In 1890, British media mogul Alfred Harmsworth launched the halfpenny comic magazine. By reducing the page size and opting for the cheapest paper and ink, Harmsworth was able to undersell his competitors’ penny-priced output and created a publishing success that was widely imitated and ushered in the age of comics as a mass medium. In 2002, DC Comics started its Absolute Edition series, which reprints popular titles that originally appeared as pamphlets in oversized hardcover books (complete with dust jacket, slipcase, and ribbon) that cost between $50 and $100. Evidently, something has changed in the way that comics are produced and marketed, and one may well surmise that this change of formats is linked to the change in the cultural status they have experienced in the past few decades. At the turn of the twentieth century, comics “came at or near the bottom […] in the pantheon of […] literature,” a judgment of taste that finds its material equivalent in their disposable nature. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, comic books—especially deluxe editions like DC's Absolute series—are more likely to find themselves displayed in a bookcase than placed in the dustbin. And, with Art Spiegelman's Maus (1986/1991) winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen (1987) being included in Time magazine's 2005 list of the “All-TIME 100 Novels,” their position in the pantheon has clearly been revised. Yet interestingly, Maus and Watchmen only received these accolades after they had been repackaged as graphic novels, both having previously been published in magazine or pamphlet format. To tell the story of comics’ establishment as a “legitimate” art form is, among other things, also to tell the story of their shifting publication formats.

In this chapter, I propose to look at the curious evolution of comics through the lens of a series that harks back to the late-Victorian media landscape that British comics emerged from and that simultaneously embodies and questions the current state of the medium. Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1991-2019) relates the adventures of a superhero team made up of characters from nineteenth-century classics, such as Mina Murray from Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) and Allan Quatermain from H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885). In the first volume (1999) they face Sherlock Holmes's archenemy Professor Moriarty along with a “yellow peril” in London's East End.