Recently the Hugo Awards established a new category for stories told in media other than prose fiction, partly to accommodate Alan Moore and David Gibbons’ comic book series Watchmen, which in fact won the Hugo in that category. The Prometheus Awards don’t have multiple categories; nonetheless, I think it would be to our advantage to entertain and nominate them as well. Indeed, I wish to nominate another comic book series by Alan Moore (with artist David Lloyd): V for Vendetta.

Alan Moore shows us a dystopian Great Britain after an only vaguely described world war. There is still a state, but power is held by a fascist government which has all the usual apparatus: secret police, arrests without trial, concentration camps, propaganda, and the like. Moore’s story focuses on a one-man rebellion against it, the rebellion of one of its victims, who goes under the pseudonym ‘V’.

So far the story seems commonplace enough, but Moore quickly makes it clear that it will not remain so, in a pair of monologues delivered by the leader of that State, who sees freedom as a luxury his society cannot afford one by V, who sees justice without freedom as meaningless and has turned away from it to anarchy. Moore’s story makes it clear that he hasn’t just adopted a fashionable slogan, but actually knows the meaning of the word. He appears to be thinking of classical leftist anarchism rather than of the more radical wings of the current libertarian movement, but his story makes it clear how kindred their spirits are.

I have in mind, in particular, his narration of the imprisonment and torture of Evie, a young girl V has rescued from arrest and prostitution. Moore makes this a story of Evie’s discovery of her own will, in resisting her tormentors, even without hope. That she also has the most dramatically unexpected outcome to a story of imprisonment and torture since the ordeal of John Galt is an added delight, but above all a psychological insight into what makes people resist is the heart of this scene and of his entire story.

The story itself is an intensely dramatic one, in several senses. It has plot twists and unexpected reversals. Moore is having fun and is willing to be theatrical to do so. V himself is a theatrical figure, consciously so, delighting in masks and rôle-playing. It has a number of sections that would fit well into a stage production, notably V’s speech to the human race criticizing its unsatisfactory job performance, and the later nightclub song about the joys of fascism, filled with double entendres and hints of perversity:

“If it should be decreed by fate
That you invade my neighboring state
Then you will find my frontiers open, rest assured.”

So here we have a work from foreign sources, in many ways; its espousal of a classical anarchism of which many libertarians are critical; its British setting and references; its presentation in a ‘graphic novel’ format that still convinces any work in many critics’ eyes as artistically worthless. But it’s a work well worth looking into. It offers many pleasures, but ultimately the discovery that what Moore is showing and telling isn’t so foreign at all.