V for Vendetta

• 1. Introduction

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  V for Vendetta is a British graphic novel by writer Alan Moore and artist David Lloyd, and its hero wears a Guy Fawkes mask that hides his face. He is an anarchist who treats the toppling of a government as theatre. The government is a fascist regime ruling a battered United Kingdom in the 1990s. The story began as a serial in a British comic in 1982 and was not finished until the end of that decade. Why did its first run stall, and where did Moore and Lloyd find their ideas? What did Moore believe about his own masked hero, and why did he turn against the film that followed? And how did a mask from a comic strip end up on the faces of strangers in the street?

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• 2. Warrior Years

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  The first episodes of V for Vendetta ran in black and white from 1982 to 1985 in Warrior, a British anthology comic from Quality Communications. Its editor and publisher, Dez Skinn, doubted that such a harsh strip could win readers alone. He called it "uncompromising" and said it would probably have been "an early casualty" had every character carried a separate title. The anthology format solved the problem. With five or six strips in each issue, readers needed only two or three favourites to justify buying the magazine.

  The publishers cancelled Warrior in 1985, and two completed issues never reached print. Several companies then tried to persuade Moore and Lloyd to let them publish and finish the story. In 1988, DC Comics answered with a ten-issue series that reprinted the Warrior stories in colour and then carried on to the ending. The first new material appeared in issue 7, which printed the unpublished episodes meant for Warrior numbers 27 and 28. Tony Weare drew one chapter, "Vincent", and added art to two others, "Valerie" and "The Vacation". Steve Whitaker and Siobhan Dodds coloured the entire series.

  The collected paperbacks and hardbacks carry Moore's essay "Behind the Painted Smile" and two interludes that sit outside the central story. In the United States they came from DC's Vertigo imprint, and in the United Kingdom from Titan Books. Vertigo was shut down in 2018, and the book moved to DC Black Label. DC had sold more than 500,000 copies in the United States by 2006. In August 2009, DC released a slipcased Absolute Edition. It included newly coloured "silent art" pages from the original run, full-page panels with no dialogue, which no earlier collection had printed.

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• 3. Sources and Influences

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  In 1975, the DC Thomson scriptwriting competition rejected a comic strip idea of Moore's called "The Doll". It featured a transgender terrorist in white face makeup who fought a totalitarian state in the 1980s. Moore drew on that rejected idea when he wrote V for Vendetta.

  Years later, Skinn reportedly invited Moore to create a dark mystery strip with Lloyd. He wanted something like their popular Marvel UK strip Night Raven, but set in a 1930s noir. The pair skipped the historical research a period setting would demand and placed the story in the near future. The concept then settled on the letter V rather than the word Vendetta.

  Lloyd came up with the idea of dressing V as Guy Fawkes. His earlier designs had followed the usual superhero look, and he abandoned them.

  While preparing the plot, Moore wrote a list of everything he wanted to bring in, and he reprinted it in "Behind the Painted Smile". It names Orwell, Huxley, Thomas Disch and Judge Dredd. It names Harlan Ellison's story "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman, and Vincent Price's Dr. Phibes and Theatre of Blood. David Bowie, The Shadow, Batman, Fahrenheit 451 and Thomas Pynchon appear too. So do The Prisoner, Robin Hood, Dick Turpin and the atmosphere of British Second World War films. Academic studies have confirmed this crowd of influences. The dystopian strands stand out, especially parallels with Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four at several points in the plot.

  One entry on the list is a painting, Max Ernst's "Europe After the Rain". The first book of the comic is titled "Europe After the Reign".

  Anarchism and fascism are the two poles of the story, and Moore designed V as an enigma. V, an anarchist, begins by torturing and murdering members of the fascist government. Moore then made his actions deliberately "very, very morally ambiguous". In his words, "I didn't want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think." The Guy Fawkes comparison was deliberate too. In a 2012 interview, Moore said Britain has a history of "making heroes out of criminals or people who in other centuries might have been regarded as terrorists".

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• 4. A Fractured Britain

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  Moore assumed that Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government would "obviously lose the 1983 elections". He imagined an incoming Labour government under Michael Foot, committed to complete nuclear disarmament. Such a government, he reasoned, would let Britain escape relatively unscathed from a limited nuclear war. Fascists would then quickly take over the ruined country. When DC reissued the work, Moore admitted the premise had not aged well. A Conservative defeat that never came, he said, showed "how reliable we were in our roles as Cassandras."

  In the comic, the war comes in the late 1980s, after a dispute over Poland. The Soviet Union and the United States, under President Ted Kennedy, trade nuclear strikes. Continental Europe and Africa become uninhabitable. Britain escapes the bombs because its Labour government removed the American nuclear missiles. It still suffers environmental devastation and famine from the nuclear winter. After a period of lawlessness, the surviving corporations and fascist groups join to form the Norsefire government.

