The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Omnibus by Alan Moore

And by the time we return to the League story in 2009, it's a much bleaker cultural landscape still.' 'But changes in society over the first 50 years of the century meant that by the middle years culture had changed, certainly by 1969 where pop culture was predominant and previous culture was perhaps in danger of becoming increasingly marginalised. They're more often drawn from popular culture, because of course popular culture has expanded incredibly in the 50 years since 1910 when culture was still largely the preserve of an educated elite,' he said. By the time we get to 1969 we've got some equally interesting characters but they're a kind of different category. 'When we start out in 1910 we have a fairly rich background to draw from – we've got Brecht's Threepenny Opera which was set around that time, we've got all of those wonderful occult characters that were being created around then. In an interview with the Guardian on publication of the previous book in the series, Century 1969, last year, Moore said that the 21st-century storyline was drawn from a 'much bleaker cultural landscape'. At one point he even kills someone with a lightning bolt from his penis, according to the review. The magical school, however, appears nothing like Hogwarts: 'There are flashbacks of psychotic adolescent rage and whimpering children pleading for their life, all strewn with molten corpses', writes Sneddon in a review for the Independent on Sunday, while the antichrist figure himself is 'overgrown and high on anti-psychotics, raging at the education system that let him down and sounding peculiarly like Harry Enfield's teenage Kevin'. While Moore, the author of the seminal graphic novels Watchmen and V for Vendetta, never uses the words Harry or Potter in Century 2009, he makes his allusions clear by portraying a magical school reached by a magical train hidden between platforms at London's King's Cross, according to reviewer Laura Sneddon, who blogs as Comicbookgrrrl and who got her hands on the only review copy.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Omnibus by Alan Moore