chapter nine

This is the twelfth 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.

Figure 644: Night Raven causes the antagonists to kill their own man by putting a Night Raven mask on one of them.  (Written by Steve Parkhouse, art by David Lloyd, from Hulk Comic #1, 1979)

Over the course of Moore’s stories, Night Raven suffers from the disease until he finally obtains a cure, at which point he realizes that Yi Yang had only done all of this to give herself an enemy. (“How does an immortal kill herself,” he has Night Raven ponder in the story where he’s finally cured. “She sets about creating a weapon, perhaps unconsciously, responding to that barely audible voice inside her that pleads for extinction. She creates a weapon that might just be able to kill her.”) This also let Moore gradually move the setting up to the present day, which has obvious appeal to anyone seeking to use the character in future stories since it enables teaming him up with other characters in the Marvel stable. Having accomplished this, however, and with Moore backing away from Marvel UK work due to his dissatisfaction with Bernie Jaye’s dismissal, Moore, again characteristically, handed the text pieces over to Jamie Delano, giving him his first professional credit. 

Figure 645: V causes the antagonists to kill their own man by putting a Guy Fawkes mask on one of them. (Written by Alan Moore, art by David Lloyd, from “The Vacation,” in Warrior #18, 1984)

V for Vendetta, however, fell a long way from Night Raven, although certainly similarities were maintained, most obviously the faceless and implacable nature of the lead characters, although V eventually did get the origin story that Night Raven lacked. The most obvious of these is the change in setting from the 1930s to the present day – a change prompted by Lloyd’s request to not have to keep doing a bunch of historical reference.

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This is the eleventh 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.

Figure 635: A tall giraffe galloping like a rocking horse.

This is certainly a harsh assessment, but it is in truth difficult to argue. Consider, for instance, her account of the group’s adventures in the Land of Take-What-You-Want, in which “if you want anything, you can usually get it there for nothing.” At one point, the adventure goes as follows: “‘Do you want a nice fat lion, Jo?’ asked Silky, as a large lion wandered by and licked Silky’s hand. ‘No, thank you,’ said Jo, at once. ’Well, what about a giraffe?’ said Silky. ‘I believe they make fine pets.’ ‘You believe wrong then,’ said Bessie, as a tall giraffe galloped past like a rocking-horse. ‘Nobody in their senses would want to keep a giraffe for a pet.’ ‘Oh, look!’ cried Fanny, as she came to a shop in which stood a great many large and beautiful clocks. ‘Do let’s take a clock back home!’” This is largely par for the course for Blyton.

Figure 636: V reads The Magic Faraway Tree to Evey. (Written by Alan Moore and Enid Blyton, art by David Lloyd, from “Violence” in Warrior #9, 1983)

In the 1943 sequel The Magic Faraway Tree, Blyton creates a land not entirely dissimilar to the Land of Take-What-You-Want, the Land of Do-As-You-Please. In it, Jo drives a train, Fanny gets everyone elephants to ride, and Dick (a new character in this book) goes swimming. Then Moon-Face gets an idea for something to do: “‘Let’s dig an ENORMOUS castle!’ cried Moon-Face. ‘Then we can all sit on the top of it when the sea comes up.’ ‘We can’t,’ said Silky, suddenly looking sad. ‘Why not? Why not?’ cried Jo in surprise. ‘Isn’t this the Land of Do-As-You-Please?’ ’Yes,’ said Silky. ‘But it’s time we went back to the Faraway Tree.

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Comics Reviews will return on February 11th.

This is the tenth 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.

Figure 630: Peter Murphy in The Hunger. David J’s bass is visible on the left.

