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V for Vendetta | 
 enlarge | Authors: Alan Moore, David Lloyd
Publisher: Vertigo
Category: Book
List Price: $19.99
Buy New: $10.70
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Rating:  219 reviews
Sales Rank: 8008
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 10.2 x 6.7 x 0.8
ISBN: 0930289528
Dewey Decimal Number: 741.5941
UPC: 761941202549
EAN: 9780930289522
ASIN: 0930289528
Publication Date: April 1, 1995
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Amazon.com Review
V for Vendetta is, like its author's later Watchmen, a landmark in comic-book writing. Alan Moore has led the field in intelligent, politically astute (if slightly paranoid), complex adult comic-book writing since the early 1980s. He began V back in 1981 and it constituted one of his first attempts (along with the criminally neglected but equally superb Miracleman) at writing an ongoing series. It is 1998 (which was the future back then!) and a Fascist government has taken over the U.K. The only blot on its particular landscape is a lone terrorist who is systematically killing all the government personnel associated with a now destroyed secret concentration camp. Codename V is out for vengeance ... and an awful lot more. V feels slightly dated like all past premonitions do. The original series was black and white and that added to the grittiness of the feel while the coloring here in the graphic novel sometimes blurs David Lloyd's fine drawing. But these are small concerns. Skillfully plotted, V is an essential read for all those who love comics and the freedom, as a medium, they allow a writer as skilled as Moore. --Mark Thwaite
Product Description
V for Vendetta is, like its author's later Watchmen, a landmark in comic-book writing. Alan Moore has led the field in intelligent, politically astute (if slightly paranoid), complex adult comic-book writing since the early 1980s. He began V back in 1981 and it constituted one of his first attempts (along with the criminally neglected but equally superb Miracleman) at writing an ongoing series. It is 1998 (which was the future back then!) and a Fascist government has taken over the U.K. The only blot on its particular landscape is a lone terrorist who is systematically killing all the government personnel associated with a now destroyed secret concentration camp. Codename V is out for vengeance ... and an awful lot more. V feels slightly dated like all past premonitions do. The original series was black and white and that added to the grittiness of the feel while the coloring here in the graphic novel sometimes blurs David Lloyd's fine drawing. But these are small concerns. Skillfully plotted, V is an essential read for all those who love comics and the freedom, as a medium, they allow a writer as skilled as Moore. --Mark Thwaite
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| Customer Reviews: Read 214 more reviews...
 Thought provoking November 16, 2008
having seen the movie when it first came out, I was curious about the book. I am NOT dissapointed. It is one of the most thought provoking things I have read, like 1984 but with more interesting and strong willed people. What really scares me is how I can see some of the aspects of the book happening in this day and age, with a complacent media who care more about ratings, and people who care more about celeb trash than fighting for what is right. As the author says, "this book is for those who do not turn off the news"
 V For Vendetta and the Coming Anarchy November 11, 2008
Between 1982 and 1988, Alan Moore wrote one of the classic graphic novels while also simultaneously working on his famous Watchmen. This was V for Vendetta, a noirish thriller set in a near future England that had been transformed into a fascist state. The novel's protagonist was actually an anti-hero who went by the mysterious name of "V," and who was obsessed with destroying the fascist state of England. V's tactics are frankly, and unapologetically, terrorist in nature, for he is determined on blowing up the houses of Parliament and slaying the great Leviathanic monster which England has become.
During the course of the novel, V abducts a woman named "Evey," whose name is a homonym for the letters "E" and "V," the fifth and fifth from last letters of the alphabet respectively. The way in which the letter V is drawn by Moore's character and others as a graffiti symbol, however -- a V with a circle around it -- is suggestive of an upside down version of the "A" symbol for Anarchism, and indeed, Moore, in his deconstruction of the superhero myth has turned its traditional meanings upside down. For the purpose of the traditional superhero is to guard and protect the modern megalopolis from attacks by astral beings, whereas V's primary purpose is to destroy the modern megalopolis altogether. He is not an immune cell, but rather, like his prototype, the Phantom of the Opera, an antigen, for V's kidnapping of Evey, whereupon he spirits her away to his underground habitation which he calls the "Shadow gallery" very much recalls Gaston L'Hereux's famous villain, only instead of a phantom haunting an opera house, we have a masked phantom haunting an entire city, bent on its destruction.
The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has pointed out the parallel between V and Sutler (as Adam Susan is called in the film), the fascist dictator who rules England, suggesting that V's tactics in imprisoning and torturing (mentally) Evey in order to help her attain true freedom is as brutally totalitarian in nature as Sutler's cruel treatment of the British. There is thus, Zizek insists, a secret inward identity between V and Sutler.
