V for Vendetta

What's inside (8 sections)

1. The night V takes the airwaves
2. Norsefire and the men who watch everyone
3. Evey in the middle and Larkhill coming into focus
4. What V puts Evey through
5. Finch walks into the fire and London breaks
6. What works and what drags
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I picked this up because I kept seeing the mask everywhere and I wanted to know where it actually came from. You know the one, white face, thin smile, pointed beard. It shows up at protests, in memes, on T-shirts. I figured the book behind it would be a straight revenge story, masked guy versus bad government, done in a weekend. It is that, but it is also slower and stranger than I expected, and it stuck around in my head longer than most comics do.

Alan Moore wrote it and David Lloyd drew it, and Lloyd matters a lot here. The art is all shadows and close faces, rainy streets, small rooms, television screens glowing in the dark. Moore gets the name on the cover most of the time, but Lloyd designed the look of V, pushed for the shadows instead of capes and sound effects, and drew London so it feels damp and watched. The first version ran in black and white in a British magazine called Warrior, starting in 1982 and stopping in 1985 when the magazine folded. DC then picked it up, printed it in color in ten issues, and collected it as a book starting in 1988. The Vertigo and DC trade I read runs 296 pages. That publishing mess explains why the dates get confusing, but the story itself reads as one finished thing.

The set up is simple to picture. England has gone through a nuclear war that did not hit Britain directly but wrecked the rest of the world. Crops fail, money fails, riots spread. Out of that mess a party called Norsefire takes power. They promise order and they mean it in the worst way. Cameras on corners. Curfews. The state runs the radio and the television. Police vans pick people up at night. Jews, Black people, gay people, political opponents, anyone the party calls undesirable, disappear into camps. By the time the main story starts, most people have settled into it. They grumble about the food and the cold and then they obey.

Moore and Lloyd do a good job showing how that kind of rule actually feels day to day. It is not all marches and speeches. It is queuing, and bad TV, and neighbors who do not ask questions. Evey Hammond, the girl who becomes the heart of the book, starts there. She is sixteen, thin, scared, working in a factory, trying to feed herself after her parents are gone. One night she goes out to try to sell herself for cash because she is desperate, and two secret police grab her in an alley. That is how she meets V.

The night V takes the airwaves

V shows up in a cloak and a Guy Fawkes mask and kills those two men with knives before they can hurt Evey. He is theatrical from the first minute. He talks in long looping sentences full of Vs, bows like an actor, quotes old plays, laughs at his own jokes. Then he drags Evey up to a rooftop to watch him blow up the Houses of Parliament.

That scene sets the tone for everything after. It is November 5th, Guy Fawkes Night, the anniversary of the old plot to blow up Parliament in 1605. V has wired the building, which in this future sits empty and unused, and he sets it off while conducting with his hands like it is music. The sky fills with fireworks he has rigged. On the roof Evey is terrified and thrilled at the same time. She does not know whether to run or cheer.

The next day V does something even bolder. He takes over the state television and radio from his hideout, a place he calls the Shadow Gallery, full of banned books and paintings and records. On screen he tells London that the government has been lying, that people gave up freedom for safety and got neither, and that if they want him to come back in a year and blow up the Post Office Tower they should decide for themselves. The police cut the feed, but enough people see it that rumors start.

I liked this opening because it tells you V is not Batman. He does not want to help the police. He does not want a better leader. He wants the whole show torn down, and he wants ordinary people to do part of it themselves. He also likes to show off, which makes him fun to read but hard to trust. That tension never really goes away.

Evey stays with him after that night because she has nowhere else to go. He gives her a room underground, lets her look at the art the party banned, plays her old songs. He is kind to her in an odd formal way, and also completely unwilling to explain himself. He answers with riddles or changes the subject.

Norsefire and the men who watch everyone

A lot of the book cuts away from V and Evey to the people running the country, and those parts read almost like a office drama with guns.

At the top is the Leader, Adam Susan. In the later film they changed him to Sutler, but in the book he is Susan, a lonely man in love with the computer system he built. He talks to it. He trusts it more than people. Under him are the heads of the different branches, each with a silly and creepy title. The Eye watches through cameras. The Ear listens through bugs. The Nose is the regular police. The Mouth runs the media. The Finger is the secret police who grabbed Evey.

Two of those men get the most pages. Eric Finch is the head of the Nose, the detective trying to catch V. He is tired, decent in a worn out way, drinks too much, takes pills to sleep. He does not love Norsefire, but he believes in order and he is good at his job.