The result was a minor hit that stuck around in the independent charts for two years and, perhaps more significantly, marked the birth of goth music. Sticking with the period aesthetic from which they got their name and first single, Bauhaus quickly forged a distinctive visual style that drew from German Expressionism coupled with periodic trips to antique stores to, as J puts it, pick over “piles of moth-eaten Victorian velvet (in both the ladies and gentleman’s departments.”) This was coupled, in their live shows, by lighting design produced by Graham Bentley, who used stark industrial lighting and strobes to flood the stage with light, highlighting their monochromatic wardrobe. All of this served to highlight, in Moore’s words, “the rivetting stage presence of Peter Murphy as he writhes against his live backdrop of searing white light and contorted shadows” – a stage presence that would go on to become one of the defining images of goth culture when director Tony Scott used the song and Murphy’s performance for the opening credits of his classic 1983 vampire film The Hunger, with Murphy gyrating against and tearing at a wire mesh, a libidinous monster playing homage to the cinematic tradition Scott’s film succeeds.

Figure 631: Moore’s text was eventually used as the cover for Bauhaus’s live album This Is For When

Moore, indeed, was one of the band’s early boosters, giving them one of their first pieces of national press in February of 1980 when he gave them a half-page writeup in Sounds, some eight months before their first full album, when they were still riding high on the back of two singles and a Peel session. Entitled “Phantoms of the Teenage Opera,” the piece concludes by proclaiming the band to have “a sound as clean as a razor, and a vision that doesn’t need dressing up in angry rhetoric or android accessories to make a point. Their music may have the shadow of the tall steel over it, but that’s a heartbeat you hear throbbing in the background, not a ring modulator.

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Comics Reviews will return on February 11th.

This is the ninth 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.

Figure 621: William of Orange was crowned William III in the Glorious Revolution. Here his 1688 arrival is depicted by James Thornhill (1675-1734).

It is not that this is entirely unsympathetic. Fawkes himself was a Catholic supremacist, but he fit into the same centuries-long tradition of religious dissidence in England that would eventually produce William Blake. And as David Lloyd noted, the basic cheek of trying to blow up Parliament is rather appealing. In the end, though, is not so much the precise ethics of Fawkes the man that are most relevant to the development of V for Vendetta as it is the holiday that sprung up in the wake of the plot. Following its uncovering, the public were allowed to celebrate the plot’s failure by lighting bonfires. The next January, Parliament passed the Observance of 5^th November Act, which established a standing holiday commemorating the King’s survival. This holiday persisted, not least because in 1688 William of Orange’s arrival in England to overthrow James II happened to land on November the 5^th, the day after his birthday, giving the holiday new resonances. Over time the custom of bonfires came to incorporate first burning the pope in effigy, and then, somewhat more moderately, burning Guy Fawkes in effigy – a tradition that led to the creation of the Guy Fawkes mask, with allowed one to give one’s anti-Catholic effigy a suitably grotesque holiday. 

Figure 622: An 1870s effigy of Guy Fawkes built by a London fruitvendor.

The holiday also, in the 19^th century, gradually became a holiday more associated with the working class, a transition that led to a transition away from celebration of victories of the monarchy and towards a more anti-authoritarian approach. Over the course of the century, Fawkes found himself incorporated into popular fiction, starting with William Harrison Ainsworth’s 1841 novel Guy Fawkes, which rehabilitated Fawkes into a more sympathetic character who, by 1905, was appearing as a hero in illustrated books like The Boyhood Days of Guy Fawkes; Or, the Conspirators of Old London. This was very much the spirit in which Moore was introduced to the holiday – he talks of how “when parents explained to their offspring about Guy Fawkes and his attempt to blow up Parliament, there always seemed to be an undertone of admiration in their voices, or at least there did in Northampton.” 

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This is the eighth 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.

Figure 613: William Godwin

He turns also to Mikhail Bakunin’s Collectivist Anarchism, with was an important predecessor to Marxism, along with Peter Kropotkin’s rejection of private property, and, more contemporarily, Hakim Bey (who in addition to being an anarchist and pedophilia advocate was an open sorcerer, defining the concept as “the systematic cultivation of enhanced consciousness or non-ordinary awareness and its deployment in the world of deeds and objects to bring about desired results”). But for the purposes of understanding Blake, perhaps the most important thinker Moore touches upon is William Godwin, whose Political Justice, in Moore’s account, advocated “that the individual act according to his or her individual judgement while allowing every single other individual the same liberty.”

