V for Vendetta by Alan Moore

There’s no denying that Alan Moore is a force to be reckoned with in comic books; his work has produced a number of very famous books (Watchmen and V for Vendetta being two notable examples that have also been turned into major films) and popularized the “graphic novel” format. At the same time, one can’t help but find, eventually, that Moore’s strangeness, preponderance of imagined dystopias, and penchant for oddity, to be somewhat laborious.

It's less romantic if you remember that Guy Fawkes was tortured, hanged, and mutilated

Still, it must be said that, at least in a few well-known cases, Moore manages to make compelling stories, whose narrative complexity, breadth of allusion, and characterization easily outstrip those of “real” novels. I have never been a follower of comic books, but the few graphic novels I’ve read in recent years have instilled a fondness for them in telling certain kinds of stories. Certainly, it’s difficult to imagine The Watchmen as a novel; V for Vendetta likewise strains my creativity in pondering an alternate universe where is a standard novel. It could be done, surely, but would it not be a fundamentally different work? Also, we’d be left without the familiar anarchic symbol of the Guy Fawkes mask, recently co-opted by Anonymous.

For those unfamiliar, V for Vendetta tells the story of a near-future England, run by a white supremacist movement called Norsefire. This dystopia encompasses a number of fatalistic ideas of Moore’s: the first is the reemergence of institutionalized racism and eventually ethnic cleansing, and the second is the growth of a police state, wherein liberty is traded for perceived security. After a nuclear war and a plague that may or may not have been real, England is one of the few nations in the world to be relatively prosperous, in part because of the election of the Norsefire Party, which quickly revitalized the nation at the cost of pretty much everything a civilized people hold dear. Non-whites are rounded up and terminated, homosexuals are driven into hiding or outright exterminated, and all items of cultural relevance—books, records, art, &tc.—are declared contraband and destroyed. Imagine a melange of Nazi Germany with handful of Stalinist USSR mixed in; it’s one of many recent works which borrow heavily from Orwell’s 1984.

Enter “V”, a masked outlaw who seeks to overthrow the incumbent regime. After blowing up an important landmark, he saved the life of Evey, a young girl about to be sexually assaulted and likely “disappeared” by the secret police, known as “The Finger”. Thus Evey becomes a part of V’s plans, which include the assassination of a number of prominent politicians and public figures. V’s plans themselves become an issue as readers are made to wonder where his personal revenge stops and his battle to overthrow the fascist government begins.

The language of the graphic novel is not particularly realistic, at least where V himself is concerned. There’s a lot of flowery narration on his part, solemn intonations, and poem-perfect turns of phrase that nonetheless seem to work because Moore wants us (initially) to see V as supernatural. The issue of mortality, when it does arise, is superseded by the notion that ideas are immortal when not invested in a single mortal man. “Did you think to kill me? There’s no flesh and blood within this cloak to kill. There is only an idea. Ideas are bulletproof.” Thus, it is not simply V’s design to destroy, one by one, the institutions and leaders of Norsefire; rather, his aim is to convince England’s citizens (who, you may remember, elected Norsefire in the first place) to overthrow the government themselves. His narrative proxy in this is young Evey, whom he draws into his plans and into whom he instills his anarchic ideas; her slow progression from fear to uncertainty to acceptance, we are to take as a synecdoche for all of England.

Alan Moore: Totally Not Creepy At All

I’m told that V for Vendetta was originally inked in black and white; the version of the graphic novel I read was in color, but a terrible washed-out palette of mucous and menses that simply made the panels muddled and the characters difficult to differentiate. It was actually confusing at times which identically-dressed government agent was which. Then, too, I had my own quibbles with Moore and Lloyd’s work itself: the leader of Norsefire has a strange and fetishistic obsession with a computer network called FATE, which makes it too easy to dismiss the man as a raving lunatic; villains who are insane are generally cliché, and do nothing for a story. The movie version wisely omitted this small and insipid subplot.

