Tag Archives: David Lloyd

I Hate Superheroes

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That’s what Alan Moore told a recent interviewer. “I don’t think the superhero stands for anything good,” he said. “They were originally in the hands of writers who would actively expand the imagination of their nine-to-13-year-old audience.” But since all they do nowadays is entertain 30-60-year-old “emotionally subnormal” men, Moore considers superheroes “abominations” and their continuing dominance “culturally catastrophic.”

This from a self-professed anarchist who considers the shooting of government leaders a “lovely thought.” Little wonder his first superhero was a terrorist.
 

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Moore and artist David Lloyd started V for Vendetta in 1981 for England’s since defunct Warrior magazine. I started reading it when the series moved to DC in 1988. I was 22, Moore’s age when he first conceived a story about “a freakish terrorist” who “waged war upon a Totalitarian State.” But it was Lloyd who transformed Moore’s freak into “a resurrected Guy Fawkes, complete with one of those paper mâché masks in a cape and conical hat.”

Their plan was to create “something uniquely British,” and, sure enough, the Fawkes reference meant absolutely nothing to this Pittsburgh-born college senior. When I’d read The Handmaid’s Tale the year before, I though Margaret Atwood was forecasting an original future: “when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress . . . The entire government, gone like that.” But Fawkes beat her by almost four centuries.
 

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I didn’t read up on the Gunpowder Plot till I was a student teacher prepping Macbeth for a class of tenth graders. Shakespeare staged his tragedy of a regicidal anti-hero after Catholic terrorists tried to blow-up King James during the 1605 opening of Parliament. They’d rented a storage space under the House of Lords and crammed in three dozen barrels of gunpowder. Fawkes was arrested before he could light the fuse, tortured into betraying his dozen co-conspirators, tried, hanged, and his body displayed in pieces as a warning to sympathizers. He was still in prison when London lit bonfires in celebration of the King’s survival, and Parliament later declared the anniversary an official holiday, complete with fireworks and newspaper-stuffed “guys” set ablaze.

But hatred is a funny thing. Somewhere along the line the point of all those celebrations got hazy. Guy Fawkes Night lost its official standing in the 19th century—around when penny dreadful writers were converting England’s most abominable traitor into a romantic hero, a conspiracy Lloyd happily joined. “We shouldn’t burn the chap every Nov. 5,” he told Moore, “but celebrate his attempt to blow up Parliament!”

I want to say the American equivalent would be championing John Wilkes Booth or Lee Harvey Oswald, but Fawkes’ rehabilitation might be possible only because his assassinations failed. Benedict Arnold could be closer—except no one remembers what treason he was planning (and even if you do, surrendering West Point to the British just doesn’t have the same audacious charm).

So Lloyd wanted to “give Guy Fawkes the image he’s deserved”—but I’m not sure Moore was fully committed to the plot. Despite his anarchist rhetoric, he doesn’t “believe that a violent revolution is ever going to work,” and he doesn’t hide his freakish terrorist’s violence under POW! and BAM! bubbles either. It was Lloyd who banned the sound effects (along with thought balloons—probably the most important moment in Moore’s development as a writer), but Moore’s dialogue complicates the violence Lloyd renders otherwise bloodless:

“I’ve seen worse, Dominic, physically speaking. Like I say, it’s the mental side that bothers me . . . his attitude to killing. Think about it. He killed them ruthlessly, efficiently, and with a minimum of fuss. Whatever their faults, those were two human beings . . . and he slaughtered them like cattle!”

The terrorist also enters quoting Macbeth, the monstrous anti-hero Shakespeare’s audiences (including King James for whom it was commissioned) would have linked to Fawkes. Moore’s Chapter One title, “The Villain,” is a bit of a clue too. V goes on to murder and maim his way through some thirty more chapters, but the part that troubled me most at the time was the psychological torture he inflicts on Evey. Yes, he rescues the damsel from a back alley rape in standard Batman fashion, but then he dupes her into believing she’s been imprisoned by the fascist government, shaves her head, starves and waterboards her, all in the name of . . . what exactly? By the end Evey is a good little Robin, taking on her mentor’s mission, but there’s more than a whiff of Stockholm syndrome between the panels.