Figure 614: One of Blake’s illustrations for Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life. (1791)

Political Justice, more properly titled Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness, was published in 1793, the same year as America a Prophecy, and Godwin and Blake traveled in similar circles – Blake did a series of illustrations for Godwin’s future wife Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life in 1791, for instance. (Godwin and Wollstonecraft’s daughter, also named Mary, would go on to have a significant career of her own, largely under her married name, acquired from “Ozymandias” poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.) Blake followed Godwin no more than he did any other man, but the intellectual similarities are clear enough.

Figure 615: The cover for the third issue of The Northampton Arts Group Magazine, featuring an iteration of Alan Moore’s concept for “the Doll.” (c. 1973)

For Moore’s part, at least in terms of V for Vendetta, the most obvious anarchist to mention is Colin Ward, whose Anarchy in Action was first published in 1973, when Moore was working with the Northampton Arts Group, putting out zines while writing spoken word pieces like “Old Gangsters Never Die,” submitting a doomed proposal for “a freakish terrorist in white-face make-up who traded under the name of the Doll and waged war upon a totalitarian state sometime in the late 1980s” to future Starblazer publisher DC Thomson, dreaming up his sci-fi epic Sun Dodgers and the character of Five, “a mental patient of undefined but unusual abilities who had been kept in a particular room, room five,” and meeting Phyllis Dixon, who he quickly married the next year.

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This is the seventh 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.

Figure 606: Vala hiding beneath the ground. (William Blake, Europe a Prophecy, Copy K, Object 4, Written 1794, printed 1821)

Vala opens Europe a Prophecy by railing against Enitharmon, asking her, “wilt thou bring forth other sons? To cause my name to vanish, that my place may not be found.” She speaks of how she, “sitting in fathomless abyss of my immortal shrine” looks up at heaven and the stars and seizes “their burning power” so she can “bring forth howling terrors, all devouring fiery kings. Devouring & devour’d roaming on dark and desolate mountains In forests of eternal death, shrieking in hollow trees.” But Enitharmon, she claims, foils her in this. “I bring forth from my teeming bosom myriads of flames,” she says, “and thou dost stamp them with a signet, then they roam abroad and leave me void as death.” But the prelude ends with a strange sense of hope, with the shadowy female asking “who shall bind the infinite with an eternal band? To compass it with swaddling bands? and who shall cherish it With milk and honey? I see it smile & I roll inward & my voice is past.” 

This prelude poses an interesting ambiguity, especially when taken in light of the remainder of Europe a Prophecy and, for that matter, of Blake’s mythology. Vala/the shadowy female is not generally a positive figure, but rather an embodiment of nature (itself a complex concept within Blake’s system), and a warlike death goddess. She speaks of her nature, saying “my roots are brandish’d in the heavens, my fruits in earth beneath Surge, foam, and labour into Life, first born & first consum’d! Consumed and consuming!” Ultimately, she will prove responsible for Albion’s fall. And yet it is difficult not to see her as a sympathetic figure in this exchange with Enitharmon – her revolutionary, destructive spirit is the obvious tonic to Urizen’s ghastly order. And it is worth stressing that it is Blake’s most famous image of Urizen, as the Ancient of Days, that serves as the frontispiece to Europe a Prophecy, a fact that further strengthen’s Vala’s moral legitimacy. 

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This is the sixth 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.

The art cuts back to Evey for the final row of panels, her face in shadow, a single tear visible, the narration returning to her instead of simply her quoting Valerie. “I know every inch of this cell,” she thinks, as she holds the scrap of toilet paper up, her face shrunken and lined with wrinkles that should be impossible for a woman who is only sixteen years old, and kisses it softly on the x. “This cell knows every inch of me.” And a final panel, her eyes and nose, weathered, single tear still suspended on her face, the edges of it simply fading out to the stark and infinite whiteness of the page. 

“Except one.”

