Elizabeth Sandifer

About Elizabeth Sandifer

http://www.eruditorumpress.com

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

Posts by Elizabeth Sandifer:

February 11, 2023

Erudite Waffles (2/11/23)

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Hello, I’m Elizabeth Sandifer, and you’re spending your Saturday reading Eruditorum Press.

What I’m Up To

I got the Last War in Albion Volume 4 post on Storm Constantine out to Patrons. Read a bunch of comics for the next couple essays. Penn drew some panels. Been a pretty sleepy week.

Youth pastor for Cthulhu voice But you know who hasn’t been sleeping? Jack fuckin’ Graham, who’s written his first new essay in fucking ages. Those of you wise enough to back his Patreon have already seen it, the rest will have their sanities wrenched from their minds on Monday. And then on Tuesday, it’s Christine’s birthday, and I’m throwing her about eight thousand words of party. There will be lesbians. Final part of the V for Vendetta chapter will go out on the 20th, the same day Penn and I fuck off to Brooklyn again to see Lexi.

Even the Mere Idea of More Vacation Photos is Like a Hellish Weight Within My Mind, Please Make it Stop and Give Me Some Tumblr Asks

You hear that everyone? Send center-justified bold-face text your Tumblr asks courtesy of elsandifer.tumblr.com, where my askbox lies open to all regardless of whether they want to speak to me or a typographical element tortured by its own existence.

in your tiny essay on hugboxing and scab picking you wrote: “you can’t help but think that if something comes along that shakes the foundations of what’s possible it’s gonna come from the hugbox side”, and then in your manhunt review: “This is the future. The door has, at last, been kicked open, and it’s time to storm the castle and put our new fucking queen on the throne”. have your feelings on the matter evolved between the two or do you think manhunt doesn’t quite shake the foundations?

My feelings have evolved; the hugbox side has gotten, to my mind, increasingly bound up in solipsism, dogmatism, and an inability to recognize that working for defense contractors is bad, while the scab-picking side had the best piece of trans SFF in recent memory, and that’s changed the math rather a lot.

More broadly, I’m deeply hostile to the growing trend of sex negativity within the queer community, and frankly I see that as coming out of a similar place to hugboxing, so my opposition to it has gotten much starker.

With your changing feels on scab picking does the man you’re more lenient on what kind of scabpicking isn’t too far? For an shitty example: Do you still oppose discorded whooves on an sheer conceptual level despite it’s scabpicking origins?

At the end of the day my problem with Discorded Whooves is that I would rather stab my own eyes out than engage at length with a My Little Pony/Doctor Who crossover Tumblr blog. I don’t think there’s any principles underlying that; it’s purely a statement about my interests and preferences. But it’s a very firm one that’s not especially movable; I’ve put in my effort appreciating adult fandom of children’s media, and as it turns out I hate literally everything about it.…

February 6, 2023

Rats With Guns (Book Three, Part 62: Occupy)

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Previously in Last War in Albion: In an unlikely series of events, a series of 2008 protests against Scientology that emerged out of the online hacker group Anonymous made widespread use of V for Vendetta-style Guy Fawkes masks. There are several possible reasons for this.

“Rats. Rats with money. And rats with guns. I’m your worst nightmare.” – Grant Morrison, Action Comics

A more parsimonious explanation, however, is simply that it was magic. V for Vendetta was not one of Moore’s conscious magical works, but art need not be conceived of as magic to be magic. And even if Moore wasn’t conscious of it, there is a clearly magical dimension to the way in which its conclusion served as an endpoint of the first phase of his career. The fact that the mask would come to prominence in anti-Scientology deepens the sense, Scientology having been the bastard offspring of Jack Parsons’ magical experiments and the disowned father of Burroughs’s magical techniques. Of course V for Vendetta’s central iconography would turn into a magical totem. Of course when that totem, completed in the wake of Watchmen reached fruition, it would be in opposition to Scientology. How else could it have possibly played out?

Moore, his part, was openly delighted by this development, remarking in a September 2008 interview that “I was also quite heartened the other day when watching the news to see that there were demonstrations outside the Scientology headquarters over here, and that they suddenly flashed to a clip showing all these demonstrators wearing V for Vendetta masks. That pleased me. That gave me a warm little glow.” His sense of satisfaction was, however, only just beginning.