“The central question is,” Moore says, “is this guy right? Or is he mad? I didn’t want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think and consider some of these admittedly extreme little elements.”

Which, by the way, is a pretty good example of using a superhero to actively expand an audience’s imagination.
 

Britain Anonymous Protest

 
Meanwhile, Guy Fawkes keeps adventuring. The “hacktivist” network Anonymous adopted Lloyd’s Fawkes mask for their 2008 Scientology protest—which they then carried over to Occupy Wall Street and, most recently, a worldwide Million Mask March held on Guy Fawkes Day to protest government austerity programs. The group’s anti-corporate message, however, gets a bit hazy once you know Time Warner owns the copyright on the mask (via DC I assume) which are manufactured in South American sweatshops and earn the company a killing on Amazon.

Something to think about, Moore might say.
 

guy fawkes masks in sweatshop

A Suicide Pact: Means and Ends in V for Vendetta and The Rebel

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250px-V_for_vendettaxV for Vendetta, despite its pulp adventure plot and its stark propaganda, is not a morally simple book.  The baddies, the fascists, are depicted as complex human beings with motives of their own, and sometimes even a kind of decency. V’s nemesis, Eric Finch, for example, is described in the text as “a policeman with an honest soul.”  The hero, V, on the other hand, engages in any number of cruel and despicable acts — from systematic and serial murder, to the deliberate manufacturing of food shortages by sabotage, to torturing his young protégé, Evey Hammond, for the sake of producing a kind of conversion experience.

Isaac Butler, in his essay “V for Vile,” enumerates these and other various sins, both political and moral, at some length — writing, at times, not so much about the book as against it.  In the comments to that post, others, such as Mike Hunter, counter that the character V may be reprehensible but the book implicitly condemns him and his actions.  He notes, for instance, that V describes himself in the first chapter as “the villain” and is elsewhere identified with “the devil.”  Such a defense, however, risks converting V for Vendetta  from an anarchist book to an anti-anarchist book, one that can comfort timid liberals by equally condemning both political extremes.  That reading not only undercuts Alan Moore’s stated intention (which may not be that important), it also ignores the story’s pervasive atmosphere of moral ambiguity, renders the ending arbitrary, and worst of all, prevents us from grappling with the genuine philosophical problems that the book poses.

Chief among these problems is, what may be the largest question in political philosophy since the time of Machiavelli, that of unjustifiable means.  A great deal of evil has been done on the theory that some good will result, but looking back over history, it seems hard to defend the idea that the overall results have been good.  And yet — what if evil means are the only ones available?  More precisely, what if the means that might achieve our ends also contradict them?

In The Rebel, Albert Camus explains the paradox:

“If rebellion exists, it is because falsehood, injustice, and violence are part of the rebel’s condition.  He cannot, therefore, absolutely claim not to kill or lie, without renouncing his rebellion and accepting, once and for all, evil and murder.  But no more can he agree to kill and lie, since the inverse reasoning which would justify murder and violence would also destroy the reasons for his insurrection.”

One kind of solution, among the many that Camus considers, is that of the Russian terrorists who stand “face to face with their contradictions, which they could resolve only in the double sacrifice of their innocence and their life.”  These martyr/assassins

“were incapable of justifying what they nevertheless found necessary, and conceived the idea of offering themselves as a justification. . . .  A life is paid for by another life, and from these two sacrifices springs the promise of a value. . . . Therefore they do not value any idea above human life, though they kill for the sake of ideas.  To be precise, they live on the plane of their idea.  They justify it, finally, by incarnating it to the point of death.”

V is a terrorist of this mold.  And so he plans his own murder — at the hands of the police detective Finch — just as meticulously as he planned his campaign of sabotage and assassination.  V does, as Camus suggests, incarnate his idea to the point of death, but only so that the idea may survive: “Did you think to kill me?  There’s no flesh or blood within this cloak to kill.  There’s only an idea. Ideas are bulletproof.”

The idea of Anarchy does live on as, in a sense, V himself lives on — but in a new form, and in the person of Evey Hammond.  Evey takes on the role of V, the mask and cloak, but her mission and her methods are different.  She reflects:  “I will not lead them, but I’ll help them build.  Help them create where I’ll not help them kill.”

