Our new series for 2015! Daily Constitutional editor Adam takes us on a Cartoon & Comic Book Tour of London – 20 stops on a metropolis-wide search for all things illustrated.
He'll be taking in everything from Gillray and Hogarth, to Scooby Doo and on to Deadpool and beyond! In addition he'll guide you to the best in London comic book stores as well as galleries that showcase the best in the cartoonist's art.
Panel No.14: V For Vendetta
DC Editor Adam writes… The timing of this
innocent – this daft, this frivolous – Cartoon & Comic Book Tour of London
continues to challenge your correspondent. (See earlier post HERE and HERE.)
As I sat down to blog this post on V For
Vendetta – as trailed in the previous post – a friend sent me a link to a piece
in today's Daily Telegraph newspaper* about the hacktivist/activist group Anonymous and their
latest project, a cull of at least 100 social media accounts allegedly being
used to recruit potential jihadists to fight for Islamic State.
The symbol of Anonymous is the "Guy
Fawkes mask". Such masks were popularised by the comic book V For Vendetta…
V For Vendetta is simply the most important
comic book of our age.
It is with V For Vendetta, written by Alan
Moore (in 1981, first published in '82), and a small band of other graphic
novels (a term shunned by Moore himself) that the world of comics begins to elbow
in to the same critical space as traditional literature. From this point on,
comics/graphic novels would be discussed alongside Flaubert at dinner parties.
This last image would, I imagine, make Alan
Moore – an occultist and an anarchist as well as a writer – want to throw up.
At the very least.
Many of us knew it all along, o' course. But
in the aftermath of the V comic – and From Hell , also by Moore – publishers would realise that
there was a market for intelligent illustrated stories and such talents as Posy
Simmonds – long a great newspaper cartoonist and children's illustrator – would
be free to unleash her gifts on such projects as Gemma Bovary (1999) – based on Madame Bovary by
the aforementioned Flaubert.
Moore did not, of course, invent the Fawkes
mask – here's Buster comic from 1965…
… giving a Guy Fawkes mask, long popular with British children, as a free gift
to readers for Bonfire Night (commemorating the bungled 1605 assassination by
explosion of King James VI at the hands of plotters including the famous Fawkes).
But the film of V for Vendetta (2006),
using David Lloyd's highly stylised version from the comic is widely credited
with starting the contemporary phenomena of using the Fawkes mask in a protest
and political agitation context.
So there's a big dollop of British radical
history from the get-go. And the spirit of the Vincent Price movie Theatre of
Blood provides some rather twisted "light relief". The paper stock
and stylistic influence is pure D.C Thomson** and the shadow of Judge Dread
looms large, too. For all that it was a hit in the US, it is very British
comic.
Orwell is in the mix, both in the words and
the pictures. There's a grubby feel to David Lloyd's artwork that makes me
think of the 1984 – the low quality goods, the cigarettes rolled so loosely
that the tobacco falls out. The palette, too, is not only grim but its lack of
breadth – putrid greens and yellows the hue of a week-old bruise providing
scant respite from the suffocating shadows – underpin the privations of the
story.
Our story is set in the aftermath of a
nuclear war in the late 80s. Britain is under Fascist rule. V – a
theatrically-costumed revolutionary anarchist in a Guy Fawkes mask – is
wreaking revenge on the regime. Early in the story he saves 16-year-old Evey
Hammond. Evey, from Shooters Hill in South East London, is an orphan – her
father has been executed for his Socialist beliefs. Having saved Evey, V allows
her to tag along as he embarks upon his next act of vengeance – blowing up the
Old Bailey…
The book teems with London locations
(here's Big Ben AGAIN, see also earlier posts in this series)…
… but the Old Bailey scene is a signature
moment in the tale.
We'll come back to Allan Moore again with
his From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – doing our best to
avoid the movie versions of those two books as Moore hated both film treatments
every bit as much as he did the movie of V For Vendetta. (We'll ask my colleague, movie expert Richard IV to state their cases another day!)
You can buy V For Vendetta at the Vertigo website: www.vertigocomics.com
* I'll be back to the Daily Telegraph soon,
as well as **D.C Thomson.
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On Tuesdays our blog posts support the charity Missing People
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A London Walk costs £10 – £8 concession. To join a London Walk, simply meet your guide at the designated tube station at the appointed time. Details of all London Walks can be found at www.walks.com.
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