In the recent article on Steampunk Spanking I mentioned the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the movie starring Sean Connery. What you may not know is that the movie was based on Volume One of a graphic novel of the same name published by America’s Best Comics and created by Alan Moore, Kevin O’Neil, Ben Dimagmaliw and Bill Oakley.
As you can see from the second of the drawings above, the scope and imagery very much suggests a Steampunk setting.
What was omitted from the film were the early scenes where our heroine captures the Invisible Man at Rosa Coote’s school for young ladies. The cad was there playing mischief and spying on the girls and the headmistress, Miss Coote, has called on the League for help.
Rosa Coote was a figure in several Victorian spanking novels including the Pearl and The Convent School. These were lurid harsh tales of the type that are now probably out of print, but were still available up until the 1980s.
In the scene above Katy Carr (of What Katy Did Next) is shown caning Olive Chancellor, a suffragist from the Bostonians, another Victorian novel. This is very much the vibe behind the novel and the films where a host of literary figures are drafted into the League from a variety of sources, hence Mina Harker (who in the film replaced Miss Murry as the heroine), Dorian Grey and Tom Sawyer all featuring in the film.
I have had the novel on my bookshelf since 2006 and have long thought about featuring it. Then a search of the web only reveals a cursory mention of the scene so here it is, possibly for the first time and scanned in by my own fair hand.
