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V Wants Freedom

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Have you stumbled upon the comic V for Vendetta? Or perhaps you have only seen the movie? What is it really about? We have V who calls himself an anarchist and is completely against the totalitarian government that is controlling the people of Great Britain, so we can say that the main message of Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s graphic novel is freedom. After being kept in a resettlement camp and being tortured, V’s main goal becomes destroying the Norsefire political party. He doesn’t believe in the government and wants to set everyone free from it.

Moore, Alan and David LLoyd. V for Vendetta. DC Comics, 1989, pp. 206.

Telling a story through the use of both text and images gives us a unique experience, and I think it is more about how we travel through the comic. The many different types of closure that the creators of the comic have used allows us to experience and see each individual scene exactly how they want us to. Scott McCloud gives us six different types of closure in Understanding Comics, but Lloyd mainly uses scene-to-scene transitions. A page will focus on one specific scene, but we see the scene from different perspectives. If we see the page above from V for Vendetta, we can see that the first panel focuses on the man’s face. In the next panel, we still see the same man, but now we are seeing the side of his face. In that same page, we are able to experience his view. We see the Larkhill Resettlement Camp sign that he is passes by as he is walks through. Because we are able to see everything in the scene from the character to his surroundings that could possibly be from his very own perspective, we tend to feel as if we are there with him. This type of closure allows one to experience the scene from every possible perspective which is why it is like we are inside the comic and are traveling through it.

Because of that unique experience that a graphic novel gives and allows the reader to travel as if one was really part of the story, we are able to understand how serious the case is and why V feels the way he does towards the Norsefire party and why he has made destroying it his life goal. Not only do we get to feel what a certain character is feeling through their facial expressions, but also through their surroundings. Being able to see how close or far away something is helps us experience what that character is going through. We are able to travel with the character and that allows us to understand V’s goal to freedom from the totalitarian government.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperCollins Publishers, 1994.
Moore, Alan and David LLoyd. V for Vendetta. DC Comics, 1989.



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