In February of 2011, the Canadian anticapitalist group Adbusters proposed a “Million Man March on Wall Street.” The proposal for a mass demonstration on Wall Street gained ground, and eventually settled into a concrete plan for a demonstration on September 17th, now under the banner of Occupy Wall Street. Adbusters was by this point a venerable organization that had been around since V for Vendetta was being published at DC. Their primary practice was what they called “culture jamming,” a concept derived from the 1960s French Marxist group the Situationist International, who proposed a similar practice called détournement. In the case of Adbusters, this usually meant creating media that at first glance looked like perfectly ordinary late capitalist advertising, but upon inspection contained anticapitalist messages and critiques of the corporations being parodied. One notable example, for instance, sought to highlight Coca-Cola’s use of death squads in Columbia to crack down on a unionization effort by taking Eddie Adams’s Vietnam War photo of the execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém so that a Coca-Cola logo appears flowing out of the gun like smoke. These tactics had an obvious aesthetic similarity to the sorts of memes popular on 4chan, and so it was unsurprising when people working under the Anonymous banner came out in endorsement of the demonstration. Which meant that when it happened there were once again a lot of Guy Fawkes masks going around.…

February 4, 2023

Erudite Waffles (2/4/23)

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THE PANCAKES OF WRATH ARE WISER THAN THE WAFFLES OF ERUDITION.

What I’ve Been Up To

I finished up the script for Britain a Prophecy #7, at least to the point where I need to hand it off to Bob for edits. Past that it’s been a research week—I’ve been working through Storm Constantine’s first Wraeththu book for a piece that’ll probably be out to Patrons early next week, and doing some other reading for LWIA v4. I’ve also been listening to a lot of Nine Inch Nails, which is once again Lexi’s malign influence, and am musing on serializing a Halo by Halo review series through these newsletter posts.

Penn’s been doing character designs for Britain a Prophecy #5, which continues apace. Here, let’s give a preview of the uniforms for the fae army.

We also got a new scene out for $10 Patrons, and a new behind the scenes post out for all patrons.

Also, I just sold my first piece of fiction writing. No details I can share yet, but if you asked me “El, what would be your absolute top choice of ways to break into professional fiction writing” I’d be hard pressed to come up with a better one than this. I can’t wait for this one to come out.

Some Movie Reviews

Man, it’d be *great* if I could post these here, but I actually gate my media reviews to my $2+ Patrons so you’ll have to go there to find my reviews of Cruising and Manhattan Baby.

Some Tumblr Asks

These I don’t gate! My asks remain open, and so, for what it’s worth, do Penn’s.

Favourite Kibble track? (Alex’s goofy project)

“What Time Is It?”

How long do you think it will take for you to reach the present day in Last War in Albion? Another ten years? More?

There are way too many variables to even begin trying to predict that. What I’ll say is that it’s a project I generally enjoy working on, and that I regret leaving it fallow as long as I did, even as I recognize those years were not actually ones I was in a place to devote it attention. But also, it’s a lot of work, and there’s other stuff I want to do too, and, like, if I sell a novel or get an ongoing comic series that work is going to come out of LWIA time. So I can’t promise full time work on it for the next year/five years/ten years. Hell, I don’t like to promise full time work on it for the next month, because, as January showed, sometimes it turns out I really need to write 8000 words about 90s singer songwriters.

But I like Last War in Albion and I want to do right by the project. So I’ll do the best I can, but wouldn’t want to estimate any sort of timeframe beyond “well, hopefully before I’m dead.”

How much of Britain a Prophecy do you plan in advance vs write as you go along ?…

January 30, 2023

Pain and Unconsciousness (Book Three, Part 61: Project Chanology)

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Previously in Last War in Albion: Even as his relationship with DC and Time Warner deteriorated, Alan Moore supported his friend Steve Moore getting work novelizing the V for Vendetta and Watchmen films, in part because Steve Moore was supporting his ailing brother. In spite of this, DC abruptly cancelled the Watchmen novelization following a phone call between Moore and Gibbons.