Figure 599: Evey retains her last inch, refusing to sign a false confession. (Written by Alan Moore, art by David Lloyd, in Warrior #26, 1985)

“Valerie” is followed by “The Verdict,” the last chapter of V for Vendetta to be published in Warrior. The chapter opens with Evey being offered the opportunity to confess to her “crimes” – that she was kidnapped by V, “systematically brainwashed by means of drugs and torture” and “frequently subjected to sexual abuse,” and that she aided him in “the unlawful killings of Roger Dascombe, Mr. Derek Almond, Dr. Della Surridge, and the Reverend Antony Lilliman, Bishop of Westminster,” and that “the above statement is genuine, and that it was not signed by means of intimidation.” This last statement is rather clearly untrue, however, as when she declines to send it she’s told that she’ll be taken “out behind the chemical sheds” and shot. 

Figure 600: The final page of V for Vendetta to appear in Warrior. (Written by Alan Moore, art by David Lloyd, from “The Verdict” in Warrior #26, 1985)

And so Evey returns to her cell and reads Valerie’s letter again, waiting for Rossiter to come and take her to her execution. She’s given one last chance to sign the statement.

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Last War in Albion will now be running on Thursdays.

This is the fifth 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.

Figure 584: The title character makes a fleeting appearance in Book Two, tacitly answering Gordon’s question. (Written by Alan Moore, art by David Lloyd, from “Variety” in Warrior #19, 1984)

The next few chapters focus on her life with Gordon up until he’s killed when a deal goes wrong and she attempts to avenge him before apparently being arrested. The most interesting of these is probably Chapter Six, “Variety,” which takes place within The Kitty-Kat Keller, a gentleman’s club in which an unnamed dancer goose-steps to a fascist cabaret song (“So if some blonde and blue eyed boy / would care to teach me strength through joy / and see that all my liberal tendencies are cured; / if it should be decreed by fate / that you invade my neighbouring state / then you will find my frontiers open, rest assured.”) as Evey observes the various patrons: Rose Almond being tossed out because her card is overdrawn, an associate of Gordon’s named Robert being told by Almond’s replacement at the Finger that he’ll no longer be honoring their deal to keep his elderly mother out of a home (“Homes? They’re gas chambers!” Robert exclaims, to which Creedy responds, “Not gas. If you want the truth, Robert, there’s just three good South Ken boys with iron bars.”), and another associate from Scotland named Ally Harper, who will turn out to be Gordon’s murderer next chapter. This selection of petty and everyday degradations offers a perspective not really seen yet within V for Vendetta, one that pays off its original conception as a 1930s mystery strip in the noir tradition, and culminates in Robert having a breakdown, shouting to the bar that “we shouldn’t have to live like this” and that “I wish the bastard bomb had ‘it bastard London. That’s what I wish. I wish we were all dead!” at which point the Fingermen in the bar surround him and beat him.

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This is the fourth 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.

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This is the third 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.

Figure 570: V’s quotations from Macbeth in the first installment resonate with his actions in rescuing Evey. (Written by Alan Moore, art by David Lloyd, from “The Villain” in Warrior #1, 1982)

But “Virtue Victorious” does not use its contrast for comedy, or, at least, not for any straightforward comedy, and the point is not the contrast between the bishop’s words and the images, but the way in which the two intersect and resemble each other. The bishop is praying for divine forgiveness for the child molestation he’s about to commit, but when he speaks of “the evil one who is surely come amongst us in this, the hour of our greatest trial,” the images of V fighting his way through the guards give clear double meaning to these words. The sequence is of course not unprecedented – it is in many ways simply a refinement of the technique Moore was using back in the first installment, where he had V quoting Macbeth while slicing his way through the Fingermen threatening Evey. But the refinement is in this case significant, with the text and images in “Virtue Victorious” coming from two distinct scenes that are allowed, in effect, to play simultaneously. As the comic went on, Moore grew even more confident, eventually doing away with most of the dialogue and words entirely and giving Lloyd stretches of pages at a time in which the storytelling is entirely visual, or where, to use an example from Book Two, a chapter in which the only dialogue comes from television broadcasts playing out in the background. These are in some ways small potatoes compared to the expansive formal and stylistic experiments that Moore would later become known for, but nevertheless, the advancement within the course of the serial is significant, and it’s not surprising that Moore refers to the comic as “one of the first real major breakthroughs I made in terms of my own personal style.”

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