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The Two Faces of Anarchy in V for Vendetta

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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 is that of justice, freedom, one’s integrity, and how identity ties into these ideas overall. The novel conveys these themes to us by the acts of anarchy against the fascist government that has taken over England. The whole reason behind V’s acts is because he was once a prisoner in a resettlement camp and was tortured for years. Once V obtained his freedom, he set about obtaining it for the rest of the country and serving justice to those that had oppressed him and England for so long.
The question that is asked throughout the novel is “Who is behind the mask?”  But what we as readers learn throughout the novel however is that it doesn’t really matter who is behind the mask, and we also learn that (spoiler alert) it changes, and in hindsight we should have seen it coming. The opening panels of the novel foreshadow the events to come in the novel by doing just what McCloud talks about, by using scene – to – scene transitions and juxtaposing Evey and V in almost identical scenarios, both are getting ready for something, in front of a mirror, and both of them wearing a type of mask. In the end, it ends up being Evey behind the Guy Fawkes mask, because it doesn’t matter who is behind the mask, because the mask is a symbol for the acts that are being done. Something that V says sticks out to me in this instance, which is in Book 3 when he says “Anarchy wears two faces, both creator and destroyer. Thus destroyers topple empires, make a canvas of clean rubble where creators then can build a better world” (Moore, 248) This also ties in with the closure aspect the McCloud mentions in Chapter 3 of Understanding Comics, as readers we are, in that moment, meant to draw our own conclusion that V was the destroyer, and Evey is the creator who comes in to help create a better world to live in.

https://archive.org/details/VForVendettaComics/page/n3

McCloud, Scott. The Invisible Art Understanding Comics. HarperCollins Publishers, 1994.

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