“Engrams are a mental image picture containing pain and unconsciousness.” – Neil Gaiman, 1968 BBC interview

In response to this, Moore was incandescent, reasoning that this was “what that odd turn-of-phrase ‘quietly compliant’ was all about–that they expected me to be quietly compliant because I would have been thinking like them, and thinking ‘Oh, if I don’t do what they say they’ll take that job away from Steve.’ That had never even occurred to me. I didn’t think that anyone could ever be that verminous. But, once I had thought that was probably what had happened, I immediately spoke to the people at DC. I told Karen Berger she could never call me again, and that I didn’t want anything to do with anybody at DC Comics. I was furiously angry and sickened at—at least what I’d perceived—had happened. I though that was completely unforgivable and subhuman.” He also took a moment aside at his wedding to Melinda Gebbie shortly after (which dates all of this to early 2007, a year or so after the release of V for Vendetta) to tell Dave Gibbons that he no longer wanted to discuss Watchmen with him at all.

Some time later, Gibbons—who Moore claims had not actually ever thanked him for the money as requested—called Moore to further discuss Watchmen. Specifically, Moore recounts, Gibbons relayed an offer from DC to return the rights to the book in exchange for Moore giving DC his blessing to do prequels and sequels. This, more than anything else in the story, is the bit that is difficult to quite make sense of. Did DC really see the rights to one of their most successful perennial sellers as worth giving up just for permission to do sequels and prequels—sequels and prequels they would eventually decide to do anyway? For that matter, what would the rights to Watchmen actually entail in this case? Clearly DC would retain a license to the characters, and it’s hard to believe they intended to let the original book go out of print, so what could they possibly have been offering Moore?

Whatever the answer, Moore was thoroughly uninterested, angrily retorting, “No, no–I don’t want that to happen. I don’t want these prequels and sequels to exist, and I certainly don’t want the rights to Watchmen back. DC has been abusing that book for a couple of decades. They presumably feel that it is no longer of much value to them, compared to the potential value of the sequels and prequels. So, they’re giving me back the spent carcass of a book that I was once very, very proud of.”…

January 28, 2023

Erudite Waffles (1/28/23)

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Efforts to not feel impossibly behind on everything ever continue to flounder, and I’m starting this Thursday evening, so let’s see how much content we can create!

What I’m Up To

I finished “How to Be an Egg in the Age of Lilith Fair,” and it’s started going out to Patrons. Be on the site in a few weeks. So now I get a handful of days to look at fiction before the month rolls over and I have to figure out where my ten thousand paying words are coming from this time.

You may notice a certain grind-hardened jadedness there.

Penn’s done layouts on the next scene of Britain a Prophecy, though I think now he has to bog down and do two big pieces of character design.

Oh, and I went to New York and hung out with Lexi.

Obnoxious Vacation Recap

So yeah, Lexi’s usually Ithaca based, but is spending the first chunk of the year living in Brooklyn because she’s a big city girl at heart. The downside of this is that Penn and I don’t get to see our girlriend regularly. The upside is that when we do, we do it in Brooklyn. So we headed down on Friday. The Ithaca to New York drive is actually one of my absolute favorites—looping through the Poconos and then heading over the Delaware Water Gap is just gorgeous, and then you get the thrilling suspense of whether you get to suffer through the abject misery of the George Washington Bridge or the slightly different abject misery of beating your way through Manhattan. And it’s the perfect length to build what Penn and I refer to as my frog boil playlists, long multi-hour things that slide impishly among genres. Here’s the one we listened to, which moves slower than usual, preferring a sort of meta-frog boil structure that slides from the Lilith Fair stuff I’d been working on into harder stuff that’s closer to what Lexi listens to. Music as pretentious ritual and all. (Entertainingly, we brought Lexi our copy of Phonogram to borrow.)

So we got in late afternoon and started our trip with dinner, which was at Claro, a Mexican place in Gowanus we’d previously gone with Christine before my Neoreaction a Basilisk talk back in October. Within fine dining—a sphere in which I have numerous preferences on account of being a bougie cunt—I’m very partial to the more casual and relaxed style of fine dining. Which is to say that I’m always going to prefer a Brooklyn Michelin star to a Manhattan one, and this is firmly an established favorite now.

Although in some ways the real highlight was the trip down, which we decided to take on foot in a spirit of psychogeography, and so had a nice two mile walk through Brooklyn to reflect on extremely pompous notions of cities as human-created gods and use the word “vibe” a lot. And then, at the end, there was food.