Evey’s new direction — her move away from violence — is only a renunciation of V’s methods, not of his vision, or even his plan.  It is, in fact, the culmination of the latter.  Earlier in the book, V himself acknowledged:

“Anarchy wears two faces, both creator and destroyer.  The destroyers topple empires; make a canvas of clean rubble where creators can then build a better world.  Rubble, once achieved, makes further ruins’ means irrelevant.

Away with our explosives, then!  Away with our destroyers!  They have no place within our better world.  But let us raise a toast to all our bombers, all our bastards, most unlovely and most unforgivable.  Let’s drink to their health. . . then meet with them no more.”

V’s dilemma, awful as it is, is that the methods that bring the new world into being stand in contradiction to the world they help create. Camus spells it out:  “The terrorists no doubt wanted first of all to destroy — to make absolutism totter under the shock of exploding bombs.  But by their death, at any rate, they aimed at re-creating a community founded on love and justice. . . .”  Unfortunately, people who employ such methods may themselves be unsuited to live in the world they have helped to win. As  Evey reflects, echoing V’s own words: “The age of killers is no more.  They have no place within our better world.”  The answer lies in V’s death.  He must die so a new world can be born, a world where he is not needed and would not be welcomed.

V is vindicated, paradoxically, because he is condemned.  V, the murderer, accepts his own murder in turn.  And Evey — now, pointedly, “Eve” — becomes a new V, creator rather than destroyer.  Violence is justified by the renunciation of violence.  It is that renunciation that qualifies Evey for the new society, that justifies her efforts to build it.  But V’s renunciation of violence is his suicide.

Camus’ solution to this dilemma — or rather, his resignation to it — was altogether more pragmatic, and more forgiving:

“Thus the rebel can never find peace. . . .  The value that supports him is never given to him once and for all; he must fight to uphold it, unceasingly. . . .  His only virtue will lie in never yielding to the impulse to allow himself to be engulfed in the shadows that surround him and in obstinately dragging the chains of evil, with which he is bound, toward the light of good.”

Camus, lyrically, leaves us with an image of the human condition:  a solitary figure, bound in chains, surrounded by darkness, struggling toward freedom.  As with his final view of Sisyphus — “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.  One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” — the image of the rebel is, perhaps, an optimistic one.  For it suggests that we can resist the shadows, that the chains that bind us do not deform us with their weight, that we can recognize the light and do not grow blind in the darkness.

Camus suggests that struggle is possible, even where innocence is not, that we can assert our dignity even when we have not yet won our freedom.  It is an ideal of heroism, not one of purity.

 

 

 

Bio

Kristian Williams is the author, most recently, of Hurt: Notes on Torture in a Modern Democracy (Microcosm, 2012).

 

Ben Saunders on the Inconsistency of V for Vendetta

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Ben Saunders left this comment in response to Isaac Butler’s V for Vendetta piece.

Fascinating discussion. I disagree with the main thrust of Isaac’s critique for reasons that the other British commentators here have given. (I’ve been discussing the anti-heroes of 2000AD with Douglas Wolk recently so the topic is pretty fresh in my mind: http://dreddreviews.blogspot.com/2012/09/brothers-of-blood.html)

But as is clear from that interview with Moore, helpfully cited by Ng Suat Tong, V started out as one thing and became something else. It began as a super-stylish pulpy romp, appearing in six-page monthly installments in STARK black and white (without lines around the word balloons, even). It was 1982, Thatcher was still in her FIRST term, and the innovations of the work more than outweighed its derivative or implausible elements. It’s quite hard to recapture, now, the thrill of reading V, then; but I recall feeling the excitement of discovery with each episode, knowing that Moore and Lloyd were pushing at the boundaries of what could be done in British comics, before my very eyes.

But it ended very differently, almost eight years later. By this time it had become the “other” graphic novel by “the creator of Watchmen,” freighted with post-Watchmen levels of expectation, and repackaged according to the normative tastes of a different national audience: a colorized monthly of twenty-or-so pages per installment.

