Round Two

This post should finally get me caught up to where I'm supposed to be. I'll do my best not to rehash stuff I've said recently, but I'm running out of material to work with here.

I read Alan Moore's little essay about the creation of V for Vendetta after I finished the comic, and I found it pretty interesting. I think the chronicling of the long creative back-and-forth process between the two men serves as a great example of why comics are so unique. I think my favorite part was where he mentioned that the Muse very rarely delivers an entirely complete idea in pretty gift wrapping. That's especially applicable to a work of serialized fiction. I mean, they obviously had to have a general sense of where the story was going and what they wanted to accomplish by the end, but the story definitely got pieced together bit by bit over a long period of time. Given how long it took them to finish the series, it's rather amazing to me that it all hangs together so well and brings together so many different plot elements. Moore mentions some minor inconsistencies and oversights that were committed in the early chapters, but I didn't notice any jarring contradictions or stylistic changes.

We talked about ideologies present in V for Vendetta last time in class. For me, it's hard to separate the comic from the movie in this regard. The movie really exemplifies and emphasizes certain themes in the story. On the other hand, it changes the story in ways that Alan Moore didn't intend, so I think looking at the film is harmful in this case. One of the themes that is made much more explicit in the comic is that anarchy is not the same thing as chaos. I mean, it's still an incredibly radical political ideology, but to dismiss it as a total lack of order is misleading. V describes it as the difference between the Land-of-Do-As-You-Please and the Land-of-Take-What-You-Want. In the film, the ending seems much more reminiscent of the American Revolution: an overthrowing of a tyrannical system of government for a more democratic one. But V isn't advocating democracy. He's advocating anarchy, which is why he blows up Parliament. It's this sort of radical thinking that is supposed to make us question whether V really is any more than a terrorist. We tend to ignore or downplay his radicalism and assume he shares the same values that we do.