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V for Vendetta (New Edition) | 
 enlarge | Authors: Alan Moore, David Lloyd
Publisher: Titan Books Ltd
Category: Book
This item is no longer available
Rating:  221 reviews
Sales Rank: 5561155
Format: Import
Media: Hardcover
Edition: New Ed
Pages: 296
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 10.2 x 6.9 x 0.7
ISBN: 1845761820
EAN: 9781845761820
ASIN: 1845761820
Publication Date: October 21, 2005
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| Customer Reviews: Read 216 more reviews...
 Alan Moore's first great (even if flawed) work December 20, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Admittedly, I am a latecomer to the cult of Alan Moore. I was barely aware of him back in the late 80s/early 90s, and other than Killing Joke, my introduction to him was actually in the superb D.R. and Quinch series for 2000 A.D. I missed out on the original releases of his Swamp Thing run, V for Vendetta, and The Watchmen.
Later, I rediscovered Moore with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I was already a fan of Kevin O'Neill from his work on Marshal Law (which is still one of my all-time favorite comics and fantastic satire), so I immediately jumped on the new series. Over the years, I've slowly been winding my way back through Moore's definitive work, viewing it for the first time with a somewhat different perspective than most who read the comics upon initial release.
While not the best of Alan Moore's work (The Watchmen, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Killing Joke are far better tales), V for Vendetta still stands up as an amazing piece of comic book art after all these years. Many of the political and social themes (as well as David Lloyd's artwork) may not seem that revolutionary now (or for literature in general), but one has to view the series like a Black Flag album or a painting from Joan Miro. Compared to other releases of that time (and in many cases of the ensuing decades), it stands well above the competition.
I do tend to agree with Moore that the series works much better in its original colorless incarnation, was serialized in Warrior magazine in the UK during the 1980s. The concept of the stark, black and white artwork used to tell a tale of endless moral gray areas works so perfectly. And in many ways, it sub-references the original pulp mystery origins of the series when Moore and Lloyd thought it would be set in the 1930s gangster era. The lackluster coloring by DC Comics, who published the series here in the U.S. under their Vertigo imprint, almost detracts from the story.
But up until this time, there had never been a comic series like V for Vendetta. This was the comic book equivalent of Swift's "A Modest Proposal," offering up a satirical and dystopian viewpoint that masks a very serious political argument. Moore and Lloyd were reacting to Thatcherite Britain, parodying its more grotesque sins including xenophobia and ruling by conformity.
In addition, the countless literary allusions, the use of iambic pentameter for V's dialogue, and the unflinching portrayal of a society that is falling apart at its very core is still head and shoulders above most comic storytelling.
One fact hit me reading all these years later: there isn't a single hero in V for Vendetta. No one is heroic, not even V. While his anarchist quest could be regarded as noble, it still results in murder and ultimately the complete destruction of British society (holding to the idea that the old society must be destroyed so a new one can be built in its place). Other than Judge Dredd or the Punisher, there was nothing this grim and cynical in comic storytelling of the 1980s and early 90s. It took guts for Moore to craft such a storyline and to do it with such a creative and artistic flourish. Even if you disagree with Moore's viewpoint, you are dragged into his political arguments, forced to take sides, much like the characters trapped in the storyline, are left to question your own pre-determined moral judgments. That is the mark of a great storyteller.
 The House of Shadow December 16, 2008
The seize (the dimension of the book) and the original colors (not present in foreign editions) make you forget that it's a paperback...
and about V: always remember the 5th of November...
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
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
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
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
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