V for Vendetta is a British graphic novel written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd (with additional art by Tony Weare). Initially published between 1982 and 1985 in black and white as an ongoing serial in the British anthology Warrior, its serialisation was completed in 1988–89 in a ten-issue colour limited series published by DC Comics in the United States. Subsequent collected editions were typically published under DC's specialised imprint, Vertigo, until that label was shut down in 2018. Since then it has been transferred to DC Black Label. The story depicts a dystopian and post-apocalyptic near-future history version of the United Kingdom in the 1990s, preceded by a nuclear war in the 1980s that devastated most of the rest of the world. The Nordic supremacist, neo-fascist, outwardly Christofascistic, and homophobic fictional Norsefire political party has exterminated its opponents in concentration camps, and it now rules the country as a police state.
The comics follow the story's title character and protagonist, V, an anarchist revolutionary wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, as he begins an elaborate and theatrical revolutionist campaign to kill his former captors and torturers, bring down the fascist state, and convince the people to abandon fascism in favour of anarchy, while inspiring a young woman, Evey Hammond, to be his protégée.
DC Comics had sold more than 500,000 copies of the graphic novel in the United States by 2006. Warner Bros. released a film adaptation of the same name, written and co-produced by the Wachowskis, in 2005. Following the first and second season premieres of Gotham prequel television series Pennyworth in 2019 and 2020, showrunners Danny Cannon and Bruno Heller confirmed the series would also serve as a prequel to V for Vendetta, with the series' British Civil War eventually giving way to the Norsefire government and rise of V, and the third season featuring predecessors to V wearing Guy Fawkes masks.
Publication history Structure and publishing history of V for Vendetta Book Chapter Warrior DC 1: Europe After the Reign 1: The Villain #1 #1 2: The Voice #2 3: Victims #3 4: Vaudeville #4 5: Versions #5 #2 6: The Vision #6 7: Virtue Victorious #7 8: The Valley #8 9: Violence #9 #3 10: Venom #10 11: The Vortex #11 2: This Vicious Cabaret Prelude #12 #4 1: The Vanishing #13 2: The Veil #14 3: Video #15 4: A Vocational Viewpoint #16 #5 5: The Vacation #18 6: Variety #19 7: Visitors #21 8: Vengeance #22 #6 9: Vicissitude #23 10: Vermin #24 11: Valerie #25 12: The Verdict #26 #7 13: Values #27(unpublished) 14: Vignettes #28(unpublished) 3: The Land of Do-As-You-Please Prologue — #8 1: Vox Populi 2: Verwirrung 3: Various Valentines 4: Vestiges #9 V: The Valediction 6: Vectors 7: Vindication 8: Vultures #10 9: The Vigil 10: The Volcano 11: ValhallaNotes The first episodes of V for Vendetta appeared in black-and-white between 1982 and 1985 in Warrior, a British anthology comic published by Quality Communications. Editor/publisher Dez Skinn, fearing about the appeal of the strip remarked, "If I'd have given each character their own title, the failures would have certainly outweighed the successes, with the uncompromising 'V for Vendetta' probably being an early casualty. But with five or six strips an issue, regular [readers] only needed two or three favorites to justify their buying the title."
When the publishers cancelled Warrior in 1985 (with two completed issues unpublished due to the cancellation), several companies attempted to convince Moore and Lloyd to let them publish and complete the story. In 1988, DC Comics published a ten-issue series that reprinted the Warrior stories in colour, then continued the series to completion. The first new material appeared in issue No. 7, which included the unpublished episodes that would have appeared in Warrior No. 27 and No. 28. Tony Weare drew one chapter ("Vincent") and contributed additional art to two others ("Valerie" and "The Vacation"); Steve Whitaker and Siobhan Dodds worked as colourists on the entire series.
Collected editions The series has appeared collected in paperback () and hardback () form, including Moore's "Behind the Painted Smile" essay and two "interludes" outside the central continuity. Later collections include reissued paperbacks, published in the US by DC's Vertigo imprint () and in the UK by Titan Books (). A new hardback edition was published in 2005 featuring improved printing and colouring. In August 2009, DC published a slipcased Absolute Edition (), which included newly coloured "silent art" pages (full-page panels containing no dialogue) from the series' original run, which had not previously appeared in any previous collected edition.
Background
David Lloyd's paintings for V for Vendetta in Warrior first appeared in black and white. In writing V for Vendetta, Moore drew upon a comic strip idea submission that the DC Thomson scriptwriting competition rejected in 1975: "The Doll", which involved a transgender terrorist in white face makeup, who fought a totalitarian state during the 1980s.
Years later, Skinn reportedly invited Moore to create a dark mystery strip with artist David Lloyd. V for Vendetta was intended to recreate something similar to their popular Marvel UK Night Raven strip in a 1930s noir. They chose against doing historical research and instead set the story in the near future rather than the recent past.
