V for Vendetta – Alan Moore, David Lloyd

Rating: 3.5 stars

I re-read V because I’d recently re-read Watchmen and wanted to re-read some comic books to see how they’ve aged now that I’m better read and more perspicacious (such as being able to use the word perspicacious). If you think of ever watching the movie (2006), don’t. I beg of you, never ever watch it. It is possibly worse than the Watchmen movie, and that is pretty awful.

Well, hoo boy, I remember not liking V all that much before, but now I can articulate my problems. First, I’ll start with the things I liked. The story is fast paced, self-contained and easily digestible. Well, maybe I shouldn’t say that. It abounds in adult subjects like rape and genocide, and there are a bunch of things like that. But as an adult and someone that is aware of 20th century history (and beyond!), you should know most of these things. If you don’t, stop reading a review of V for Vendetta and learn everything you can about the Holocaust and other genocides. It is far more important! My favorite book is Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo (English title If This Is a Man). For me, it encapsulates so completely the struggle of a man to understand and live through and after the Holocaust.

Okay, time for the negatives. The first is that some of those things like rape feel like they’re put in to make things more edgy. I don’t think that’s the case, nor do I doubt the sincerity of the authors, but it comes off that way sometimes. They were using the edginess to make a point, and I don’t believe that point is well made. For some really good examples of how ultra violence is used to make a point, see Robocop (1987 and you better not pretend there’s another movie version of it) or A Clockwork Orange (either the movie or the book, both fantastic in their own ways).

I was reading some of the back matter, and Alan Moore was talking about how he originally wanted V to be called The Doll and be transgender. I think that would’ve been great! That said, that’s not what we got. Instead, V is supposed to be something of an absolute philosophy embodied in a person, and so why was he in a concentration/death camp? There’s no answer, and it denies us the possibility of understanding why V has a problem with the government.

A lot of writing starts off like that, where the author fits an idea into a person. I’m not a big fan of that, especially when it’s so blatant. On purpose, there’s no character development or anything really interesting or that has much depth when it comes to V. That said, there is some character development. It’s interesting but not profound. Given what I said before, you can guess I’m not happy about Evey becoming the other face of Anarchism. There’s this idea of martyrdom, and I don’t agree with it! People can have good ideas and contribute to society and not live to ruin any impact they had.

One last problem I want to address is that I walked away without really getting much out of the story. I read it in three days, and I could’ve done it much faster if necessary. I don’t know if it’s a thing with me, entirely, but usually I take longer to digest the meaning of a book. If I go through it fast, it usually means I don’t find much in it challenging or that it has a message. What is this V for Vendetta’s message? Fascism is bad? No duh. Fascism tries to hide its face (always, at least one character says something along the lines of ‘the way people use Fascism these days, it’s lost all meaning’)? No duh. Anarchism is the answer? Uh, that isn’t the book’s message nor Moore’s. I was reading on wikipedia that he wanted to point out opposite ends of political ideology, and Anarchism really isn’t the opposite of Totalitarianism because, at Moore rightly points out, Anarchism isn’t about the absence of society or societal conventions but something more akin to democracy.

The last thing is that the story seems to hinge a little on its revolutionary or newness. Maybe it’s just the sort of stuff I read or that this book is more than 20 years old that I feel like the story isn’t nearly as new or groundbreaking as it wants to be. For example, almost a decade earlier, Watchmen covers much of the same ground. And I’m not going to say Watchmen addressed this topic first. We (1921) covers some of it too! I think some of it is also covered in The Betrothed. I don’t count it as a negative for it to cover well-trod territory because there are no original stories anymore, but I do count it as a negative if it feels like the newness is supposed to be a major part of the attraction.