, and the death of anything genuinely fresh and new in the world (which he also mentions in his poem 'Mandrillifesto').
Aside from Orlando being unable to cope with the modern world. Mina Murray mocks the 'The invisible college' (clearly meant to be Hogwarts), for being a pastiche of "comforting imagery from the 1940's" meant to evoke the past, Allan Quartermain with his drug of choice no longer existing is addicted to Opium again, and all this is happening as theres a new threat on the horizon.
. . . the anti-christ, the one destined to destroy the world. Is none other than 'The Boy Who Lived' himself. Now a grown 20-something man child who hates the world, who kills one of the main characters who's been around since Leagues first volume in a VERY humiliating way. The characters death pretty much sums up the way Moore feels about what Harry Potter and "Young Adult" fiction has done to the genre of adventure and fantasy.
Harry Potter, the Anti-Christ literally kills Allan Quartermain, the one who discovered King Solomons diamond mines, who faced off against an Immortal Egyptian goddess and lived to tell the tale, by
pissing magic on him. 
In return, Harry is killed by a thinly veiled Merry Poppins, or rather God in the physical form of Merry Poppins. Who tells Harry that the reason she's come to fight him is because of her "concern for the children, and the welfare of their imagination".
Clearly Alan Moore doesn't think too highly of modern Young Adult fiction like Harry Potter. He's basically saying through this that modern young-adult literature doesn't breed creativity or imagination, it breeds stagnation and turns the people who read it into adult children. (A backlash against his own fans who grew up with his DC comics perhaps?)
I guess if League was meant to be Alan Moore taking a journey through literatures history. Then Century 2009 does do a decent Job of summing up the modern state of modern literature. It doesn't end on a happy note for anyone involved. . . it ends on disappointment. While I don't agree with the majority of Moore's sentiment here I can at least admire him admitting his exhaustion and bitterness through his art.
Ray wrote:In preparation for the TV shows release there was a comic book adaptation of American Gods . And it's something else. . .
NSFW SPOILER: Show