However, the most important point to note - and it is absolutely basic - about superhero narratives and what they mean, is to discover what values the superhero represents and what are those represented by the villain, and in V's case, we note that his underworld habitation is a realm of art and culture, a miniature monastery filled with books, paintings, jukeboxes and other mementoes of the realm of the humanities. V himself tends to speak in iambic pentameter, the dialect of Shakespeare's characters, and he is incredibly eloquent and learned. The fascist state represented by Sutler on the other hand is an absolutely technocentric, inhuman state in which book burning and heavy censorship is enforced through a complete militarization of the society. We note that cameras have been mounted everywhere, for the society of this "future" England is under complete surveillance.
But these cameras which Moore was envisioning in the 1980s have now become our living reality, for nowadays they are everywhere: mounted atop traffic lights, Walmarts, convenience stores, banks, etc., we are indeed under constant surveillance. As artists often function as a society's Distant Early Warning system, V for Vendetta is even more relevant now than when it came out, for it envisions precisely the type of society which is presently emerging. Moore's picture of a centralized state in which the media is owned and operated by the government is exactly what is taking place before our very eyes with the merging of corporations and the federal government (especially with the recent corporate bailout package). Ever since 9/11, we are becoming the kind of fascist state (albeit a technofascism) which Moore was merely warning us about twenty five years ago.
V, though he is a brutal murderer and a terrorist / anarchist, nonetheless stands up for and represents the values of the humanities, which are indeed currently under threat by the new fascism emerging at the behest of the political right and the neocons. Moore was telling us, with his great graphic novel, that unless we wish to see things like art and music and literature (and this includes popular culture) disappear altogether, we are going to have to stand up and fight for it.
George Bush, jr. and his neocon buddies, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney and the usual suspects, have compromised more human rights and freedoms in America than ever before, and they have cut funding for the arts and slashed budgets in order to support their imperialist conquest of the Middle East, while local American cities are drained of the resources to fund things which the neocons regard as superfluous, such as libraries, schools, the arts, etc. Make no mistake about it: the world of Alan Moore's V for Vendetta was no mere hyperbole, but rather a metaphoric vision of what is going on in this society right now.
Take a look around you: the cameras are everywhere, and they are watching you; the freedoms which our parents and their parents once took for granted are dissolving. Public funding for the humanities is disappearing into an ever increasing militarization of the American way of life, which is fading at the very moment that I am writing this and you are reading it.
Soon, and not too far off, I may not be able to take for granted the very freedoms which yet still enable me to articulate these ideas and which allow you, the reader, to ponder them. How far away?
Well, I think that's the point of Moore's great novel: that's up to you.
Are you willing to fight for your freedom?
Or are you going to stand by, surfing the Internet and flicking apathetically through the channels on your television set while the tanks and trucks are rumbling past your windows in the street outside?
Which type of society do you want to live in? The one that America fought for during World War II? Or the one that it fought against?
Funny how things change.
--John David Ebert, author of Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society
Shades of Gray November 3, 2008
Unlike the film (which I will leave up to you to judge), this piece is not dated, and does not include a criticism of any specific regime or time period. Instead, it is an excellent presentation of anarchy versus fascism, with no guide book or good guys to guide you. On one side, you have a revenge-bent but idealist terrorist. Opposite him is a man who is concerned for the people of his country, and is therefore willing to play the hated dictator to save them from what he is convinced is hell. In between are average people working for their own ends, trying to survive. While the story focuses on V, the anarchist, the novel hardly focuses on his positive traits. He is, after all, a murderer and a terrorist. However, this book does an excellent job of stepping away from the blanket labels of both "terrorist" and "fascist" and forcing--God forbid--actual thought about the constant debate over when security compromises what it is trying to protect. Brilliant, profound, and morally vague, I would recommend this to anyone and everyone.
requiered reading October 9, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a very interesting tale about police state and the consequences it has on its citizens. Drawings are cute while the story moves at an adequate pace. It is also remarkable the component of rebellion against oppression. I would recomend it for teenagers from 14 years old on. Please note Alan Moore is a comic writer with a sense for complex characters and let's say some deeper issues.
 Good Story, Poor Printing September 24, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
It's been mentioned before, but the quality of the printing for this book is pretty poor. Honestly, I wouldn't have even minded the poor paper quality if the book side had simply been increased by about 2 inches on either side, but as is, things are pretty cramped and a lot of the detail is lost. So if you're picky, be warned.
If you've seen the movie, then you know what to expect here. There are some small changes, but for the most part, the book and the movie are pretty much parallel. I'm sure you've heard that Moore whined about the movie, and I was expecting to see a lot more differences, but no. The tone is really the same, the plot is the same, Moore was being silly.
I'd say this is take or leave if you've seen the movie. But if you liked the movie and want to get a slightly different take on the V story, or you haven't seen the film at all, check this one out.
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