OK, so I recently finished the first story arc of Alan Moore's excellent comic book series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I really recommend it to you all. It's like a Victorian era version of the Justice League of America, except that all the characters are pulled from Victorian novels. For instance, the team of protagonists is:

1. Wilhemina Murray, more familiar to most as Mina Harker before a certain unfortuante incident (team leader),
2. The daring adventurer Allan Quatermain, who is starting to get on in years,
3. The exotic Captain Nemo and his fantastic Nautilus,
4. Hawley Griffin, The Invisible Man, and
5. Dr. Henry Jekyll with his fearsome companion, Edward Hyde.

In the first issue, the team takes on the double threat of Fu Manchu and Moriarty, who are both fighting for control of a supply of cavorite, an exotic lighter-than-air substance that would allow the construction of an amazing Arial Warship. The England through which they move is populated with all manner of characters from victorian dramas to victorian comedies to victorian science fiction to victorian porn. Imagine Moore's earlier work From Hell, but fun.

Anyway, I was reading the series, and I wondered...If I had to put together a LOEG today, who would I use?

Rules for the heros

Here are the rules, as deduced from the story so far:

1. All heros must be fictional.
2. Your team may have 6 members at most (the current team has 5.5, and a previous team had 6 members, but two of those were a husband-and-wife team).
3. Everyone must bring an original skill to the team.
4. They need not have extraordinary powers. Quatermain is just a guy with an ego and an elephant gun.
5. Continuity must be preserved with the characters' other adventures. For example, you wouldn't want to use Fox Mulder in an adventure that takes place in 1998...wouldn't he be missed at work? Exception: You may bring them back from the dead, if you can make it plausable.
6. You may use characters that are associated with any media except comic books or cartoons. I really wanted to put Dr. David Banner on my team, but the problem is that comic book heros are commonly seen in crossovers, and the objective here is to make a crossover team of characers in mediums besides comics.
7. They may not be comedic characters. The LOEG has met up with characters that were from comedies, but all the books they were based off of took themselves seriously, even the hokey ones.
8. They must be representatives of American Culture. This does not mean that they have to be from the United States, but it does mean that they have to have been popular there, just as the Hindu Captain Nemo was well-known to 19th century England.

That said, let me present my two offerings for LOEG 2000.

1. The first one could actually have been formed in 1991:
   1. Special Agent Clarice Starling, riding her fame from a high profile arrest, (team leader). I'm ignoring the events in Hannibal, because they're inconvenient and the book sucks anyway.
   2. Retired San Francisco police officer Harry Callahan,
   3. High-tech vigilante Michael Knight, and his sidekick KITT,
   4. Ronin Lieutenant and master of disguise Templeton Peck,
   5. and John Shaft, Private Dick.
2. The second team would need to be formed in a couple of years:
   1. Special Agent Dana Scully, relegated to this dead-end job because she's been talking about some weird shit, but no one has a pretense to fire her (team leader),
   2. Ex-Green Beret soldier John Rambo, pulled from the VA psych ward,
   3. Cole Sear, a pre-teen shanghaid into government custody after his talent is noticed by a school counsellor.
   4. Eminent mathematician and erstwhile paleobiologist Dr. Ian Malcolm.
   5. A beta version of the new Max Headroom program.

But who will they fight against?

This is the tricky part. All I can really say to define a bad guy is that he/she must be

1. Evil,
2. Powerful,
3. well known, and
4. not from a comic book either.

That leaves almost no one as a good villain today that can measure up to Fu Manchu or Moriarty. Dr. Hannibal Lecter and Patrick Bateman are both creepy psychopaths who are still on the loose, but neither one poses the kind of threat to National Security that would require a super team of our caliber to fight. Closer, I think, might be Freddy Kreuger, who has always exuded much more potential for carnage than a lone serial killer.

I am left with two possibilities:

1. Rich Texan J.R. Ewing is running for President, but he has a dirty little secret: His company's patented Trioxin process has earned him millions, but an unfortunate leak triggers some disturbing side effects in a small town. The LOEG is called in to try and restore order, and they start to link the zombies to Ewing, but the Military is involved too....
2. Godzilla. I don't have any idea what they'd do, but it sure would be cool.

So, got any better ideas? Tell me.