A Century of Reading Time: From Modernist Novels to Contemporary Comics

Abstract

Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century (1999-2012) is a neo-Victorian comic book series that forcefully engages questions about history and the passage of time. This essay uses League to demonstrate how comics replicate, and even amplify, the tension between clock time and psychological time that so often appears in modernist works, thereby revealing the comic book form as an addition to the panoply of modernist techniques that interrupt the linear progression of clock time with time as felt by the individual. Simultaneously, this reading suggests that clock time – usually thought to be the objective, public dimension of time – is actually quite subjective.