Christ, This Is Already Obnoxious, Can We Do a Tumblr Ask or Something?…

January 23, 2023

The Devilish Nature of His Studies (Book Three, Part 60: The V for Vendetta Novelization)

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Previously in Last War in Albion: The Wachowskis oversaw a V for Vendetta film that heavily altered Moore’s story, making it into a Bush-era political allegory with a strong queer subtext. Moore wasn’t thrilled.

A man sits in silent contemplation of its dark secrets and exotic conjurations, his face lined and weary, aged by the devilish nature of his studies. – Steve Moore, Father Shandor: Demon Stalker

Amidst the merchandising generated by the film was a novelization of the movie script. This would usually be a banal bit of ephemera, but in the case of V for Vendetta it proved a curious and interesting detail of the overall event that was the movie by dint of the fact that it was written by Steve Moore. This immediately gave it a credibility and importance that movie novelizations generally lack, simply because it carried a tacit stamp of approval, or, at least, grudging tolerance from Alan Moore, without whose blessing there is no remotely plausible way that Steve Moore would have proceeded with the project. Moore’s assent was surely less about actually supporting the idea of a novel based on the script based on the disowned comic he’d written fifteen years ago than about supporting his best friend getting some money, but the fact remains that Steve Moore’s involvement meant that the novel served, at least in part, as Moore’s camp getting to put its own spin on the Wachowskis’ adaptation.

Those looking for scandal or for a “correction” to the Wachowskis’ version of the story will be largely disappointed. Save for one moment in which he impishly flags a major plot hole in the script by having Finch notice that the claim that the experiments on V were to produce the virus that Norsefire used to rise to power made no chronological sense (almost certainly what Alan Moore was talking about when he described “plot holes you couldn’t have got away with in Whizzer And Chips” given that he later noted that his friend had “done such a brilliant job on the novelization of the V for Vendetta film—even fixing a plot hole in the original screenplay for them”) and conclude that V’s account can’t be entirely honest, the novel is largely a faithful and straightforward adaptation of the film script, written in a breezy and direct prose style that reads fast and with clarity, working with an omniscient narrator who flits easily among viewpoint characters. If anything, it’s fair to criticize the novel for holding too closely to the at times drab liberalism of the Wachowskis’ vision—passages like one that describes Gordon’s satirical attacks on Chancellor Sutler as “satirical antics that, in many ways, were just as damaging to the powers that be” as V’s manifestos.

Still, there are clear moments where he puts his own spin on events. This is clear from the beginning—after opening with the evocative and scene-painting fragment, “A strange, shadowy room, somewhere deep beneath the streets of London,” Moore continues with a bit of historical context that’s utterly absent from the film, which spends a couple minutes informing its presumed American audience who Guy Fawkes is but makes no effort to speak of “old, old London that had seen so much, in two thousand years of war and terror and despair.…

January 21, 2023

Erudite Waffles (1/21/23)

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Hello from sunny Brooklyn, where Penn and I are spending the weekend with Lexi being decadent and sexy queers. I’ll probably just post a vacation update in next week’s newsletter, because I like being a decadent and sexy queer. This one, meanwhile, will be brief because it’s been

What I’m Up To

an absolute clusterfuck of a week, frankly, though that’s mostly because we rearranged an entire floor of the house to change my office space and give Penn some studio space because he’s started playing with noise music. That already screwed up my posting of last week’s Last War in Albion, which is a real pity because it’s one of my absolute favorite posts from Book Three.

But yeah, I basically didn’t get to start work work until Tuesday, which led to some alarmed looks at the schedule and how much Last War in Albion I could realistically write this month. Thankfully that “How to Be an Egg in the Age of Lilith Fair” project came through when I needed it, and looks like it’ll be good for about three Patreon posts this month—the annotations, as of Thursday morning when I’m locking this in so I can queue it, are at 4600 words with seven more songs to write about, so look for that on Patreon next week or so. We’ll see—I might take the annotations and then take one more swing at the playlist, because I feel like I’m underrepresenting the cultural object itself.

In Britain a Prophecy news, Penn just sent a four page scene to Nechama. Let’s see if I have anything I can run as a preview of that. Yeah, here, this is utterly spoiler-free and just a nice pair of Taz images.

