Skip to main content

Freedom Through Anarchy in V for Vendetta

By ShockeronShockSt

I’m going to start out by saying that I have never seen the movie V for Vendetta, so please don’t hate me. I’ve only just recently read the graphic novel V for Vendetta by Alan Moore, the one the movie is based on. This graphic novel presents a theme of freedom through anarchy that is illustrated with dark images that left me thinking about government and the control it has over the people. The world portrayed in this story is one akin to what I assume may have happened had Hitler's regime reigned. There are concentration camps and a government that monitors and controls its people's every move.

To portray this image, Moore uses iconography like that explained in Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Moore uses the symbol of the V in the circle to mark the locations that the protagonist, V, takes a life or makes a statement. After V calls for the people of this country to be free in Book 3 of the story, there is a scene of a girl with pigtails spray painting the word “bollocks” on the ground and saying it over and over and damning everything that she feels has controlled her. At the end of this, she spray paints V’s symbol, the V in the circle. This calls the readers of the graphic novel to see how V’s agenda, his desire for freedom through anarchy is spreading like wildfire throughout the country. V’s work is being seen even though the government is trying to keep his movement quiet and keep their control.

I think the most amazing thing that Moore does in this graphic novel is to use the dominoes as a symbol throughout the books of the graphic novel. There are pictures of dominoes in each of the three books and in the third book everything comes full circle, the reader has to use their own sense of “closure” as McCloud mentions in Understanding Comics to recognize that each of the events that are mentioned in the entire graphic novel all connects and each add up and run into one another like a domino effect. The scene where V finally completes his domino set up a version of his symbol it all clicks. Each backstory about a character and each story told by V all links together and all of them are affected by each other.

The use of dark images and iconography really emphasized the main theme of freedom through anarchy in V for Vendetta by Alan Moore. Moore used many of the facets discussed by McCloud in Understanding Comics. If you haven’t read the graphic novel and you’ve only watched the movie, or if you’re like me and hadn’t done either, go get the book! It’s really amazing and it really opens a lot of interesting viewpoints.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Junji Ito and the Art of the Uncanny

By Anonymous
As discussed in Chapter 2 of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics , the Japanese style of comic book art holds several notable quirks. While early manga artists tended to favor simplistic, yet distinct styles that paved the way for a number of internationally renowned characters, contemporary manga artists have since favored a hybrid style that juxtaposes the cutesy, rounded characters of yesteryear with the realistic and richly shaded settings that have since become popular. Building on this, McCloud describes a phenomenon in which Japanese comic artists have used realism to objectify--that is, to emphasize the "otherness" of certain characters, objects, or places--elements of their work and further separate these elements from the reader. I have chosen the work of one of my favorite comic artists, Japanese horror icon Junji Ito, to further illustrate McCloud's point. Though McCloud describes this phenomenon in the context of Japanese comic book art, he is usi...
1 comment
Read more

The Two Faces of Anarchy in V for Vendetta

By Anonymous
As someone who has only seen the movie version of V for Vendetta once many years ago and have never read the graphic novel, I wasn’t exactly sure how similar or different the movie version would be to the graphic novel. I was in for a surprise when I discovered just how vastly different, they are from each other. With that being said, they do have some similarities when strictly looking at the motives of the characters. Let’s dive into those motives and how the author and illustrator of V for Vendetta achieved getting these motives across to their readers. In Scott McCloud’s chapter of Understanding Comics “ Blood in the Gutter ” we are presented with different panel – to – panel transitions, and an introduction to the term “gutter” as being the white space between the panels which is where the audience of reader “takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea” (McCloud, 66). After finishing reading V for Vendetta , several themes or ideas that were most prevalent...
Post a Comment
Read more

Maus: A New Type of Nonfiction

By Anonymous
The first thing that comes to my mind when I think of the nonfiction genre is the biography. A thick book full of pages about the life of a specific individual. Barely any visual aids, if any, and a monotonous voice throughout that makes these great to fall asleep to. In summation, I had a very rigid and bland view on the nonfiction genre before reading Maus by Art Spiegelman . This graphic novel is so entertaining that it was hard for me to believe that it is nonfiction. I did not think that nonfiction books could be anything but a glamorized version of a textbook. However, Spiegelman was able to prove everyone that nonfiction was not such an inflexible genre, and could tell a story instead of simply informing.   He incorporated many other creative elements to make his story different from all the other Holocaust tales in existence. Firstly, by making the characters animals, he adds a somewhat otherworldly aspect to this retelling of his own father's experiences. I think t...
Post a Comment
Read more