This is the first of fifteen parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Nine, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on V for Vendetta for Warrior (in effect, Books One and Two of the DC Comics collection). An omnibus of all fifteen parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.
The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in a collected edition, along with the eventual completion of the story. UK-based readers can buy it here.
Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore did some underground-style work for
Sounds, a newspaper strip called
Maxwell the Magic Cat, some work for Marvel UK on
Doctor Who and
Star Wars comics, numerous
Future Shocks and
Time Twisters for
2000 AD, the continuing serials
Skizz and
D.R. & Quinch for the same magazine, a run on
Captain Britain for Marvel UK, and broke out in the United States working on
Swamp Thing for DC Comics. Concurrently with all of that, he wrote a serial called
V for Vendetta in the British quasi-monthly anthology
Warrior…
“Please. For us. For all of us… Laissez les bontemps rouler.” -Alan Moore, Swamp Thing
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Figure 551: The chillingly prescient image of widespread CCTV cameras in London. (Written by Alan Moore, art by David Lloyd, from “The Villain” in Warrior #1, 1982) |
From its first installment, back in 1982, amidst Moore’s earliest works, V for Vendetta crackles with mad gusto. The first page brazenly sets a scene with all the fascist gusto of 2000 AD’s Judge Dredd, only with none of the broad comedic satire that characterized that strip. Instead it is an all too familiar near-future world, recognizably just a few of history’s happenstances removed from the world of its readers. It is a few months shy of sixteen years in the future, with an unsettlingly phrased radio broadcast identified as the “Voice of Fate.” The language is plastic and stilted, quietly evoking Moore and Lloyd’s previous collaboration on a story for Doctor Who featuring the evil plastic alien Autons: it is “the fifth of the eleventh, nineteen-ninety-seven,” a declaration that is followed by a bizarrely precise weather forecast promising that “the weather will be fine until 12:07 A.M. when a shower will commence lasting until 1:30 A.M.” Note the care with which Moore sets up the unsettling nature of this – the first number is weirdly over-specific, whereas the second is a nice, round number like one would expect from a weather forecast. This broadcast is contrasted with David Lloyd’s starkly monochromatic art, which begins with a soaring skyline before cutting to a mass of people heading home in wide shot. A third panel focuses on a detail from the image, a CCTV camera pointed at the street, a sign proclaiming, “FOR YOUR PROTECTION.”
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Figure 552: The spartan squalor of Evey’s apartment. (Written by Alan Moore, art by David Lloyd, from “The Villain” in Warrior #1, 1982) |
From this introduction, the art and voiceover both take a turn for the dark.
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