The other is Lewis Prothero, who runs propaganda as the Voice of Fate on the radio. Prothero used to run a camp called Larkhill. There is also a bishop named Lilliman who preaches for the party while doing horrible things with girls supplied by the Finger, and a woman doctor named Delia Surridge who has a past she tries to drink away, and Derek Almond, a thug in charge of the Finger whose wife Rose hates her small life even more.

Seeing them together helped me get what Moore and Lloyd are doing. This is not one evil wizard at the top. It is a bunch of frightened, greedy, tired people holding up each other because the system pays them. When V starts killing them one by one, the system does not fall right away. It wobbles, people cover for each other, the TV lies, life goes on.

The art helps here too. Lloyd draws these men in tight rooms, sweating, lit by lamps and screens. Susan sits alone with his monitors. Finch sits in archives with paper everywhere. Prothero shouts into a microphone with spit flying. You can almost hear the hum of the equipment. It makes the politics feel close instead of abstract.

Evey in the middle and Larkhill coming into focus

Evey tries to adjust to life with V and fails. She is grateful and scared. She asks questions he will not answer. She misses normal food and daylight. After a while she sneaks out and ends up with a man named Gordon, who takes her in.

Gordon was a small time criminal who knew V a little, and his place feels normal in a way the Shadow Gallery does not. He cooks, he jokes, he has a car. Evey starts to relax for the first time. Then one night Gordon is killed by a gang over money, and Evey is alone again. She picks up a gun to get revenge, but V stops her and then abandons her on the street for disobeying him. It is cruel, and it made me angry at V for a long stretch.

That cruelty has a point, though it took me a while to see it. V is trying to shape Evey into someone who can act without him, but his methods are harsh and unfair. He uses her. He scares her. He lectures her. She calls him out on it later, which is one of the best parts of the book.

Around the same time Finch starts digging into Larkhill, and the past finally comes clear. Larkhill was a detention camp where Norsefire sent people they wanted gone. Prothero ran it. Lilliman preached there to give it cover. Surridge was the doctor. V was a prisoner there, known only as the man in room five.

Surridge kept notes, and Finch finds them. She writes about experiments with a virus and with hormones, about prisoners dying, about one prisoner who worked in the garden and seemed different. That prisoner, the man who became V, spent time growing roses and reading, and then one night blew up the camp and escaped, badly burned. The fire killed almost everyone except the staff who were away. Surridge writes that she feels guilty and that she knows she deserves whatever comes. It is the most human writing in the whole book, plain and tired.

V spends the middle of the book killing the Larkhill staff one by one, and each murder fits the person. He drives Prothero mad by burning his doll collection and showing him what helplessness feels like. He poisons Lilliman with a communion wafer after confronting him about the girls. He gives Surridge a painless death because she showed remorse, which is the only mercy he offers. He kills Almond in a straight fight when Almond comes for him. Each time he leaves a rose, a Scarlet Carson rose grown from the Larkhill garden, as a signature.

I found these chapters hard to read in a good way. They are violent, but the violence is not cool the way action movies make it cool. It feels personal and sad. Prothero screaming in his cell, Lilliman begging, Surridge accepting the injection, all of it lands heavy. Lloyd draws it without flinching but without showing off. You see enough and then he cuts away.

What V puts Evey through

The hardest section to talk about without spoiling the effect is what V does to Evey after Gordon dies.

Evey is picked up on the street, or so she thinks, by the Finger. She is hooded, beaten, shaved, thrown into a cell. For weeks she is interrogated. They want V. They threaten to shoot her. She refuses to talk, even when she has nothing useful to say. In the cell next to hers she finds letters scratched on paper or passed through a hole, written by a woman named Valerie.

Valerie was an actress. She was gay at a time when that got you arrested. Her letter tells her whole life in small pieces. How she grew up, how she loved her first girlfriend, how she acted on stage, how the party took her job and then her partner and then her. How she was sent to Larkhill. She writes that even though they took everything, they could not take her sense of who she was. She dies in the camp, but her words keep Evey alive in the cell. Evey reads them over and over.

Then Evey is told she will be shot, and she says she is ready, that she has no fear left. At that moment the cell door opens and it is V. The whole prison was fake. The interrogator was V in disguise. The letters from Valerie were real, passed to him years ago, but the prison, the threats, the bald head and the hunger, all of it was staged by him to free Evey from fear.

I had to put the book down here. The Valerie pages are beautiful, probably the most famous part of the comic, and they work. But what V did is awful. He tortured a kid who trusted him to teach her a lesson. Evey says so to his face. She hits him, she cries, she leaves. The book does not let him off.