For a project that turns out to be roughly the page equivalent of a year-long 12 part mini-series, eight years is a ridiculously long time from inception to execution, and the creative techniques and attitudes of the writer had obviously transformed considerably over those years.

IMO then, the flaws in V are largely a function of the exigencies of the popular serial form, and the particularly vexed circumstances of V’s significantly interrupted publication history. Depending on one’s perspective, the result is (at best) a damaged masterwork – and (at worst), an occasionally incoherent mess. Personally, I’ve always found the last quarter of the book disappointing (Isaac didn’t mention Finch’s “enlightenment through acid” sequence – surely one of the lazier moments in all of Moore’s canon) and suspect that Moore was simply feeling less inspired by V after the imposition of a five-year publishing hiatus, over the course of which he had developed other interests.

Of course, that is just speculation. But it’s a fact that V was an interrupted project, and I think very few such creative projects could emerge undamaged from such a history. The result, I think, is a book that is really two quite different books spliced together and spray-painted with color for re-sale on the American market in a way that can make it hard to see the join. But that fundamental incoherence is there, and it gives Isaac’s critique some purchase.

Moore’s Marvelman/Miracleman (the first episode of which appeared alongside the first episode of V in Warrior #1 – yes, it was an exciting time to be reading British comics) is similarly hamstrung. It is, IMO, both better than V, and worse – better in that Moore’s original conception survives the long, strange, trip that it took to bring out the damn thing, but worse in that he had no consistent artistic collaborator, no David Lloyd to help create the illusion of seamlessness through the nightmarish transitions between publishers and markets. The early six-page installments featured some lovely black and white art by Garry Leach, filled with fabulous use of zipatone, and which adapted even less well to standard US color-monthly format.

Great discussion all round, though.

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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

V For Vile

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At first, I was nervous.  I am not a hater by nature; I generally consider myself an enthusiast. How could I, then, participate in this Festival of Hate? Is there a way to responsibly choose something that’s worth hating on? Perhaps, I thought, I should just refuse to participate all together.

Noah asked me to pick my candidate for Worst Comic Of All Time. Being a good graduate student, I decided I needed some kind of rubric for determining Worst. Whatever I chose had to (A) Be made by competent, even skilled, creators (Ed Wood style badness wouldn’t do!), (B) Fail on its own terms to the extent they can be determined by a good-faith reading of the text, (C) Be not only bad but hateful in some way and (D) Influential.

There were several candidates that leapt to mind, but were unable to fulfill all four. The 300, for example, is hateful, made by a skilled creator and influential. But it doesn’t fail on its own terms. It is trying to be The Triumph of the Will of American Empire, a racist, pro-fascism pamphlet in which Western Society is attacked by ever darker, more exotic and queerer antagonists. On this front, it succeeds. It is, as a friend of mine put it, “a delicious pie baked by Goebbels.”

This search eventually lead me to Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V For Vendetta, a work that fulfills all four criteria with aplomb. It’s a competently made, terrible, hateful failure on its own terms that has, sadly, had some influence, particularly on the radical left, who really should know better by now. It manages to be brazenly misogynist, horrifically violent, and thuddingly dull all at the same time. It’s one of the few books that spawned a film adaptation that is both borderline-unwatchable and an improvement on its source[1]. Moore and Lloyd appear to have set out to make Nineteen Eighty-Four with a happy ending, and instead ended up making a leftish The Fountainhead.

For those not in the know, V For Vendetta is Alan Moore’s first longform work with original characters.  An anarchist response to the election of Margaret Thatcher, V takes place in a fascist England after the whole rest of human civilization has been wiped out in WWIII[2]. Seemingly out of nowhere arrives V, a faceless terrorist who wears a Guy Fawkes mask and pursues two goals: revenge on the people who imprisoned and medically experimented on him in a concentration camp, and bringing down the government.

