In a way, V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd is almost too obvious a choice for the Guardian’s series on literature about fighting back. Defiance is in its DNA. Revolution is its bread and butter. Standing up against injustice and fascism runs through it like the name of a seaside town in a stick of rock.
You may only know V for Vendetta from the Wachowskis’ adaptation starring Hugo Weaving and Natalie Portman, or you may be distantly aware of it thanks to the adoption of the Guy Fawkes mask by Anonymous and various protest groups. Or you may not know it at all.
V for Vendetta was published in the 1980s in the avant garde British comic magazine Warrior. The magazine folded in 1985 and DC comics picked up the series, first reprinting the story so far in colour (a suitably muted palette, but still akin to one of those ghastly “colourised” classic movies compared to the bleakness of the original) and then continuing and ultimately concluding the mini-epic.
The story takes place in 1997 – which was at the time of writing the near future. A nuclear war has devastated much of the world; Britain’s Labour government has succeeded in its disarmament policies so the UK is largely unscathed. But the turmoil brought about by the conflicts allows hard-right organisations and surviving corporations to come together under the banner Norsefire, quickly establishing a dystopian, fascist order in a Britain on the edge of chaos.
By the time we meet desperate teenager Evey, about to be brutally punished by undercover policemen, Britain has achieved a sort-of even keel, though one without ethnic minorities, hom*osexuals, radicals, transgender people. Anyone who isn’t straight, white and compliant has been disappeared into concentration camps and Britain has long since been ethnically, socially and sexually “cleansed”.
V rescues Evey and takes her to his secret hideout, furnished with the elements of British society that have been systematically erased. He employs her in his vendetta against those who incarcerated him and experimented on him in Larkhill Resettlement Camp in the early days of the reborn society, but V has a wider agenda; to bring down the state and create The Land of Do-As-You-Please.
While V’s flash-bang terror tactics against the new world order are pleasingly rousing, they are just the catalyst. It is the smaller, more human acts of defiance that really drive the narrative: Evey’s realisation that the dictatorship she has lived most of her life under is not the only way; policeman Eric Finch, whose investigation of V leads him to question the difference between state-approved law and actual justice; the small girl writing BOLLOCKS on the pavement, having realised that the all-seeing gaze of London’s pervasive CCTV network has been blinded by V.
At the heart of the story is the tale of Valerie Page, a gay actor who occupied the next cell to V in Larkhill. Her handwritten memoir, hidden in the wall, inspires him to escape the camp, and later encourages Evey in her own ultimate act of defiance during her apparent incarceration by the state.
In 1987, I met Alan Moore in Manchester, where he was signing copies of Watchmen with artist Dave Gibbons. DC had just announced they were reprinting and continuing V for Vendetta, two years after the story had been left hanging by the cancellation of Warrior.
Would we, I asked Moore somewhat nervously, be finding out who the perpetually-masked V actually was?
To his credit, he didn’t reply as I expected (“What do you think this is, sonny? Some kind of bloody superhero comic?”). Instead, he smiled enigmatically and said: “After a fashion.”
It would be a couple more years before I found out what he meant. The movie version made heavier weather of driving this message home, but the result was the same: we don’t find out who’s under the mask, because it’s potentially any of us. V is an idea, a symbol, and as he says himself: “Ideas are bulletproof.”
Quick GuideThe five Alan Moore comics you must read
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V for Vendetta (1982 - 1989)
This dystopian graphic novel continues to be relevant even 30 years after it ended. With its warnings against fascism, white supremacy and the horrors of a police state, V for Vendetta follows one woman and a revolutionary anarchist on a campaign to challenge and change the world.
Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow (1986)
Moore's quintessential Superman story. Though it has not aged as well as some of his work, this comic is still one of the best Man of Steel stories ever written, and one of the most memorable comics in DC's canon.
A Small Killing (1991)
This introspective, stream-of-consciousness comic follows a successful ad man who begins to have a midlife crisis after realising the moral failings of his life and work.
Tom Strong (1999 - 2006)
A love letter to the silver age of comics that nods to Buck Rogers and other classics of pulp fiction. Tom Strong embodies all of the ideals Moore holds for what a superhero should be.
The League of Extraordinary Gentleman (1999-2019)
One of Moore's best known comic series, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is the ultimate in crossover works, drawing on characters from all across the literary world who are on a mission to save it.
Two things strike me now. One is how the majority of the British population were happy to accept control and turn a blind eye to atrocities, so long as they were fed a diet of vaguely familiar sitcoms and tabloids. The other is that even at the height of the Thatcher years, Moore and Lloyd thought that something as epochal as a nuclear war would be necessary before Britain embraced fascism.
As we sleepwalk towards something closer to what Moore and Lloyd showed us, I am reminded of the cover of Warrior magazine number five, and its tagline, “Pray the future will never need … V for Vendetta”, and I can’t help but wonder: are we already there?