That stayed with me more than the explosions. V loves music and roses and old films, and he also starves a teenager to make a point. Both are true. If you want clean heroes, this is not the book.

After that Evey walks away and lives on the street for a while. She sleeps rough, she steals, she watches London get colder and meaner. She sees how normal people cope, kids playing, old women praying, men drinking. It slows the book down in a way I needed after the cell chapters. You breathe for a bit before the end starts.

Finch walks into the fire and London breaks

While Evey is gone, V moves to the second half of his plan. He has killed the camp staff. Now he wants to destroy the symbols that let Norsefire rule minds.

He blows up the Post Office Tower, the Jordan Tower in the book, which carries the cameras and the microphones, the Eye and the Ear. He does it with music again, and this time a crowd watches instead of hiding. Then he goes after the CCTV and the broadcast centers, cutting the party off from its own people. Without the Voice of Fate telling them what is true, London starts to panic and also to think.

Finch is falling apart by now. He takes LSD at the site of the old Larkhill camp to try to understand V. When he comes out he has a clearer idea of who V is, but he is broken as a policeman. He stops obeying Susan. He just follows the thread.

Susan is also falling apart. Cut off from his screens, ignored by his staff, he goes a little mad with love and rage toward his computer. Helen Heyer, wife of another official, tries to use the chaos to grab power for her husband. Rose Almond, Derek's widow, drifts through the back half working as a dancer, getting angrier until she picks up a gun.

The street war that follows is messy. Looting, strikes, gangs, police shooting, neighbors helping neighbors. It does not look like a revolution from a poster. It looks cold and tired and loud.

V meets Evey again during this chaos and they talk properly for the first time. He shows her the train he has prepared, full of explosives, aimed at Downing Street. He says he is the destroyer, not the builder. Someone else will have to decide what comes after.

Then Finch finds V in an abandoned subway tunnel and shoots him. It is quick and ugly. V walks away, dies in Evey's arms in the Shadow Gallery, and asks her to give him a funeral with fire. She lays him out on the train among the roses and sends it off to explode over the city. She looks at his face and chooses not to show us.

I found that death sadder than I expected. V is a murderer and a manipulator, but he loved beauty and he hated cruelty, and Lloyd draws him in death as small under the cloak. Evey crying over him felt earned because she had every reason to hate him and still saw what he tried to give her.

Afterward Evey puts on the mask herself. She scares off a gang, speaks to the crowd, lets the train go. Finch walks out of London on an empty road. Rose Almond shoots Susan's stand in at a parade. Order does not return. Something new and uncertain starts.

What works and what drags

The best parts for me were the small human bits inside the big plot. Valerie's letter. Surridge's diary. Finch sitting up late with files. Rose Almond staring at herself in a mirror backstage. Gordon making tea for Evey. Those pages feel lived in.

The politics hold up better than I feared. This was written in the early eighties, reacting to Thatcher and the Cold War and fears about cameras and computers. Some details are dated. The computer Susan loves fills a room and talks in printouts. But the core idea, that people trade freedom for comfort and then blame each other when comfort fails, still bites.

What drags. The middle sags a little with meetings and titles and men shouting in rooms. The Eye, the Ear, the Nose, the Mouth, the Finger, it is a lot to track, and a few officials blur together. V's big speeches can tire you out if you read them late at night. I skimmed a paragraph or two on my first pass and got more on the second.

The art is not flashy, which some readers may not love. No splash pages every issue, no perfect muscles. Faces are plain, coats are heavy, backgrounds are brick and fog. I grew to love it because it makes London feel real, but if you come from modern superhero books it may look quiet at first. Give it fifty pages. The shadows start to feel like part of the story.

One more fair warning. This is violent and sexual in ways that are not for kids. The camp history, the bishop, the prison cell, the street fighting, all of it is drawn and described bluntly.

I closed it thinking less about masks and more about Evey. She starts as a scared kid trying to buy food, gets used by V, reads Valerie's letter, survives a fake prison, walks away, comes back on her own terms, and finally chooses to wear the mask without becoming V. V blows up buildings. Evey learns how not to be afraid, and then has to decide what to do with that.

FAQ

When was V for Vendetta first published?

It ran in Warrior from 1982 to 1985, then DC collected it starting in 1988. The cited DC trade runs 296 pages with ISBN 9781401208417.

Who drew V for Vendetta?

David Lloyd illustrated it, designing the Guy Fawkes mask and the shadowed London streets, while Alan Moore wrote the script.

Is V for Vendetta part of a series?

No. It is a standalone graphic novel that ends with Evey taking the mask, with no sequel by Moore and Lloyd.