The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Alan Moore, with David Lloyd · a comic in three books, written by Alan Moore and drawn by David Lloyd · serialised in black and white in Warrior, 1982 to 1985, and completed in colour by DC Comics in ten issues, 1988 to 1989 · scored as the collected story, script, page design, drawing and lettering read as one text, from knowledge; no text in hand, and words quoted only where they are certain
Mode
Political adventure strip turned dystopian tragedy and novel of ideas; a revenger’s tale that becomes a story of succession
Mythos
Guy Fawkes and the fifth of November; the avenger out of the dungeon; the ordeal, descent and rebirth; the death of the hero and the passing of the mask
Phase
From one night of 5 November to the next and beyond: the vendetta against Larkhill’s officials, Evey’s imprisonment and release, the fall of the state’s organs, V’s death and his successor
Presentation
Black-and-white serial in an anthology, broken off when the magazine closed, then reissued in colour and completed after a gap of about three years; collected in one volume in 1989
Register
No thought balloons and no sound effects; picture, dialogue and found texts (broadcasts, a diary, a letter, a song) carry the telling; heavy blacks with little outline
Scale
A state seen at every level, from its Leader and his computer to the police, the broadcasters, the wives and the street, across a year and more
Governing Proposition
A masked man who came out of a camp kills the officials who ran it, and wages a war of broadcasts, fireworks and murders against the state that built it; on the way he takes a girl off the street, puts her through an ordeal of his own making, and leaves her his mask. The wager of the book is that a modern tyranny is consented to by frightened and ordinary people, that the resistance to it can be learned only at a terrible price, and that the hero who teaches it must be an idea and not a man, so that he can die and go on.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
V for Vendetta began in the first issue of Warrior, a British black-and-white anthology published by Quality Communications, in 1982. Alan Moore wrote it and David Lloyd drew it, and the desk names both as its authors. The magazine closed in 1985 with the story unfinished. Three years later DC Comics reissued it in colour as ten monthly issues, 1988 to 1989, reprinting the Warrior chapters and completing the story, and in 1989 it was collected as one volume. That is the unit scored: the complete story as collected, in three books, Europe After the Reign, This Vicious Cabaret and The Land of Do-As-You-Please. Script, page design, drawing and lettering are read as one text, with the colouring of the DC issues and the chapters drawn by Tony Weare, which are part of the work as published and are credited or charged to it.
The book opens on the night of 5 November, with the rhyme spoken, “Remember, remember the fifth of November”, and the old story of a masked conspirator under Parliament is set going again in a near future. Britain in 1997 has survived a nuclear war of the late 1980s and is governed by the Norsefire party under a Leader, Adam Susan, who loves a computer called Fate. The state is divided into organs named for the body: the Eye, the Ear, the Nose, the Mouth, the Finger. A girl of sixteen, Evey, goes out to sell herself, is caught by the Finger’s men, and is saved by a man in a smiling mask who quips, kills, and then shows her Parliament burning, with fireworks and music.
The night is pulp, and the book knows it: a rescue in an alley, a villain’s speech, a spectacle. What makes it more than pulp is a decision about how the story will be told. There are no thought balloons and no sound effects. Nobody’s inner speech is printed. What the reader knows comes from pictures, from dialogue, and from texts found inside the story, broadcasts, a diary, a letter, a song, and the masked face at the centre never changes expression. Lloyd draws it in heavy blacks with little outline, so that figures are made of light, and V is read only by posture and by what the shadow lets through.
Movement II
Around the masked man the book builds a panorama of the state, and the panorama is where its disclosure lies. The men who run the organs are not monsters. Almond, of the Finger, has a temper; Creedy is ambitious; Susan himself is lonely, and loves the computer. The Voice of Fate speaks to the nation from the dark. The state was taken up after a catastrophe by frightened people, and it is kept by officials with ordinary vanities. Panels cut in parallel across London show its organs at work at once, so that the reader watches a government function as the people in it do not.
The lives under the state are drawn in the same steady light. Rosemary Almond falls into the cabaret; Helen Heyer manoeuvres; Alistair Harper runs his gangland. Each strand shows something of how a society lives under such a state, and each pays something to the whole. The test of necessity bites here: the Heyer plot runs past what it needs, and some of the early chapters, with their set pieces and quotations, are permitted rather than compelled. Perhaps an eighth of the book is serial habit rather than argument.