The book sets out to be a kind of action-thriller with political content, a work that uses a compelling story and the basic tools of mainstream comics (read: violence) to smuggle in a lot of pro-anarchism speeches and “thought provoking” sequences about individual and political freedom.  On both of these fronts, it fails massively.  It does not work as a thriller because we are never as readers in any doubt that V will succeed. He assures us again and again that he has a plan and at no point in the book does this plan seem in any kind of jeopardy[3]. He suffers no setbacks. He in no way struggles. Everything moves forward with the inexorability of a Greek Tragedy, but one that takes the gods’ point of view instead of the mortals. This sabotages any potential thrill the story might have as a story. Narrative tension generally relies on some mix between questions the audience needs answered and answers the audience has that the characters don’t.  Neither is present in this book. The mystery as to V’s origin—really, the only even mildly compelling question in the text—is resolved before the first third is over.

The political content, such as it is, is no great shakes either. Yes, radical anarchy is preferable to jackbooted fascism. And in a world in which sanity means conformity to a genocidal, hyper-consumerist, corrupt authoritarian society, maybe we all need to go a little mad. V, however, ends just before fascist England actually falls. Moore gets to have it both ways, making a case that a radical anarchist state would be a really great thing without ever having to imagine for the reader what that world would look like. He even has V go to great lengths to explain that the riots, looting and murder taking place in England’s streets as the government collapses aren’t anarchy at all, but rather chaos.  I suppose anarchy, like Communism, can never fail; it can only be failed.

The problem with shoddy political allegories like V For Vendetta (or The Dark Knight) is that the alternative realities they rely on to make their experiments work are so preposterous and rigged that they end up disproving themselves.  True, were England to be taken over by Nazis, terrorism would likely be justified.  But making a book arguing this case is a waste of time and energy. You might as well write a book making the in depth argument that if your Aunt had bollocks, she’d be your Uncle.

Well-crafted dystopian narratives understand this. Nineteen Eighty-Four doesn’t spend a lot of time arguing to the reader that the INGSOC should be overturned.  Neither does Brazil contain a stemwinding speech about the tyranny of bureaucracy that Sam Lowry toils under. Instead, both bring to the table a rich examination of the psyche of those living under a dystopian state. Sam Lowry’s inner conflict between being a distracted dreamer and a bureaucratic climber slyly interacts with his gradual education into how his world and privilege work.  Nineteen Eighty-Four’s portrayal of the gradual wearing down of Winston Smith’s psyche and of the way the totalitarian mindset is formed and reinforced at every turn, is harrowing and moving[4].

In order for V for Vendetta to pull something similar off, it would have to care about the characters who inhabit it.  Sadly, the souls wandering its richly illustrated pages are mere pawns—or, to use the book’s own recurring image, dominoes—they are there to be set up and moved around as the narrative sees fit, toppled when expediency demands.

Nowhere is this more true than in the work’s treatment of Evey Hammond, V’s female sidekick[5] and eventual replacement.  Evey is a shopworn narrative trope, the neophyte who joins the narrative so that the world can be explained to her, and via her, the audience[6]. Evey is the reader-surrogate within the novel, the person who has to try to make sense of V’s actions, while V is placed as the author’s surrogate, the explainer and shaper of the narrative. Repeatedly, we are reminded that V is creating something for us, something that seems chaotic, but that will reveal a pattern if we just wait and are patient.  For example, this section comes from a journal of one of V’s “doctors” at the prison camp:

While later on, we see a recurring image of V setting up dominoes in his home base without being able to see the pattern, only to have it be revealed that it is his trademark V symbol right before he topples them all and the state of England:

If Evey is meant to be the reader and V is meant to be creator, it’s worth pointing out exactly how V For Vendetta’s creators feel about their audience. “I’m a baby,” Evey says to V.  “I know I’m stupid.”:

V for Vendetta is the kind of book that proceeds from the assumption that the reader is a moron, and if only we were properly enlightened, we would agree with its creator. We are the gutless conformists, who just need a good stern talking to (and a little bit of torturing) to convince us of our errors. And here comes a guy who talks a lot like Alan Moore—all allusions and quotes from other sources, weird obscure jokes and puns, cryptic clues—to show us the way. It is, in that way, no different from The Newsroom: the work of a blowhard who is incapable of imagining anyone ever disagreeing with him, or a world in which he could possibly be wrong.