  Norsefire is Nordic supremacist, neo-fascist and homophobic. It exterminated its opponents in concentration camps and now rules as a police state.

  The highest officials sit on a council called "The Head". Five departments are named after sensory organs or body parts that hint at their jobs. The Eye handles video surveillance, and the Ear handles audio surveillance. The Nose is the investigative police, based at New Scotland Yard. The Finger is the executive secret police, and the Mouth runs propaganda. Adam Susan, the reclusive Leader of Norsefire, obsessively oversees a government computer system called Fate.

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• 5. Vengeance and Ordeal

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  On Guy Fawkes Night in London in 1997, a financially desperate 16-year-old named Evey Hammond approaches men on the street. They turn out to be Fingermen from the secret police, and they intend to rape and kill her. V, a cloaked anarchist in a mask, kills them. He then remotely detonates explosives at the Palace of Westminster. He takes Evey to his underground lair, the Shadow Gallery, which is full of contraband. There she tells him her life story. Her mother died during the lawless years, and her father, a former socialist, was arrested by the regime.

  Detective Eric Finch, who leads the Nose, begins to investigate V. V first kidnaps Lewis Prothero, a propaganda-broadcasting radio personality. Prothero once commanded a "resettlement" camp near Larkhill. V forces him to relive it, with Prothero's treasured doll collection standing in as inmates, and Prothero suffers a mental breakdown. Next, with Evey's unwitting help, V reaches Bishop Anthony Lilliman, a paedophile priest. She does not know it is an assassination, and she disguises herself as a child prostitute to get V into the residence. V forces the bishop to eat a poisoned communion wafer, and the bishop dies.

  The third target is Dr. Delia Surridge, a medical researcher who once had a relationship with Finch. Finch realises that all three victims worked at Larkhill, and he warns Derek Almond, who supervises the Finger. That night V kills Surridge with a painless poison. When Almond appears and fires an unloaded gun at him, V kills Almond too. Surridge leaves a diary. It reveals that V was a Larkhill inmate and a victim of her cruel medical experiments. He destroyed the camp, fled, and is now eliminating its former personnel. Finch begins to suspect that this vendetta may be a cover for something bigger.

  Four months later, V breaks into Jordan Tower, home of the propaganda department known as the Mouth. He broadcasts a recorded speech calling on the people to resist. His escape relies on an elaborate diversion that kills the department's leader, Roger Dascombe. Peter Creedy becomes the new head of the Finger. He provokes Finch into striking him, and Finch is sent on forced leave.

  Evey, returned by V to the outside world, shelters with a man named Gordon, and their friendship turns romantic. A Scottish gangster named Ally Harper murders Gordon. Evey tracks Harper to a meeting with Creedy, who is buying the support of Harper's thugs ahead of a coup d'etat. As she tries to shoot Harper, she is abducted and wakes in a prison cell. Interrogation, humiliation and torture follow. In the cell she finds a letter hidden by an earlier inmate, Valerie Page. Valerie was a film actress imprisoned for being a lesbian and subjected to medical experimentation.

  Her interrogator offers a final choice, collaboration or death. Inspired by Valerie's letter, Evey refuses. Expecting to be executed, she is told instead that she is free. The prison was a charade built by V, so that she could face an ordeal like the one that shaped him at Larkhill. The letter was genuine. Valerie really existed, and she died in the cell next to his. Evey forgives V. He then reveals that he hacked into Fate long ago and has been manipulating Adam Susan with mind games. Susan has formed a bizarre romantic attachment to the computer, and he begins to descend into madness.

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• 6. Ideas Are Bulletproof

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  On the 5th of November 1998, V blows up the Post Office Tower and Jordan Tower. The blasts kill Brian Etheridge, leader of the Ear, and shut down three government agencies: the Eye, the Ear and the Mouth. Creedy's men and Harper's street gangs violently crush the wave of public revolutionary fervour. V tells Evey that this is not yet the "Land of Do-as-You-Please", his name for a functioning anarchist society. He calls the present chaos an interim "Land of Take-What-You-Want".

  Finch has been mysteriously absent. His young assistant, Dominic Stone, realises that V has been influencing Fate all along, which explains V's consistent foresight. Finch has travelled to the abandoned site of Larkhill near Salisbury Plain. There he takes LSD to summon memories of his own devastating past and to imagine himself a Larkhill prisoner, like V. Back in London, he deduces that V's lair lies inside the abandoned Victoria Station.

