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I first read V during my junior year in college (this being '96-97). Oddly enough, though I attended school in a podunk town in the arse-end of Wisconsin, the town library against all odds had a really superb little graphic novel section. One Saturday, not long after I'd started going there semi-regularly, I stumbled across V and took it back to my dorm room. I began reading sometime after 4 pm.
When I looked up at the end, it was around 9 pm and I'd missed dinner.
THAT'S a fucking good book. I believe it was that Halloween, or possibly the next, that I went as V. Most of the costume was shit, but I found a theatrical mask that, when painted, worked PERFECTLY, which was the most important part. I keep forgetting to contact a college chum who took pics of me in costume to see whether he can scan and email me them.
V cuts such an striking image that even a dumbass Yank like myself was impressed with his iconic power despite my then relative unfamiliarity with the history of Guy Fawkes and the tenor of Maggie Thatcher's England. (Admittedly, it's not terribly better informed now.) V nevertheless became inextricably linked in my mind with the positive aspects of the term "freedom fighter," the best case scenario thereof, where it is not enough to be pronounced free by one's rulers but to know oneself truly free without needing anyone's permission. It was a fanatical need to be utterly free that I implicitly, enviously sensed only the purest zealot could attain, and at cost of some of the niceties we more domesticated types enjoy, as trivial in the grand scheme of things as they may be.
I'd someday like to see staged, maybe even stage myself, a theatrical interpretation of V4V; I somehow sense, from the ads and what friends who've seen previews have told me, that it would be far truer to the quiet intensity of Moore's book than will be the brash, Matrixed-up rendition we're soon to have dropped in our laps. One thing I'm to understand that's been excised is most of the story of whassisname, the most focal Hand inspector (I don't have my copy of the book at easy access currently). That takes it down a peg right there for me, as it's his perspective which lays bare the atrocities of the fascist government. He knows where the bodies are in the foundations. Without that, the dictatorship, though probably still oppressive, likely comes off less sinisterly.
Anyway. Enough me. |
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