The panorama’s single question is who consents and who resists, and it holds a great deal for a book of its length: the state, the media, religion, the camp and medicine, marriage, sexuality and its persecution, art and memory in the banned objects V keeps in his Shadow Gallery, class and crime, the war that made the state. Many of these are shown once and in outline. The people of London appear chiefly as a crowd, and nature and labour are nearly absent. The book’s politics are thinnest where they are stated: the anarchism V speaks in the later chapters is asserted more than it is tested in the world.
Movement III
The vendetta is against Larkhill, a camp of the new state, and V came out of it. He kills the officials who ran it, Prothero, Bishop Lilliman and Dr Surridge, one by one. This is the spine of the first part of the book, and it resists subtraction: the vendetta is what the story must pass through before it can become something else.
Dr Surridge’s diary, read after her death, is the clearest statement of complicity in the book. It is written in an ordinary voice, by a woman who did what she did at Larkhill and recorded it, and the absence of thought balloons gives it its force: it is one of the few places where the book opens a mind, and the mind it opens belongs to a functionary. The officials of Larkhill are shown as functionaries throughout, and that, more than any speech, is what the book uncovers about how such a state is made and kept.
Finch, the policeman who hunts V, goes at last to the ruin of Larkhill and spends a night there. Through him the book poses the question it never closes, whether V is a liberator or a monster. His ends the book half endorses; his means, murder and torture, it shows without excuse. It does not account for his omniscience, his access to Fate and his foreknowledge of each move, which is a premise the story needs and leaves unexplained.
Movement IV
Evey is taken and imprisoned. In the next cell is a woman she never sees. Through a hole in the wall comes a letter, written on toilet paper, from Valerie, imprisoned for loving women, telling her life in a few pages of small handwriting. Lloyd draws it sparely, the images of Valerie’s life set beneath her words, and the letter ends on the last inch of herself that she will not give up. It is the book’s summit, and it is made of the means the form allows: a found text, read by a prisoner, with no inner voice laid over it.
When Evey comes out, she learns that the ordeal was V’s, his means of making her. She goes up onto the roof in the rain and stands with her arms open. The release comes directly from the letter, and it is earned. It is also the book’s hardest matter. The claim that freedom may be learned only by losing everything is enacted here, and then questioned, since what V has done to her is cruelty, and the sequence can be read as a rebirth or as abuse. The book allows both readings, and has kept them open across forty years.
The ordeal is the built part of the book’s myth: a descent, an imprisonment, a rebirth in rain, by which V makes a successor. Around it, the Count of Monte Cristo, the Phantom of the Opera, Faust and the Jacobean revenger are evoked by allusion, and V’s own figure is a compound of borrowed avengers. What is made new is this one structure, carried in a few sequences, and it carries the rest of the book.
Movement V
The last book was written and drawn after the gap of about three years, and the seam shows, in tone and in the turn from a revenge plot to a philosophical one. V brings down the state’s organs one after another, a line of dominoes falling across a sequence of panels, and the riots and the succession arrive quickly against the slow build of the first two books. The colour added for the DC issues, washed over art made for black and white, is muddy in places and flattens what the blacks did, and the early chapters are stiffer in drawing and staging than the later. Under the seam, the law of the panorama and of the mask holds.
Finch shoots V in the underground. V dies. Evey lays his body in a train among roses and gelignite and sends it under Downing Street, and she puts on the mask herself and appears to the city as V. The hero turns out to have been an office, and the mask the means by which it is passed on: because the face never changed and the man was never shown inside, the same mask on Evey carries the same meaning. That is how the form made V an idea, and how the book ends.
It is a book of Thatcher’s Britain, with a 1980s future that did not come, and its surface has dated. Its subject has not: the consent of ordinary people to a state of emergency has found new occasions in each period since. The mask itself became a public sign worldwide, chiefly through the 2006 film, and that fame is not the book’s depth. Beside it on this desk, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the source of its dystopia, stands at 9.0, ahead on every axis but The Sublime, where the two are level; Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a novel of the same years, stands at 8.5. V for Vendetta stands at 8.3: a political comic of real force and one great sequence, built on an inherited frame and held down by its seam, its stated theory and the bounded depth of what its panels hold.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine resists subtraction. V’s killing of the Larkhill officials, Prothero, Lilliman and Surridge, is the vendetta, and the vendetta is what the book must pass through before it can become something else, the making of a successor. Evey’s arc, from a sixteen-year-old trying to sell herself on the street to the second V, is required at every stage, the imprisonment above all. The test bites in the panorama. Rosemary Almond’s fall into the cabaret, Helen Heyer’s manoeuvres and Alistair Harper’s gangland each pay something, but the Heyer plot runs past its need, some early chapters are permitted rather than compelled, and the Fate computer is leaned on and then dropped in one reveal. Perhaps an eighth of the book is serial habit.