I suppose this shadow agenda of proving Alan Moore smarter than us would be all fine and good were the book to succeed in it.  Sadly, amidst all that allusion and reference there’s a glaring neon sign that V for Vendetta is not nearly as smart as it thinks it is:

That’s our man V there.  He’s wearing his trademark Guy Fawkes mask. Guy Fawkes is the book’s symbolic hero.  Lloyd mentions in an afterward that he wanted to rehabilitate Fawkes because blowing up parliament was a great idea. But—and I hope this is obvious to many of you when you stop and think about it—it’s patently absurd to take Guy Fawkes as an anarchist-leftist superhero. Fawkes was a ex-soldier and Catholic extremist trying to overthrow an authoritarian anti-Catholic State and replace it with an authoritarian Catholic one.  It’s just plain dumb to borrow the symbol of Fawkes without the slightest care for what it represents, just as it is an act of idiocy for the hacker group Anonymous and various members of Occupy—a movement I support, I hasten to add— to adopt the Fawkes mask as their icon.

As the book wears on (and on, and on) it also gets derailed by its panic and anger at female infidelity, a crime that is punished with gleeful violence at every turn.  On pages 39-41, V recasts his quest to free England as a lover’s spat with the female statue of Justice, who has cheated on him with Authority:

Care to guess how it ends?:

When Evey propositions V, he abandons her on the streets of England. Having nowhere else to go, she briefly takes up with a liquor smuggler named Gordon. With the inexorability of an early-eighties horror movie, as soon as she has sex with him, he gets killed by gangsters. After this, she is kidnapped, tortured, and interrogated, as faceless interlocutors demand to know the location of V and his plans.  At night, she reads a letter from a fellow inmate which gives her the courage to accept death rather than betray V. It is then revealed that the whole kidnap/torture/interrogation thing was an elaborate ploy by V to set Evey free by helping her get down to the individual freedom that exists within us, the last thing that we control.  While initially upset, here’s Evey’s eventual response from page 174:

This would be hard enough to swallow were it not for the fact that Evey’s incarceration included sexualized imagery:

And actual sexual assault:

You see, dear reader, if you won’t see the light, we have the freedom, as filmmaker Michael Haneke put it, to rape you into enlightenment. Stockholm Syndrome is liberty. Also, War is Peace and Ignorance is Strength. Just shut your pretty little mouth and do what the author tells you.  Never you mind that this is supposed to all be about radical individuality being the only way forward. You are radically free to agree and that’s about it.

Finally on the docket of cheating women who need to be punished, we have Helen Heyer. Helen becomes a regular presense in the third act of the book, as the (oddly fragile given that it’s supposed to be frighteningly all-powerful) society crumbles. The wife of a high-ranking fascist, Helen tries to maneuver her husband into the role of Leader by sexually manipulating his colleagues.  She also refuses him sex. Helen is a classic misogynist caricature, simultaneously frigid and a whore, using her body to get ahead. It doesn’t work, of course.  V sends her husband a videotape of her sleeping around, he murders her lover and is killed in the process. Helen’s plans come to naught and the book’s supposedly-cathartic orgy of chaos and violence ends on the final page with her about to be gang raped by hobos because she’s sick of trading sexual favors to them for food. Seriously.  That’s the book’s ending.

All of Moore’s bad habits as a writer are on display in V, from its misogyny to the stentorian, hectoring tone of the text whenever its eponymous hero shows up to its frantic, desperate need to impress us with its creator’s brilliance.  I feel I’ve only really scratched the surface of V For Vendetta’s terribleness here. Part of me was tempted to simply scan the song on pages 89-93 and write “Game, Set, Match,” underneath, or discuss the hackneyed and emotionally manipulative story about what happens to one of the prominent fascists’s wives after he dies, how she comes to miss his physical and emotional abuse when she has to take up a stripping job for money.  Or catalogue the way in which each allusion—to everything from MacBeth to Sympathy for the Devil—is constructed not because of its actual relation to the material, but because it’s impressive.

