V for Vendetta #3

[alicemacher]

"[P]olitically I'm an anarchist; at the same time I didn't want to stick to just moral blacks and whites. I wanted a number of the fascists I portrayed to be real rounded characters. They've got reasons for what they do. They're not necessarily cartoon Nazis. Some of them believe in what they do, some don't believe in it but are doing it anyway for practical reasons. As for [...] V himself, he is for the first two or three episodes cheerfully going around murdering people, and the audience is loving it [...] At which point I decided that that wasn't what I wanted to say. I actually don't think it's right to kill people. So I made it very, very morally ambiguous. And the central question is, is this guy right? Or is he mad? What do you, the reader, think about this? Which struck me as a properly anarchist solution. I didn't want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think."
--Alan Moore, The Beat interview, March 15, 2006

Warning for racism, homophobia and graphic descriptions of crimes against humanity.


From the third issue of the DC limited series (Nov. 1988). Originally published in Warrior #9-#11 (Jan.-July 1983). 9 of 28 pages.







While this is going on, Finger head Derek Almond violently interrupts his wife Rosemary's attempt to discuss his emotional and sexual neglect, and Dr. Delia Surridge, like the late Bishop Lilliman before her, dreams of a man's silhouette in front of yellow gas and flame. Later that evening:





The book V's reading to Evey is Enid Blyton's The Magic Faraway Tree, second volume in the popular British children's series. The quoted passage is significantly reprised later in the comic.

Over at the Nose, Dominic achieves the first big breakthrough in the V investigation. Noting that the 22nd letter of the alphabet is a recurring motif with their quarry, and that Prothero had provided the "Room Five" clue, he tells Finch he'd had Fate run a search on Norsefire's allocations of room numbers and found the "resettlement" camps were the only ones to use Roman numerals. Finch, in turn, runs a search to see if any of V's victims had worked in the camps. Sure enough, it turns out they all worked at Larkhill. Continuing the search, Finch discovers to his horror that every single Larkhill employee has, over the last four years, died.

Still later that evening, Delia Surridge wakes up to the smell of roses, and the sight of V in her bedroom. She asks if he's there to kill her.





Dominic and Finch discover that Delia too had worked at Larkhill, and are unable to reach her by phone, so they call Almond and set out themselves to warn her. Meanwhile, V asks Delia if she's afraid to die.





Delia's referring to the Milgram experiment of 1961. If you read that Wikipedia article, you'll see that Moore's taken some liberties with the actual findings, which have in any case been extensively debated since then (and the study's methodology and bias questioned too).

V hands Delia a rose of her own and confirms that he's already killed her, via hypodermic needle, while she slept, but assures her she'll feel no pain. Grateful, Delia asks to see his face one last time. He obliges (with his back to the reader, of course) and with the words "It's beautiful..." she dies.

Almond confronts V at gunpoint in the hallway. However, as he'd been cleaning his gun (and "jokingly" threatening his wife with it) when Dominic called, it seems he'd forgotten to load it before leaving. So he becomes V's second kill of the night, and not a merciful one.





The next evening, Finch reports to the Leader.











Summing up, Finch says there are two possible motives behind V's actions. The first is simple revenge on his captors and torturers. The inspector would prefer that's the case, because it'd mean his vendetta is over.







We'll find out later who that screen actress is, and why V's crying at the sight of her. For now, the grimly ironic end to Book One ("Europe After the Reign"):





Next: Book Two, "This Vicious Caberet."

Comments

[deathcrist2000]

Given the Magic Faraway Tree's presence in this comic, I think I should share Lovecraft's thoughts the Enchanted Wood: “In the tunnels of that twisted wood, whose low prodigious oaks twine groping boughs and shine dim with the phosphorescence of strange fungi, dwell the furtive and secretive Zoogs; who know many obscure secrets of the dream world and a few of the waking world, since the wood at two places touches the lands of men, though it would be disastrous to say where. Certain unexplained rumours, events, and vanishments occur among men where the Zoogs have access, and it is well that they cannot travel far outside the world of dreams. But over the nearer parts of the dream world they pass freely, flitting small and brown and unseen and bearing back piquant tales to beguile the hours around their hearths in the forest they love. Most of them live in burrows, but some inhabit the trunks of the great trees; and although they live mostly on fungi it is muttered that they have also a slight taste for meat, either physical or spiritual, for certainly many dreamers have entered that wood who have not come out.”

(The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath)

[alschroeder3]

I know The Shadow was one of the influences on V, and in some of the early Shadow novels had The Shadow unmasked, and people flinching from the sight. One man talked about The Shadow being a man of many faces---but not one of his own, indicating that his face had been terribly disfigured, probably in World War I. Later, he did unmask as Kent Allard, un-disfigured, so whether his disfigured face was another disguise, or whether he underwent surgery to fix his disfigured face is anyone's guess. V wore the mask not only for secrecy, but because his face was disfigured. It may have been suggested to Moore by the early Shadow novels.

[alicemacher]

If V's face was disfigured--which I'm not sure is clear from the comic--it would've been from the explosions he caused, since Delia specifically notes in her diary that the hormone batch affected him mentally but not physically. In the film adaptation, his CGI-ified silhouette (roaring narmfully amidst the flames) does appear to be disfigured.