V for Vendetta #4-10

V for Vendetta #4-10

Originally released in 1988

Written by Alan Moore

Art by David Lloyd

There are undoubtedly plenty of series that I started and wanted to get back to but I won't have time to do that for the purposes of this blog. (I'll likely get back to them at some point; I just won't be making a blog entry about them) However, as the series is self-contained, I would like to finish V for Vendetta before the year is through.

V's campaign to undermine the fascist government continues, as he hopes to tear it down and replace it with anarchy. He's taken Evey Hammond, a young girl, under his wing, though he seems to be pretty fickle about it - when she asks if he's her father (V stays masked at all times, shows no romantic interest in her, and her father was taken away by the government and never seen again), he blindfolds her, takes her out of his hideout, and forces her to fend for herself.

V continues his plans unabated, taking over a TV station with a bomb threat and delivering a light-hearted threat (in the style of a manager meeting with an employee about their poor performance) where he basically says that humanity has two years to shape up and grow a spine.

Evey manages to find a place to stay with a man named Gordon, though that's cut short when he's abruptly killed.  It wasn't really clear why, though that's not helped by the fact that his murderer has a very thick accent to the point where his sentences almost unintelligible at times. (it seemed like they killed him because he witnessed someone being brutally beaten for speaking out against the government, but that section jumps around between a few different months which made it tougher to follow)

Evey plans to shoot the people responsible for Gordon's death, but she's abducted before she can kill them. Issue 6 starts off in a surreal dream sequence before Evey wakes up in a Norsefire prison cell.

She's being charged for whatever the government can pin on her, including the attempted murder of the man who killed Gordon.  The whole thing feels traumatic and suffocating, and the writing and the art do a good job with making it feel like Evey is being dragged into some deep dark pit that feels like completely disproportionate punishment compared to what she's done.

When Evey refuses to confess, the interrogators decide to have her killed. She's offered a deal to get out of it, but she refuses, only to be told that she's free.

Many of her guards, and her interrogator, were actually mannequins with tape recorders attached to them.  This was all an elaborate plot to make Evey prove her loyalty to V and to show her how cruel the government can be, though it really seems like it would have the exact opposite effect once the truth is revealed.

The prison was a metaphor for how people are held back, restrained, in many ways, such as fear of death. By being willing to sacrifice her life while keeping her integrity, Evey passed V's test, but it seems like there are less psychotic ways of making his point.

Evey does come around to seeing V's side of things, as the one year anniversary of his Parliament bombing approaches. He offers to kill the man who killed Evey's lover, but she decides to wait on taking him up on that offer.

Still, the whole experience is unsettling, showing how far V is willing to go for what he sees as the greater good. He has an extremely idealized view of anarchy - I get that any kind of government, even no government at all, would be an improvement over a repressive racist totalitarian dictatorship, but it seems.like jumping straight from 100% government control to 0% government control would cause some serious problems.

V blows up the headquarters of the Eye and the Ear, crippling government surveillance for several days.  The leader of Norsefire, Adam Susan, is largely ineffectual, mutely listening to reports about the events, demanding harsh crackdowns on any misbehaviour, and almost being openly in love with his computer. (his guards do their best to ignore it)

With their newfound freedom, people find little ways to rebel - a little girl swears, some people buy food off of the black market, and the wife of a dead police officer buys a gun. (She didn't get any money as a result of her husband's death, and she doesn't have the work experience to be able to support herself, so her life fell apart)  The leader of the Finger (Norsefire's police), a man named Creedy, appears to be planning a coup.  Meanwhile, V reveals a secret room to Evey, which contains what seems to be a duplicate of Adam Susan's computer.  V has been using it to hack Susan's computer, making him think that the computer put "I love you" on one of its screens. (there are probably other more subtle ways that V was manipulating Susan, but that seems to be the only one that we've seen)

The wife of the man running the Eye is planning a coup of her own, recruiting one of Creedy's men to spy on him for her.  It's clear that, between V's actions and the ambition of its members, the Norsefire government is collapsing, though it's unclear what will emerge from the wreckage.

Finch, the officer who was particularly focused on trying to catch V, seems to be going off the deep end.  The doctor that V killed earlier, Delia, was someone that he loved, and he's driven out to the burned out ruins of the facility where V was made to try and learn something.  There are a lot of characters in this story, though as most of them lack V's flair for the dramatic or Evey's sympathetic qualities, they aren't as memorable, at least not by name. (I had to look some of them up to make sure I wasn't mixing up some characters)

V gives Evey a full tour of his gallery, acting as though he trusts her to look after it; it seems as though he fully expects that he won't survive what's coming.  It seems like he intends to play the role of a destroyer - he knows that while he can tear society down, he wouldn't be good at building it back up, and he seems to plan for Evey to fill that role.

On the morning of November 9th, it all comes to a head.  Finch took drugs while at the facility that V was in, which actually helped him with thinking like V does, at least to the point where he can figure out where V is hiding.  Adam Susan, distraught upon V revealing that he hacked the computer that Susan loves, goes out to speak to his people, only for things to go horribly wrong for him.

As Adam Susan is shot, so is V - V finds Finch in his lair, but despite getting the drop on Finch, V is shot several times, leading to one of the most memorable lines of the comic by my understanding.

Finch sees blood and rather presumptuously assumes that V is dead, operating on Predator rules - "if it bleeds, we can kill it."  However, V doesn't die that easily - as long as the desire for freedom and the possibility of tyranny exists, V will live on.  Some of V's spirit infected Norsefire as well - Finch acts like he doesn't remember where V's base was.

The competing coup attempts come into conflict, and with a little nudge from V, both end up being broken before they begin. The series ends on an ambiguous note - Norsefire is in ruins and its leadership is dead or dying, but someone will try to take power even with the coup attempts foiled, and it's unclear what the citizens of England with their taste of freedom.

This series was thought-provoking, and while I felt like I lacked the context for some details due to my unfamiliarity with British culture and history, the concept of tyranny being able to happen anywhere and the idea of how far someone should go to put a stop to it, along with the condemnation of doing nothing as a dictatorship grows around you, ring loud and clear. The last few issues just flew by, and it was interesting to see how Evey developed and tried to hang onto her integrity in a world that seemed determined to stomp it out of her.