  Inside, a scuffle ends with Finch shooting V and V wounding Finch with a knife. V insists he cannot be killed, because he is only an idea, and "ideas are bulletproof". Mortally wounded, he retreats deeper into the Shadow Gallery and dies in Evey's arms. Evey considers removing his mask but decides against it, realising that V is a symbol rather than an identity. She puts on one of his spare costumes and masks.

  At a parade, Adam Susan stops to shake hands with Rose Almond, the widow of Derek. She shoots him in the head. Creedy had been pressuring Susan to appear in public, hoping to leave him exposed. Rose, who lost her husband and her government benefits, took revenge for the life she has had to lead since. Creedy assumes emergency leadership, and Finch emerges from the subway proclaiming V's death. The remaining leaders then destroy one another. Harper kills Creedy at the urging of Helen Heyer, who outbid Creedy for his loyalty. Harper and her husband Conrad Heyer later kill each other, after a videotape sent by V reveals her affair with Harper.

  Evey, dressed as V, appears on a rooftop and announces the destruction of 10 Downing Street the next day. She tells the crowd they must "choose what comes next. Lives of your own, or a return to chains". A general insurrection begins. She destroys Downing Street by blowing up an Underground train carrying V's body, in the style of a Viking funeral. She also abducts the injured Stone and takes him to the Shadow Gallery, apparently to train him as her successor. Finch, meanwhile, leaves his post and refuses Helen Heyer's offer to become her partner and seize power. He walks down an abandoned motorway whose lights have all gone out.

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• 7. Film and Television

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  In December 2005, Warner Bros. released a V for Vendetta film directed by James McTeigue from a screenplay by the Wachowskis. Natalie Portman starred as Evey Hammond, and Hugo Weaving appeared as V. Moore distanced himself from it, as he has from other screen adaptations of his work. He ended his co-operation with DC Comics after its corporate parent, Warner Bros., failed to retract statements about his supposed endorsement of the movie. After reading the script, he said the film "has been turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country". The comic, he insisted, "was about fascism, it was about anarchy, it was about England."

  Producer Joel Silver described the V of the comics as a "superhero... a masked avenger who pretty much saves the world". That reading runs against Moore's own statements about V's role. The film also arguably removes any reference to actual anarchism from V's revolutionary actions. Lloyd, by contrast, embraced the adaptation. Steve Moore, no relation to Alan, wrote a novelisation of the screenplay, published in 2006.

  On the 4th of October 2017, Channel 4 announced it was developing a television series based on the comic. The project stalled in development. On the 29th of July 2019, the day after the premiere of the series Pennyworth, co-showrunner Danny Cannon confirmed it would also serve as a loose prequel to V for Vendetta. Pennyworth had been presented as a direct prequel to the Fox series Gotham. Its British Civil War would eventually lead to the formation of the Norsefire government. Co-showrunner Bruno Heller echoed this on the 11th of December 2020 and again on the 5th of February 2021. Characters wearing V's Guy Fawkes mask appeared in the 2022 third season, set five years after the first two.

  In November 2025, a television adaptation of the graphic novel was revealed to be in development for HBO. Pete Jackson is writing it, and DC Studios co-chiefs James Gunn and Peter Safran are producing.

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• 8. The Mask in the Streets

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  In February 1999, The Comics Journal polled readers on the top 100 English-language comics of the century, and V for Vendetta reached 83rd place. On the 5th of November 2019, BBC News listed it among the 100 most influential novels. The book's widest audience, though, arrived through its mask.

  Hundreds of thousands of Guy Fawkes masks, from the books and the film, have been sold every year since 2005. Time Warner owns the rights to the image and is paid a fee on each official mask.

  Anonymous, an online group associated with computer hacking, popularised the mask as a symbol of rebellion by wearing it at protests against governments. It featured prominently in the 2008 Project Chanology protests against the Church of Scientology, and Moore said he was pleased to see it there. According to Time in 2011, the protesters' adoption made it the top-selling mask on Amazon, at hundreds of thousands a year. The film allegedly inspired some Egyptian youth before and during the 2011 Egyptian revolution.

  On the 23rd of May 2009, protesters dressed as V set off a fake barrel of gunpowder outside Parliament. They were protesting over British MPs' expenses. The mask also appeared internationally during the Occupy Wall Street protests and other Occupy protests, as a symbol of popular revolution. Lloyd said the mask had become "a common brand and a convenient placard to use in protest against tyranny". He added that he was happy with people using it, calling it "an icon of popular culture being used this way".

  On the 17th of November 2012, police officials in Dubai warned against wearing Guy Fawkes masks painted in the colours of the UAE flag during celebrations of the UAE National Day on the 2nd of December. They declared such use illegal after masks went on sale in online shops for 50 DHS. The mask also appeared in the 2014 Hong Kong protests, and again in 2019.

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