Instead, let me close on a personal note. The reason why I find V For Vendetta so upsetting, the reason why it makes me so angry, is on some level political. I am a leftist. Unapologetically so. That V For Vendetta—with its nihilistic embrace of violence, it’s distrust of the institutions that will be required to enact any lefty agenda, its hatred of women and its love of coercion— has caught on amongst lefties, that in particular Guy Fawkes has been taken as a symbol of anything other than far-right religious terrorism is something I find particularly galling. I worry that at heart some of my fellow travelers on the Left feel reified by this work’s subtextual assertion that anyone who disagrees with them must be blinkered, an uninformed idiot who simply needs to be enlightened or blown up.

I suppose there is another way to read V, one where the surface and subtext are actually in constant conflict. One where the first chapter’s title (The Villain) is meant to be taken more seriously, where we are meant to see Evey’s torture not as she comes to eventually see it, but for the problematic and rapey coercion of one who disagrees with our main character. Maybe we are meant to see the downfall of the state as a complicated thing, and the gang-raping hobos not as a darkly ironic enforcement of Moore’s id but rather as a sign of complexity in the work. Perhaps V’s anarchist utopia is never shown because utopia means no-place and V is, in fact, wrong. Certainly there are panels and excerpts one could use to make this argument, but I am not the one to make it, nor would I really be convinced by that argument. It’s a bit too clever by half, a way of taking the book’s considerable weaknesses and claim them as strengths. Besides, Moore does a far better job in Watchmen of having the character whose worldview is closest to his also be a monster who does something unforgiveable for “the greater good.”

[1] This is almost entirely due to the presense of Stephen Fry

[2] Somehow this authoritarian hellscape on an isolated island nation with limited land and resources also manages to have a hyper-advanced sci-fi surveillance state and all of the middle class comforts of late twentieth century life, but there’s so many bigger problems with the text, we should probably let that one slide.

[3] V’s plan, by-the-by, is implausible within the world Alan Moore has constructed.  We’re meant to believe that V, an escaped political prisoner, has somehow managed to amass a huge fortune, a wide network of real estate, hacked into Fate, the central computer that oversees all surveillance and activity within England and designed a meticulous plan to bring down the Government in under 5 years.

 

[4] Both also try to create analogues for our own time within their world, things that feel both exaggerated and frighteningly real at the same time.  Brazil begins with a typographical error leading the State to torture and murder the wrong man, which feels ridiculous until you recall Maher Arar. Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Two Minutes Hate isn’t exactly Talk Radio, but it’s not not Talk Radio.

[5] You could argue that Evey is the protagonist of V and V the mentor figure. I actually think the book is confused about who its main character is. V doesn’t change, so he makes a shitty protagonist. Evey changes but is so thinly rendered and boring you can feel the book wanting to focus more often on V.

[6] Think Ellen Page in Inception.

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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

A Nostalgia for Racism?

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A few months ago, I chanced upon a piece of art which was up for sale at one of Russ Cochran’s on-line comic art auctions. It was a Hal Foster drawn Tarzan Sunday which is usually an event in original art collecting because of the rarity of such samples.

As you can see, it is a fairly reasonable example of Foster’s art on Tarzan. It was, however, a no-go area for me whatever my feelings for Foster’s artistry. The reasons are simple: this piece of art would not have given me any pleasure and I would have been embarrassed to put it on display in my apartment. I simply don’t have the blindness or nostalgia for racism which allows for an enjoyment of this kind of art. There’s the Aryan beauty standing before the squat depravity that is the Cannibal Chief and later the rather simian qualities of the cannibal tribe as they howl for blood. I have as little passion for the subject matter as I would a depiction of bestiality. There are many pit holes in collecting original art but this particular aspect is less often highlighted. After all, wouldn’t most comic art collectors salivate over the original art to this Frazetta-drawn cover…

…with its razor-toothed natives within an inch of pawing at the white female’s succulent breasts? Any objections would be easily dismissed with the notion that these were more gentle and less enlightened times where such stereotypes were the norm. And clearly they were. The fact that the art displays beautiful draftsmanship and is historically important ensures that such aspects are easily brushed under the carpet. A collector friend of mine who finds such images unpleasant was less happy with this easy acceptance which obviates concerns for subject matter. He placed a comment on this Frazetta cover (when it was displayed on Comic Art Fans) comparing it to Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s depiction of Storm Saxon in V for Vendetta.