Score: 8.1 / 10
What the book uncovers is how fascism in a modern democracy is consented to: not imposed by monsters but taken up by frightened people after a catastrophe, kept by bureaucrats with ordinary vanities (Almond’s temper, Creedy’s ambition, Susan’s loneliness), and broadcast by a voice in the dark. Dr Surridge’s diary, read after her death, is the clearest statement of complicity in the book. The second disclosure is harder: that freedom may be learned only by losing everything, which the book enacts in Evey’s imprisonment and then questions, since V’s method is cruelty. Held below the gate because the political theory is thin where it is stated: the anarchism is asserted in speeches more than tested, and London’s people are seen at last as a crowd that riots, not as persons who choose.
Score: 8.3 / 10
It rises often and twice very high. Valerie’s letter, written on toilet paper in the next cell and passed through a hole in the wall, is the summit: a woman’s life told in a few pages of small handwriting over Lloyd’s spare images of her, ending on the last inch of herself she will not give up. Evey’s release, on the roof in the rain with her arms open, comes directly from it and is earned. The opening night, fireworks and music over a burning Parliament, the dominoes, and V’s body laid in the train among roses and gelignite under Downing Street are true rises. Charged: much of the elevation is theatre, V’s Jacobean speeches and alliterative monologues being performance more than height, and the cabaret interlude works as an idea more than as a lift on the page.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The myth is built, not merely evoked. Guy Fawkes is the frame: the book opens on 5 November with the rhyme, “Remember, remember the fifth of November”, and the masked conspirator who failed is remade as one who succeeds. Deeper, the structure is the death of the hero and the passing of the mask. V makes Evey by an ordeal, a descent, an imprisonment and a rebirth in rain, and she becomes him, so that the hero is an office and not a man. That is load-bearing; it is how the book ends. The Count of Monte Cristo, the Phantom of the Opera, Faust and the Jacobean revenger are evoked by allusion and by the banned objects of the Shadow Gallery, and that layer is decoration. Held below the gate because V’s own weight is borrowed more than made, and the built part is a single sequence.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The departure is in two places. In form, dropping thought balloons and sound effects, so that a British adventure strip would be told like a film with no captions of inner speech, was a real break in the comics of 1982, and Lloyd’s heavy blacks with little outline carried it. In matter, the hero is a terrorist and a torturer whose ends the book half endorses and whose means it shows without excuse, and anarchism is taken seriously in a mass medium. The stake was real: a black-and-white anthology, an attack on the government of the day, a hero the reader is asked to fear. Held below the gate because the template is inherited: the dystopia is Orwell’s and Huxley’s, the avenger out of a camp is Dumas’s, and the masked vigilante is the costume genre’s oldest figure.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Substitute prose for the comic and much is lost. The masked face that never changes expression, drawn against shifting shadow, is how the book makes V an idea and not a person: he is read only by posture and light, and the same mask on Evey at the end can therefore carry the same meaning. With no thought balloons, every character stays opaque except where a found text opens them, Surridge’s diary and Valerie’s letter, so the form decides what can be known. Panels cut in parallel across London show the state’s organs at work at once; the dominoes falling across a sequence and a cabaret song printed as sheet music are formal choices with meaning. Held off the top because much of the story could be a film, and became one, and the colour of 1988 sits on drawings made for black and white.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The lowest of the twelve, and still a real well. Some forty years of evidence: the book is taught in courses on comics and on political fiction, has a moderate scholarship, and has been reread through each new crisis of surveillance and emergency government. On return the early chapters read differently once Larkhill is known, and the question whether V is a liberator or a monster stays open; Evey’s imprisonment can be read as rebirth or as abuse, and the book allows both. What holds the axis here is a bounded yield. Once the mask, the vendetta and the succession are understood, little in the panels remains hidden; the scholarship is narrower than that on the novels of its decade; and much of the attention the work receives is attention to the mask as a public image, which is not depth in the work.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The field is the English-language comic of the 1980s, with the British dystopian fiction of the century beside it. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of what a British adventure strip could do: a sustained political argument in the medium, a hero without interior narration, and, with Moore’s other work of those years, a demonstration that a comic could be read as a novel is read. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it was one of the books, collected in the late 1980s beside the famous American comics of 1986 to 1989, that brought the long comic for adult readers into bookshops; and its Guy Fawkes mask became a public sign worldwide. That reach is charged, since it runs through the 2006 film more than the book, the school it helped shape was shaped more by its companions, and its own formal choices were not widely taken up.