Though Watchmen was partially a black comedy, V for Vendetta has very little comedic elements, darksome or otherwise. Though one could say it has a happy ending, it is largely a long funeral dirge; a succession of death and dismay. For all that, it is difficult for those with rebellious minds not to feel a stirring in their hearts at the righteous anti-authoritarian sentiment.

Watchmen by Alan Moore

This is the first time in the history of my implementation of this meme that I have ever reviewed a graphic novel. But once my friend Abou told me in no uncertain terms that I needed to read it in the same way that I need oxygen or London Porter, I decided that if I had to read a graphic novel, Watchmen would certainly be the one to do.

In many ways, Watchmen has achieved a literary notoriety that rivals that of traditional all-text books. Written by the famous, talented, somewhat-crazy Alan Moore (also responsible for V for Vendetta), it promises not the usual lowest-common-denominator entertainment of pulps and weekly Spiderman comics, but a complex, nuanced storyline and an extraordinarily busy visual layout.

Understand that I am not a comic fan: at the peak of what may be consider the narrative arc of my love of comic books, I perhaps read my brother’s secondhand comics, or perhaps plucked a few entertaining bits from a bargain bin. I never followed any particular series, but more importantly I was never a devotee of the entire medium, preferring all-text novels instead.

So, it should speak volumes that I was very impressed—on the whole—with Watchmen. It’s 20 years old now, and it’s possibly the first postmodern takes on superheroes and superhero culture. It’s arguably the inspiration for every such take on the genre written in the intervening years, and I include the reviewed Soon I Will Be Invincible and From the Notebooks of Doctor Brain among that legion.

From a reader’s perspective, it was certainly interesting: what if superheroes were something historical, as quaint an idea as comic books are to my generation? Given a theoretical world in which superheroes are a fundamental reality, strip away the absurd veneer of comic idealism and see what you have left: a loosely-connected cloud of superheroes, only one of whom has any præternatural ability, make them all psychological cesspools of fear, distrust, projection, and insecurity, just like real people. As a bit of irony, have a character whose defining trait, besides godlike powers, is a utter inability to feel human emotions. Finally, place all this in a not-impossible dystopia where the Red Scare has turned into a decades-long pissing match between America and Russia, Richard Nixon is de facto emperor of the country, an undereducated and fear-stricken populace both loves and reviles the idea of supermen, and the threat of nuclear annihilation is dispelled only by the grace of an America-aligned superhuman named Jon Osterman.

In many ways, Watchmen is short in plot in the sense of a contemporary story arc which describes events in the time we are reading them. Much of the book is made up of flashbacks, filling out the series’ constituent characters one by one; there seems to be a span of individual “books” which tackle one main character each, reinforcing that it is vital for us as readers to understand who these superheroes are and why they act (or don’t act) the way they do. Rorschach, a masked vigilante who might be considered the series’ “main” character, is clearly psychologically scarred, but is also the most sympathetic character of the book insofar as he is a moral absolutist—i.e. “the ends don’t justify the means”—who satisfies both or desire for clear lines and our lust for justice which pays no heed to due process. Compare that against the godlike Jon Osterman (“Dr. Manhattan”), who, even though he possess to power to do just about anything, does virtually nothing because he considers himself past the entire concept of good and evil (textbook Nietzschean übermensch). My one complaint about characterizations is that while some of the cast were stand-out characters, others seemed overly simplistic or two-dimensional: the dynamic between the begadgeted Nite Owl II and miniskirted Silver Spectre II was late-blooming and ultimately underwhelming. Helpful, I think, was that Moore suffixed each chapter of the graphic novel with an excerpt from a fake novel, or report, or article, like attached errata which helps to flesh out the context of the story. And context, I think, is everything to Watchmen, which is why Moore expends so much text building it (as compared to furthering the storyline) and so many panels detailing the story’s world.