Then V for Vendetta emerged, putting the emphasis on "V" rather than "Vendetta". David Lloyd developed the idea of dressing V as Guy Fawkes after previous designs followed the conventional superhero look. During the preparation of the story, Moore made a list of what he wanted to bring into the plot, which he reproduced in "Behind the Painted Smile":
Orwell. Huxley. Thomas Disch. Judge Dredd. Harlan Ellison's "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman, Catman and The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World by the same author. Vincent Price's Dr. Phibes and Theatre of Blood. David Bowie. The Shadow. Night Raven. Batman. Fahrenheit 451. The writings of the New Worlds school of science fiction. Max Ernst's painting "Europe After the Rain". Thomas Pynchon. The atmosphere of British Second World War films. The Prisoner. Robin Hood. Dick Turpin...
The influence of such a wide number of references has been thoroughly demonstrated in academic studies, above which dystopian elements stand out, especially the similarity with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four in several stages of the plot.
The political climate of Britain in the early 1980s also influenced the work, with Moore positing that Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government would "obviously lose the 1983 elections", and that an incoming Michael Foot-led Labour government, committed to complete nuclear disarmament, would allow the United Kingdom to escape relatively unscathed after a limited nuclear war. However, Moore felt that fascists would quickly subvert a post-nuclear holocaust Britain. V, an anarchist, initially tortures and murders members of the fascist government, but as the story develops, Moore deliberately made V's actions "very, very morally ambiguous" with the aim that "I didn't want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think." The Guy Fawkes analogy was deliberate, with Moore pointing out in a 2012 interview that Britain has a history of "making heroes out of criminals or people who in other centuries might have been regarded as terrorists", desiring a similar ambiguity for a protagonist reviled as a villain by the Britain of his fictional 1990s.
Moore's scenario remains untested. Addressing historical developments when DC reissued the work, he noted:
Naïveté can also be detected in my supposition that it would take something as melodramatic as a near-miss nuclear conflict to nudge Britain towards fascism... The simple fact that much of the historical background of the story proceeds from a predicted Conservative defeat in the 1983 General Election should tell you how reliable we were in our roles as Cassandras.Moore, Alan, Introduction. V for Vendetta. New York: DC Comics, 1990.
Plot Book 1: Europe After the Reign
On Guy Fawkes Night in London in 1997, a financially desperate 16-year-old, Evey Hammond, sexually solicits men who are actually members of the state secret police called "The Finger". Preparing to rape and kill her, the Fingermen are dispatched by V, a cloaked anarchist wearing a mask, who later remotely detonates explosives at the Palace of Westminster before bringing Evey to his contraband-filled underground lair, the "Shadow Gallery." Evey tells V her life story, which reveals her own past and England's recent history. During a dispute over Poland in the late 1980s, the Soviet Union and the United States, under the presidency of Ted Kennedy, entered a global nuclear war which left continental Europe and Africa uninhabitable. Although Britain itself was not bombed due to the Labour government's decision to remove American nuclear missiles, it faced environmental devastation and famine due to the nuclear winter. After a period of lawlessness in which Evey's mother died, the remaining corporations and fascist groups took over Britain and formed a new totalitarian government, Norsefire. Evey's father, a former socialist, was arrested by the regime.
Meanwhile, Eric Finch, a veteran detective in charge of the regular police force ("The Nose"), begins investigating V's terrorist activities. Finch often communicates with the other top government officials, collectively known as "The Head." These individuals include Derek Almond, who supervises the Finger (and who is both emotionally and physically abusive to his wife), and Adam Susan, the reclusive Leader of Norsefire, who obsessively oversees the government's Fate computer system. Finch's case thickens when V kidnaps Lewis Prothero, a propaganda-broadcasting radio personality, and drives him into a mental breakdown by forcing him to relive his actions as the commander of a "resettlement" camp near Larkhill with his treasured doll collection as inmates. Evey agrees to help V with the next part of his plan (not knowing that it will be an assassination) by disguising herself as a child prostitute to help V infiltrate the residence of Bishop Anthony Lilliman, a paedophile priest, whom V forces to commit suicide by eating a poisoned communion wafer. He prepares to murder Dr. Delia Surridge, a medical researcher who once had a relationship with Finch. Finch suddenly discovers the connection among V's three targets: they all used to work at Larkhill, and warns Almond. That night after confronting Surridge in her bedroom, V kills her with a painless poison; when Almond appears as V is leaving and tries to shoot him (with what turns out to be an unloaded gun), V kills him too. Surridge leaves a diary revealing that V—a former inmate and victim of Surridge's cruel medical experiments—destroyed and fled the camp and is now eliminating the camp's former personnel for what they did. Finch reports these findings to Susan, and suspects that this vendetta may actually be a cover for V, who, he worries, may be plotting an even bigger terrorist attack.
Book 2: This Vicious Cabaret