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Survival is weighed over thirty-seven to forty-four years, from the first serial chapters to the collection. The text survives whole, has been in print continuously since it was collected, is translated widely and is taught. Its surface is partly fixed to its moment: it is a book of Thatcher’s Britain, with a 1980s future, a 1997 that did not come and a computer for a god, and Moore himself conceded in 1988 the naivety of the early chapters. The political subject has outlived those conditions, which is the axis’s test, and the book has been reread in every period since. Presence is the widest of any comic of its years outside its American companions, but the fame of the mask is carried by the film and is fame, not proof, and the figure stands at the usual mark for its span, not the widest.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Read as one craft of words and pictures. Lloyd’s drawing is load-bearing: brushwork in heavy black with little line, figures modelled by light, a mask that must act without moving, a London of rain and sodium lamps, all held across seven years. Moore’s scripting is dense and exact in structure: parallel cutting between characters, chapter rhythms, recurring images (the dominoes, the roses, the mirrors). Charged: the early chapters are stiffer in drawing and staging than the later; V’s speeches run to alliteration and quotation that become manner; the colour added in 1988, washed over art made for black and white, is muddy in places and flattens what the blacks did; and the change of hand in the chapters drawn by Tony Weare is visible. It sits with the craft of the novels on this desk, below the summit pages.
Score: 8.5 / 10
One law governs most of it: a society seen from inside every level, the state’s organs and the people under them, the masked man moving through all of them, and every story turning toward the night of the fifth. The two most distant elements, the pulp night of the first chapter, where V rescues Evey from the Fingermen with a quip and a knife, and the grave austerity of Valerie’s letter, are held by the same rule of what the mask permits. Charged: the seam between the two campaigns, three years apart, shows in tone and in the shift from a revenge plot to a philosophical one; V’s omniscience, his access to Fate and his foreknowledge of each move, is a premise the book needs and never accounts for; and the last book’s riots and succession arrive quickly against the slow build of the first two.
Score: 8.2 / 10
For a book of its length it holds many orders: the state and its apparatus in every organ; the media, in the Voice of Fate; religion, in Bishop Lilliman; the camp and medicine, at Larkhill; marriage and the family, in the Almonds and the Heyers; sexuality and its persecution, in Valerie; art and memory, in the Shadow Gallery; class, crime and the street; history, in the war that made the state; consciousness, in Evey’s ordeal. They are integrated by the panorama’s single question, who consents and who resists. Held here because many of the orders are shown once and in outline, the people of London are a crowd, and nature and labour are nearly absent.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form and The Imperishable at 8.6, then The Made at 8.5. A form that makes its hero an idea by a mask that never changes and keeps every mind closed but where a found text opens it; a text whole and in print since it was collected, whose subject has outlived its 1980s surface; and drawing and script read as one craft, heavy blacks and parallel cutting held across seven years.
Limiting Dimension
The Bottomless Well at 8.0: once the mask, the vendetta and the succession are understood little in the panels stays hidden, and much of the attention the book receives is to its mask as a public image. Above it, The Inevitable at 8.1, where the Heyer plot and the early set pieces run past their need; and The Swerve at 8.2, a real break in form laid on an inherited dystopia and an inherited avenger.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.1 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4, The Unconcealment at 8.3, Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 and The Swerve at 8.2 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.0, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.2. The aggregate, at 8.3, also stands below the summit’s 9.0.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of V for Vendetta, written by Alan Moore and drawn by David Lloyd, scored as the complete story as collected in one volume in 1989: three books, Europe After the Reign, This Vicious Cabaret and The Land of Do-As-You-Please, first serialised in black and white in Warrior (Quality Communications) from its first issue in 1982 until the magazine closed in 1985, then reissued in colour and completed by DC Comics in ten monthly issues, 1988 to 1989. Script, page design, drawing and lettering are scored as one text, with the DC colouring and the chapters drawn by Tony Weare, which are part of the work as published. Moore’s introduction of 1988 is context and is not scored; nor is the 2006 film. No translation is involved. No text was in hand, nothing was measured, and no panel was checked against a copy; particular panels are described only where the reading is sure of them. Dialogue is paraphrased, and the one quotation, the Guy Fawkes rhyme, is a line whose words are certain. Matters that could not be verified are not given, among them the names of the colourists, which chapters Weare drew, the titles of individual chapters, how much of the story Warrior printed before it closed, the page count of the collection, the contents of the collection beyond the story, and the place in the underground where V is shot.