As many readers will know, there is a whole area of collecting known as Jungle Girl art of which one of the prime examples must be this particular piece by Dave Stevens:

It’s all in good fun, both mocking homage and parody. It would seem churlish by some to find these items in any way offensive. There are of course people who collect “coon” art for historical purposes (which is absolutely valid) and others because it gives them pleasure. I don’t find the latter aspect particularly respectable.

Another story in the same vein which I chanced upon recently is “Yellow Heat” by Bruce Jones and Russ Heath from Vampirella #58 (Mar. 1977) the scans of which can be found here). The entire story was sold at a Heritage auction for $4370 in 2002

The story is one of Jones’ best remembered from Vampirella in part because of Heath’s lovely hyper-realistic art but mostly because of its twist ending. [I would suggest that those unfamiliar with “Yellow Heat” read the story before continuing with this article.] You’ll find two appreciations of “Yellow Heat” here and here. The Comics Journal message board regular Mike Hunter describes the effect as such:

“Bruce Jones and Russ Heath wreaking havoc with our “we humans are all alike, after all” expectations in “Yellow Heat”.”

Jones uses a number of tricks of sleight of hand to achieve the shock ending in this story. Part of the justification for the ending would appear to lie in the first page where a sort of incipient famine and breakdown in society is described. Jones’ script in the first panel would however suggest that the famine has not arrived and that these are much more bountiful times. The Masai warriors don’t look malnourished in the least which lessens the impact of this early description and any expectations of its relevance. There is also the description of the captive lady as a “beauty” and Heath’s great depiction of the same which effectively throws off the reader.

The confluence of a familiar coming of age story mixed with an unexpected twisting of facts and sensibilities is also a factor. These issues would be further heightened for readers familiarizing themselves with this story for the first time in the 21st century. With a greater appreciation for distant cultures, many readers would be cognizant of the fact that the Masai do not practice cannibalism and would not expect such a denouement. Others would realize that such accusations of cannibalism were often used by white colonialist as an excuse for their excesses thus eliminating such a possibility from their minds. Nor would the modern day reader (or one during the 70s I suspect) expect any writer to produce such blatantly racist caricatures of Africans in the final two panels. Readers perusing a Warren magazine in the 70s would probably be familiar with the elevated ideals of the EC line where stories like “Judgment Day” saw publication. Few readers would expect a backward looking ethos and this makes the ending that much more surprising. Perhaps it might be a useful exercise for readers to imagine a gentle story about Jews taking care of orphaned children during the Black Death before eating them in the story’s final panel. Children aren’t as delectable as beautiful African women but you get what I mean.

While I haven’t read any interviews with Campbell or Heath concerning the genesis of “Yellow Heat”, my suspicion is that there must be some explanation for the strange sensibility on display here. The story was, after all, created during the 70s and not the early 20th century when popular art was considerably less informed. It is entirely possible that “Yellow Heat” was created out of naiveté and plain wrong-headedness but it is also possible that it was born of a flippant underground sensibility – a remark on the excesses of the past (though it has to be said, nothing in the story even suggest this). In many ways, it is much more educational to read these stories “blind” than to rely on any form of stated authorial intent.

There are better examples of these kinds of cultural jibes from more recent times like Robert Crumb’s “When the Niggers Take Over America!” which is so hysterical in its excesses, all but the most simple-minded would mistake it for anything but satire.

There’s also the notable example of Chaland’s An African Adventure where every form of jungle imbued racism is brought forth.

There are the malevolent natives…

….and there’s this scene where a tribesman is slapped:

It should be clear to most readers that the only person taking a slap here is Hergé and Tintin in the Congo.

On the other hand, it would appear to many readers that Jones, Heath and Foster were drawing from the same well with respect to their imagery – the corpulent chief and malicious cannibals in both Tarzan and “Yellow Heat” being the prime examples. On a purely textural basis, Jones and Heath’s story is truly ambiguous in its racial sensitivity. Is “Yellow Heat” actually quite factual (this seems impossible), the product of a more enlightened age where having fun with racial stereotypes is perfectly acceptable (perhaps a satire; I’m sure certain African Americans would find it harmless enough) or is it symptomatic of something much less wholesome?