Watchmen is a bit like a Thomas Pynchon novel; it doesn’t come close in wordcount, but in many respects it’s a running tally of contemporary references, in-jokes, and subtle hints. Moore’s attention to detail is masterful, and though I was ultimately a bit disappointed by the main story arc, which I found much thinner than the exposition and tangents, I’m happy I read it. I suppose it constitutes an important piece of Literature-with-a-capital-L; perhaps not exactly college lit, but award-winning in its own right, and a particular new visceral/visual way of detailing the sort of thoughts forward-looking thinkers had in the 1980s about the economy and politics and the imminent threat of nuclear annihilation. It’s an impressive feat, and worth time it’ll take you to get through it.

For additional reference, you can find a more careful examination of the novel’s various themes and tropes in its Wikipedia entry.

From the Notebooks of Doctor Brain by Minister Faust

Having only recently added Soon I Will Be Invincible to my list of books to read, it seemed an unlikely coincidence that I would stumble upon another curious-looking novel about superheroes. Intrigued, I decided to try it.

Don’t waste your time. Minister Faust, be that a pseudonym or the poor bastard’s real name, reaches for the stars and only makes it to about 14^th Street. I understand what he intended: by chronicling the travails of a team of superheroes in therapy, he’s making points about history, race, politics, and fiction. The book, told as though it is a self-help book written by the therapist/narrator, Dr. Eva Brain, depicts the psychological troubles of superheroes after Götterdämmerung, which, as I take it, is supposed to represent the end of the Cold War and the disappearance of a clearly unified and labeled threat. Left to their own devices, superheroes become bored and disillusioned and descend into racial and political political squabbles which I’m sure Faust intended to mirror those of the world at large.

But it’s all so un-subtle and pedantic. Add to that the constant psychobabble of the narrator (purposefully oblique, I’m sure, but it gets damn old after 400 pages) and you’ve got a book that I felt like chucking after 100 pages.

At its simplest, From the Notebooks of Doctor Brain is a satire of comics themselves, but in the most unimaginative way: Faust makes obvious analogs of known characters and then gives them a fetish of some sort.

&c. Faust drops so many names, as well as so many acronyms, that it gets hard to keep track of them all. It fact, it gets downright tiresome, and I feel like the book is a parody of itself by the end. The author tries for so many different tricks all at once that none of them work to their full potential. The epilogue drives home the idea of narrator reliability, which had languished for the entire novel under the weight of parody and exaggeration.

Perhaps I’m being too harsh: Faust, after all, at least aimed high, and I can hardly fault him for that. And perhaps you’ll be more appreciative of his buckshot narrative devices than me. I just can’t recommend it personally.

It's Superman! by Tom de Haven

I should preface this review by saying that I’m not a Superman fan. I never read the comics; I never read more than 20 or so pages of The Death and Return of Superman; in short, I’m neither qualified to make judgments about this book’s accuracy, nor do I have any sort of emotional investment in the canonical character.

With that out of the way, I must say that I had mixed impressions of the book. It’s really only about Superman in a marginal sort of way—that is to say, it’s a violent character drama that happens to include characters from the comic. It begins like Smallville, with Superman as a young Kansan rube, and de Haven juxtaposes that with parallel narratives of Lois Lane (a loose-legged urbanite) and Lex Luthor (a cold-blooded Alderman) and occasionally a disposable villain, though for the life of me I can’t figure out reason for the latter. It’s possible that de Haven simply likes superfluous narration, like Stephen King.

So, a bit like a morning soap opera, de Haven’s noir retelling of the origins of Superman (without even touching the sci-fi aspects of it) makes Clark Kent a whiny kid, introduces quite a bit more graphic violence that I would expect, and in my mind excises the bits that make Superman really fun. Sure, I understand that it’s supposed to be a character drama and not another Superman pulp, but honestly? I don’t even think de Haven’s a very good writer. He wanders, engages in masturbatory tangents for short-lived characters, makes stereotypes out of everybody, and is more or less a bore.

Perhaps others may see the book differently: I’m open to the possibility that de Haven is the sort of genius I can’t possibily understand; that there might be nuance I’m missing; that perhaps being a Superman fan would make me like the book even more. All of these things are possible, but not likely. Skip this one.