The next issue of the second series of Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen has arrived. (Previously Blogged About Here). Haven't picked it up yet, but the first issue was good. As always, Jess Nevins' annotations are crucial to uncovering the many references to Victorian (and later) literature that Moore draws upon. And just to prove my geek status, I sent him a citation of my own. The comic includes "The New Traveller's Alamanac" (which Jess calls "Alan Moore's attempt to kill me"), an exhaustive compendium of supernatural (literary) places in the UK. In it, he describes the fate of Alice, who after coming back through the looking glass, starves to death.

The fate of Alice and the Baker [in the Hunting of the Snark], who both starve after being reversed in the looking glass, sounded awfully familiar to me. A search through some anthologies turned up an Arthur C. Clarke story from 1946 called "Technical Error", in which a power plant accident causes a worker to become "laterally inverted." (His body is flipped from left to right after briefly entering the fourth dimension). He is later in danger of starving to death because he can't digest the stereo-isomers of the enzymes his body needs. Or something like that.

It is also indexed under: Alan Moore | Arthur C. Clarke | Comics | Science Fiction

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