The Last War in Albion Chapter 9: V for Vendetta (The Warrior Years)

By Philip Sandifer

The Last War in Albion is a blog providing an ongoing critical epic history of British comic books focusing on the rivalry between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. This volume collects the ninth chapter of the saga, focusing on Alan Moore's work on V for Vendetta in the British magazine Warrior (in effect the first two-thirds of the eventual finished story).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Philip Sandifer
• Release date: Dec 2, 2014

Book preview

Copyright 2014 by Philip Sandifer

Published by Eruditorum Press

Table of Contents

Introduction

Previously in The Last War in Albion

Chapter Nine

Introduction

The Last War in Albion is a serialized critical history of British comics, focusing on the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. This is the ninth chapter, about Alan Moore’s work on V for Vendetta in the British magazine Warrior (as opposed to the work’s eventual completion at DC Comics, which will be covered at a later date). It does not require or assume a readership who has read the first eight chapters of The Last War in Albion, nor who has read the comics in question, although both will certainly improve the experience.

The Last War in Albion is serialized for free, with added images (sadly excluded from the omnibus for licensing reasons), at philipsandifer.com. Chapters One through Eight are available free there, or in low-priced ebook omnibus versions at Smashwords.

The comics discussed in this chapter are available in a collected volume from DC Comics – this chapter covers, in effect, Book One and Book Two of the collection.

This volume is an advance release of material prior to its blog publication. These advance releases unite several blog posts into single chapters, and are released alongside (or as near can be managed) the first blog post of a given chapter as a way of helping readers support the project. Accordingly, I thank you for the support. This volume collects material that was published from December 3 2014 through March 11 2015. Readers who enjoy it are encouraged to stop by the blog version, which is accompanied by extensive illustrations and a robust and troll-free discussion in the comments. Chapter Ten is expected to begin serialization on March 18th, and will have a compendium version released on or around the same day.

Thanks for reading.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Concurrently with his work in Sounds, his newspaper strip Maxwell the Magic Cat, his early Marvel UK work on Doctor Who and Star Wars, his numerous installments of Tharg’s Future Shocks and Time Twisters for 2000 AD, his continuing series Skizz and D.R. & Quinch for the same publication, his later Marvel UK work on Captain Britain, and his breaking out in the United States with Swamp Thing for DC Comics, Moore worked on a serial entitled V for Vendetta for a British monthly anthology called Warrior…

Chapter Nine: V for Vendetta, The Warrior Years

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.

From this introduction, the art and voiceover both take a turn for the dark. We are told that the Brixton and Streatham areas are quarantine zones as of today, as militaristic men patrol a jet-black street in an equally jet-black car, their authoritarian uniforms pillars of light within the film noir abyss. Productivity reports from Herefordshire indicate a possible end to meat rationing starting from mid-February 1998, and note the contrast to the date earlier on the page, while a scared-looking girl applies make-up.The productivity reports are, it is instantly obvious, bullshit. There is no chance of meat rationing ending in February of 1998, and the crap apartment of the unnamed female hammers home the point that this is a world that’s in just sixteen years gone to complete shit. Immediately a Moore devotee gets the sense of Roxy from Moore’s later Skizz - the squalid and resignedly accepted life of poverty’s misery, far worse in this world than the slice-of-life Birmingham of 1983.

The page’s last panel is a wide shot of a man approaching a mirror, seen from behind, and too far from the mirror for his face to be visible. He is bisected by shadow, half-white, half-black, himself a figure bisecting the psychedelic Rorschach Blot of a carpet. The mirror is a bulb-lit vanity clearly from an actor’s dressing room. Atop it are a wig and mask. The walls of the room are plastered with posters for classic films, but with a clear cinephile’s selection. The horror super-cast of Basil Rathbone teaming up to kill the Boris Karloff’s monstrous but sympathetic Frankenstein (his last turn in the part), who tragically obeys only the villainous and psychotic blacksmith Ygor (played by Béla Lugosi) sits next to a poster for the decade-later James Cagney vehicle White Heat, in which Cagney scintillates as a mad gangster. Next to them is a poster for the 1932 Murders in the Rue Morgue, also starring Lugosi as a marvelously mad scientist. A bookshelf on the opposite side of the room contains four books with visible titles: Thomas Moore’s Utopia, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Karl Marx’s Capital, and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The captions continue, talking about a police raid upon what is believed to be a major terrorist ring, adding another layer to this rich collage of ostentatious villainy both glamorous and monstrous, white and black as the page itself.

The scene continues upon the second page, with the unnamed female and the male both getting dressed, the man pulling on gloves and grinning alabaster mask, then standing revealed before the mirror, all theatrical flourish, wide cloak and dramatic hat. To his right, a close-up of the poster for White Heat, the caption - the sign-off of the radio broadcast - obscures some of the poster, so that it reads simply Jimmy … in his New Hit from Warner Bros. Below it, a second placard, all 30s cabaret lettering, proclaims: Chapter One / THE VILLAIN. The lefthand adjacent panel features the young girl, her face an alabaster mask of worry as she checks her makeup one last time, implicit plural to the chapter’s title.

As he is working within the British tradition of short chapters from which he found liberation in DC’s twenty-two page periodicals, Moore opts to split the page between this and a second scene, a transition Lloyd emphasizes by leaving the top two rows of panels dominated by whites, and the bottom two anchored by blacks. A man smokes a pipe and stands against the corner of a brick building. Moore indulges in one of V for Vendetta’s handful of non-diegetic narrative captions, laying out a moral thesis statement on which to pin this entire procession of lurid and uncensored mischief. Parliament’s cold shadow, Moore writes in familiar iambs, falls on Westminster Bridge and she shivers. There was power here once, power that decided the destiny of millions. Her transactions, her decisions, are insignificant. They affect no one… except her. The third person feminine pronoun refers to the woman seen applying makeup. Mister, she asks, Zelda Estrella lettering the dialogue box smaller than the text of the captions. …Uh…would…would you like to…uh… she stammers, awkward and pathetic, sleep with me or anything? … I mean… uh… for money? she finishes, meekly and awkwardly, confirming the narration’s assessment of her insignificance.

The third page opens with a reverse shot of the man she’s tried to pick up, smiling thinly and proclaiming her efforts the clumsiest bit of propositioning I’ve ever heard. He suggests that she’s not been doing this long, and she confirms, wincing that I must be really terrible as it’s my first night. She’s got a job, she explains, but it doesn’t pay enough, and she really needs the money - a familiar litany of working class misery, in other words. I’m sixteen, she insists, heartbreakingly. I know what I’m doing. The man points out that she does not, in fact, reaching into his trench coat and pulling out a badge, and explaining that if you did you wouldn’t have picked a vice detail on stakeout.

With this, his colleagues step from the shadows, revealing five men being employed to take in one harmless would-be prostitute, and the Fingerman (as the woman calls him) explains that prostitution is "a Class-H offence. That means we get to decide what happens to you. That’s our perogative. The woman begs them not to kill her, her letters becoming small and meek again, framing the propaganda poster of whatever sick regime this is, its slogan stamped STRENGTH THROUGH PURITY PURITY THROUGH FAITH. She pleads that she’ll do anything you want," but the pigs explain how this will actually