Movies - V for Vendetta

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	Movies - V for Vendetta

V for Vendetta is a ten-issue comic book limited series, later collected as a graphic novel, written by Alan Moore and illustrated mostly by David Lloyd, set in a dystopian future United Kingdom where a mysterious anarchist works to destroy the fascist government and profoundly affects the people he encounters.

Publication

V for Vendetta was originally published between 1982 and 1985, in black and white, in Warrior, a British anthology comic. The strip was one of the most popular in the title and featured on several covers during the 26 issues of Warrior.

Moore and Lloyd initially conceived the series as a dark adventure strip influenced by British comic characters of the 1960s, as well as Night Raven, a Marvel UK strip which Lloyd had previously worked on with writer Steve Parkhouse. Editors Dez Skinn and Graham Marsh came up with the name V for Vendetta. Moore credits Lloyd with the idea of dressing V as Guy Fawkes.

When Warrior was cancelled in 1985 (with one completed episode unpublished due to the cancellation), several companies attempted to convince Moore and Lloyd to let them publish and complete the story. It was not until 1988 that DC Comics started a ten-issue series that reprinted the Warrior stories in colour, then continued the series to completion. The first new material appeared in issue #7, which included the unpublished episode that would have appeared in Warrior #27. Tony Weare drew one chapter ("Vincent") and contributed additional art to two others ("Valerie", "The Vacation"); Steve Whitaker and Siobhan Dodds worked as colourists on the entire series. The series was then collected as a graphic novel, published in the US by DC's Vertigo imprint (ISBN 0930289528) and in the UK by Titan Books (ISBN 1852862912).

Themes

The series is set in an alternative-future Britain where nuclear weapons have been removed from the country following a victory for Labour in 1983, sparing it from nuclear attack in a limited nuclear war that left the country mostly physically intact. An extreme fascist single-party state has arisen, called Norsefire, that maintains control of the country through food shortages (arising during the nuclear winter), government-controlled media, secret police, a planned economy, and concentration camps for racial, political, and sexual minorities. There is an emphasis on technology, especially closed-circuit television monitoring in the mode of George Orwell's 1984
. (Closed-circuit television had not yet become common in the UK at the time Moore wrote the series. Today, London has the world's highest concentration of C.C.T.V.) When the series begins, political conflict has ended, the death camps have finished their work and have been closed, and the public is largely complacent, until "V" — an anarchist terrorist dressed as Guy Fawkes, mask and all, with an improbable array of abilities and resources — begins an elaborate, violent, and theatrical campaign to bring down the government.

V himself is something of an enigma, whose history is only hinted at; it is strongly suggested that he is physically disfigured. The bulk of the story is told from the viewpoints of other characters: V's admirer and apprentice Evey, a sixteen-year-old munitions factory worker; Eric Finch, a world-weary and pragmatic policeman who is hunting V; and several contenders for power within the fascist party. V's destructive acts are morally ambiguous, and a central theme of the series is the rationalisation of atrocities in the name of a higher goal, whether it is stability or freedom. The character is a mixture of an actual advocate of anarchism and the traditional stereotype of the anarchist as a terrorist and advocate of anarchy in the sense of chaos.

Moore stated in an interview:

...the central question is, is this guy right? Or is he mad? What do you, the reader, think about this? Which struck me as a properly anarchist solution. I didn't want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think, and consider some of these admittedly extreme little elements, which nevertheless do recur fairly regularly throughout human history.

There are many references to the letter V and number 5 (which is V in Roman numerals). For example, the character V is seen reading and quoting from Thomas Pynchon's novel, V. and listening to Beethoven's fifth symphony (the first four notes can be represented as the letter V in Morse code.) V always introduces himself with a five-syllable phrase: "You can call me V." The phrase "Remember, remember, the fifth of November" is also referenced; it is the first line of a nursery rhyme detailing the exploits of Guy Fawkes. The name of every chapter begins with the letter V. Another link to that letter comes from his past as the "Prisoner of Room Five", as later revealed in the series.

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Movies - V for Vendetta

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