I still have to break down the last seven pages of issue seven, but that wasn’t this week, just like a ton of newsletter isn’t going to be this week. In fact, all I’ve really got is

Tumblr Ask-O-Rama

Thoughts on Davies’ upcoming tenure as showrunner? Do you think he’s given Moffat a call?

At this point in my life and career I know enough people on the periphery of Doctor Who production that I hear things, and so I’m just gonna blanket decline to speculate on rumors.

But in the general case, I expect the show will be really good under Davies. It certainly was the first time. I’m excited to come back to Davies in my 40s and trans.

Yeah, I have concerns about the lack of forward motion. Every year the bulk of Doctor Who remains under the control of Wilderness Years pro-fandom is broadly speaking bad for it—and I apply that judgment to the licenses, the show, everything. But also, the Chibnall era was clearly also bad for it, and in a much more acute crisis sort of way. I’m confident in Davies’s ability to right the ship and deliver a hit, which is almost certainly more important right now.

But look, the guy who just did It’s a Sin wants to come write Doctor Who because he thinks he has some good, new ideas for it.…

January 16, 2023

By Understanding Her (Book Three, Part 59: V for Vendetta as Trans Cinema

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Previously in Last War in Albion: After a decade and change in development hell a film version of V for Vendetta was made in 2006, with a screenplay by the Wachowskis, fresh off the success of the Matrix trilogy. Moore, however, was aggrieved at producer Joel Silver’s false statements about his enthusiasm for the project, and went on the warpath.

The pang was hers, and my pang was mine, but I recognized they were a similar species. By understanding her, I felt seen. I saw myself.” -Kieron Gillen, “Colossus”

Moore even complained about the depiction of British culture, fixating on a scene in which Evey is being served breakfast, complaining that “They don’t know what British people have for breakfast, they couldn’t be bothered. ‘Eggy in a basket’ apparently. Now the US have ‘eggs in a basket,’ which is fried bread with a fried egg in a hole in the middle. I guess they thought we must eat that as well, and thought ‘eggy in a basket’ was a quaint and Olde Worlde version.”

There’s a clear sense that Moore made his mind up about the film after Silver’s comments and that anything and everything that followed was simply more proof of what he’d already decided. Certainly that’s the easiest explanation for his outrage over the clearly minor “eggy in a basket.” And it is true that the film greatly simplifies the moral complexity that Moore tried to paint—V is a straightforwardly cherished freedom fighter, described by Evey in a fawning voiceover at the beginning and end of the film, culminating in her declaration that “No one will ever forget that night and what it meant for this country, but I will never forget the man and what he meant for me,” a piece of dialogue that seems far worse than much of what Moore complained about.

Indeed, Evey is poorly served by the film in general, though the reasons why are largely ironic. The Wachowskis make the decision to give her much more agency—she’s hostile to the Norsefire regime from the start, and instead of starting as a desperate teenager who turns to sex work only to be busted by the cops she’s a career woman at the Mouth on her way to a date with a popular comedian. This is all very textbook screenwriting stuff—she’s the viewpoint character so, within orthodox theories of how movies are supposed to work, needs to be more than the meek little girl that Moore’s Evey begins as, and certainly not a prospective sex worker. The problem comes when it becomes time for her to leave V, a plot beat that is recast from being something V does to her to being of her own choosing after she attempts to betray V by warning Bishop Lilliman. From here her story proceeds similarly, with her hiding out with a man named Gordon (now the comedian she was going on a date with) and then being captured by V. This, however, significantly changes the subsequent tenor of her imprisonment and reading of the Valerie letter, and has the result of badly weakening her rooftop apotheosis when V reveals the deception.…

January 14, 2023

Erudite Waffles (1/14/23)

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AI-generated art of a hand with too many fingers, and in the wrong places.

Another week, another whatever the fuck this is.

What I’ve Been Up To

Well, let’s start with the bad news: a communications disaster with the copyeditor on TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 8 means that I currently have a freshly edited manuscript for the already published TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 7, no edits whatsoever on Volume 8, and a several month delay to that book. This is obviously very frustrating, and I apologize to everyone who’s looking forward to it.

