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Untold Tales of the League of Improbable Gentlemen -Notes and Incunabula Wednesday, 29-Mar-2000 03:58:42
NOTES & INCUNABULA: A number of readers have raised questions about the Improbable Gentlemen and their time period, so here is a summary of what we know of them: The origins of the League remain something of a mystery, as does it’s early membership. The main wing of the Lair Mansion was built in 1811 as the meeting place for the League, although it may have been operating informally for a while before this date. They were written up in the society columns as a club who dabbled in mysteries and suchlike. Little else is known of the League’s founders, although the work orders for building the neo-gothic flanking wings and rear courtyard block were signed by the club secretary Headley Valentine. The Club as we meet them in the late 1870’s consists of a core of: Colonel Blanchford Bertram, a retired U.S. Cavalry officer, world explorer, and adventurer. By the 1870’s the Colonel has been a member for a good three decades and is a man in his late fifties. Somewhere in his adventures he has picked up Knifey, a sentient blade of as-yet-unrevealed origins carried in the modern day by the superhero ManMan. Lee, ManMan’s writer, speculates about an African expedition as being the possible venue for Bertram and Knifey’s meeting. I suggest that they met when some nefarious villain – possibly the horrifyingly hairy King Mungo the Huge from the lost Rape Ape City now I come to think about it – hurled Knifey into the Colonel’s back. Sir Mumphrey Wilton, an English knight and general all round good sport. In the 1870’s Mumphrey has only recently acquired his temporal pocketwatch from the sinister Madame Symmetry of Synchronicity in another adventure which is yet to be properly documented (sigh). He has still to learn the nuances of his chronometer but is aware that it makes him some kind of minor cosmic office holder. He hasn’t yet worked out that he has stopped ageing while he carries the instrument. He won’t meet his future wife, Madge, for several decades yet, because she hasn’t been born. Hagatha Darkness, the witch of Covenant Manse. Miss Darkness 1870’s style is a young woman with a problem. Her sorcerous lineage comes with a familiar spirit who is somewhat over-familiar. The Demon Lover has been breeding Darkness line witches for thousands of years, impregnating them to create a stronger witch each time so that one day a child can become his vessel for human incarnation and subsequent dimensional domination. The independent Hagatha has disobediently taken a human lover – Mumph - instead, and this is all going to come to a head very soon after the Untold Tale that’s been, um, told. Mumphrey will unknowingly become the father of Hagatha’s daughter, and ultimately grandfather to Abandoned Legion member Sorceress. The Demon Lover subplot gets sorted out once and for all in Untold Tales of the Lair Legion #34: True, Dare, Kiss, Promise. Phineas Quimby, the EccentricEtherInvestigatorExplorer!, the late nineteenth century CrazySugarHero! After discovering his Improbable Aether, Quimby and his companion and chronicler Fogherty undertook a series of remarkable adventures utilising the various gadgets this mysterious substance powered. One such caper is detailed in The Journal of Sir Mumphrey Wilton, Extract Ten: In which we visit with an old friend and get the finest tea ever brewed on a steam-powered extrophohelioscope. Many people suspected that Quimby and his flatmate “Froggy” Fogherty were more than friends. Few realised that Fogherty was actually the cross-dressing Lady Alicia Redmayne. Quimby and Redmayne vanished in the early years of the 20th century testing an experimental time-sled and have not been heard of since. Dr Hakenfakir, surgeon, musician, hypnotist, and wielder of a suspiciously familiar cane. native of Bombay, India, Dr Hakenfakir was murdered while exploring a lead to the mysterious Floating Island of Chemmis. By a serious of curious coincidences he had just unearthed one of the Egyptian staffs of life and death from its Syrian tomb, and this granted him a new half-life so long as he retained it. This same cane would later do the same thing for the Late, Great, Donald Blake, one of the Scourge of Baron Zemo’s Lair. The circumstances of Dr Hakenfakir’s loss of the staff and it’s current ownership have not yet been explored. Hastings Vernal, intertemporal man of mystery. A number of inexplicably similar characters with the initials HV have shown up all through history. The modern age, for example, has seen Hollywood V and later Hunter Victorious interacting with super-heroes. HV has often shown an interest in joining or guiding teams of adventurers, and has a special care for the Lair Mansion, which he appears to have directed both the League of Improbable Gentlemen and the Lair Legion towards using. He was also illicitly accessing the building when it was under the ownership and control of Wilbur Parody in the latter years of the nineteenth century. On the whole, however, HV’s motives, background, and origin remain to be discovered (read: we’re waiting for Neil to write them). Jakes the butler was never described as a hunchback but he should have been. He was, in fact, a closet hunchback. The Hooded Hood’s manservant Flapjack is his great-nephew, grandson, and great-grandson, depending on how you calculate it. Young Hopkins was a page for the League in their final years who explored one cellar too many and got his descendants roped into the narrative. Helmut Zemo was the more familiar Heinrich Zemo’s great-grandfather. Whether the current Zemo is aware of the circumstances of his ancestor’s death is unknown. The Brain Butcher’s Serious Matter manifested again at an appropriate and orderly point in the time space continuum, and eventually became bonded to Hatman, whose powers are a much more benign variant of the same principle as that used by the Butcher. This has been touched upon in Untold Tales #41, the Last Will and Testament of Hagatha Darkness. Perfection O’Toole died in 1912 and was replaced by a new Emissary of Order. Only Kirk Boxleitner can reveal who that is now. Dr Christopher Waltz may have been a distant grandparent of a familiar (with everybody) First Lady of the Lair Legion, and some may recall her choice of name for her recent offspring. Wilbur Parody was a complicated and cunning adversary. His main appearance to date was in The Secret History of the Parodyverse: The Most Untold Tale of the Lair Legion of All, where he takes on Lisa and Goldeneyed as they strive to uncover what he’s been plotting all this time and encounter none other than Hastings Vernal to help with their bafflement. The final showdown with Wilbur is described in Lair Legion: Year One, part 6, but that’s not available just yet. There are a number of other connections to be made with throwaway lines in the narrative about the League of Improbable Gentlemen, but it’s more fun letting folks spot them for themselves. Let me know if you really want in on the jokes. Finally, we know that the League ended shortly after this adventure, although the circumstances again remain unrevealed. Their spirit lived on in at least two subsequent groups, the Golden Age Matadors who fought in World War II, and of course the Lair Legion themselves, who are only now delving the rich heritage that they have inherited. More of that in future stories. The history of the Parodyverse shouldn’t only be my playground, by the way. It’s great fun, the League has a long history that has never been documented, and there’s plenty of other eras too. Feel free to contribute. HH Being for the edification of the superior reader, provided by the scholarly Hooded Hood |
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