Right. Onto better news. I finished reading Sandman: Book of Dreams, the 1996 short story collection co-edited by Neil Gaiman and some guy named Ed Kramer that I’ll need to Google in a second, but who I’m sure will turn out to be a perfectly upstanding gentleman whose involvement in the project doesn’t instantly derail all other conversation about it. Except, of course, the essay went out for Patrons yesterday, and you can read all about it yourself. Queuing this up on Friday morning, but I expect today will be spent looking at Storm Constantine’s Wraeththu or possibly reading some G.K. Chesterton. Or maybe REDACTED (because I want to keep that surprise for Patrons).

I approved Penn’s pencils on the next four pages of Britain a Prophecy #5, and he’s at work on inks. I also have a few annotations written for How to be an Egg in the Age of the Lilith Fair, so the odds on that happening continue to increase.

I also got some very promising news about a possible work for hire gig.

The Obligatory Rant About AI Art

I saw a tweet the other day from someone talking about how one of their regular writing gigs had informed them that their services wouldn’t be needed anymore, as the website would be using AI to write articles in the future, though they could be offered a reduced rate editing and cleaning up the AI articles. This was presented as some grave existential horror about the threat of AI, whereas I admit my reaction was “well, that website will be out of business soon.”

Which is to say that I’ve found myself very unimpressed with the discourse over AI art. Obviously the AI art utopians, with their idiot speeches about making art accessible to anyone (working class art famously taking until the 21st century to exist) can simply be fired into the sun without further comment. But I also have precious little time for the “but copyright” crowd, being as I’m a middle aged Internet grump who has been arguing against the basic idea of copyright for literally more than half my life. (Here’s Neoreaction a Basilisk on libgen, btw!)

Anyway, all of this seems to me to spectacularly miss the actual problem with AI art, which is that it represents the accelerating replacement of art with content. Because the plain fact of the matter is that AI art sucks, and it sucks in ways that come down to extremely persistent hard problems in artificial intelligence that absolutely nobody has made any meaningful progress on in decades, the crux of these being that they blatantly lack any intentionality.…

January 9, 2023

They Seem Like Nice Boys (Book Three, Part 58: V for Vendetta Book Three, Movie Development)

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Previously in Last War in Albion: Alan Moore’s first post-Watchmen project saw him returning to the beginning of his career to finish V for Vendetta.

“In the end, I was glad they got the ideas out but very disappointed that they blew it so badly and distorted all the Gnostic transcendental aspects that made the first film so strong and potent. If they had any sense, they would have befriended me instead of pissing me off. They seem like nice boys.” – Grant Morrison, 2005 interview with Suicide Girls

Moore’s evolution over the seven years of the project is perhaps clearest, however, in the larger thematic issues. Moore had originally envisioned V for Vendetta as an exploration of anarchism vs fascism in which all sides were taken seriously—as early as 1984 Moore talked about how he originally “ intended it to be a pretty trite piece of propaganda. But it didn’t work like that – it came out superficial and hollow. I realized that the only way to treat it honestly was to take the fascist characters and get deeply involved in their mentality.” It was not, obviously, that Moore was without any moral investment in the debate between anarchism and fascism—a debate Moore has suggested is both the absolute heart of all political debate and one that is in fact “as much a matter of the emotions and spirit as they are matters of abstract intellect and politics. Maybe even more so.” Given this, and especially given his summary of the debate as “should we be ruled,” there is only ever one position that Alan Moore has ever taken at any point in his life. And the idea that V for Vendetta is particularly ambiguous in what it favors between fascism and anarchism is, charitably, strained.

All the same, there were moral ambiguities to resolve. Any ending was going to necessarily resolve some of the shades of gray, just based on what the plot beats were—who got to win, who got big hero moments on the way out, etc. And so Moore had decisions to make. He’s suggested that the bulk of these were already made, noting that “There were no major plot changes from the way I laid out the story when we were doing it for Warrior,” but in the same interview he noted that “the tone [of Book Three], I think, is subtly different.” Speaking about it some years later, asked in an interview about V’s tactics, Moore clarified that the use of violence “is something which I don’t sympathize with,” and that “in Book Three, it’s finally decided that no it isn’t; that killing people is always wrong; and at that point the initial hero V stands down and lets a non-violent person take over the role.”

It’s easy to read this transformation in light of Watchmen. It is not clear when, exactly, Moore embraced nonviolence. His earliest explicit endorsement of it comes in 1987, when he expressed a “deep aversion to all forms of violence and war,” but it’s a position one can imagine him taking at any point in his life.…

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