V for Vendetta question (open spoilers, don't open if you haven't read the book)

I just got done reading this for the first time, so maybe I’m not giving it enough time to sink in (I rushed through it in 2 sittings) or maybe I need to go back and skim through it again, but some things left me a little bit confused.

The biggest thing is that V dies about 1/3rd of the way through the book, when he is broadcasting and that group of guys storms in and fills him full of bullets, blasting him through the window. The leader is standing over his dead, unmasked body and comments, “He might still be in the building.” To further complicate things, V just casually shows up a few chapters later without ever any mention of what happened. And if all that wasn’t confusing enough, he eventually dies of a couple gunshot wounds (that he could have easily avoided?), proving that he’s not bulletproof or able to ressurect himself.

The second thing, which never threw me off bigtime but consistantly threw me slightly off throughout the entire book, was the art. A lot of the characters looked the same or very similar, a lot of things were so fluid and runny that I often couldn’t tell what I was looking at, and the lettering was bar none the worst I’ve ever seen in a comic. It was common for a word bubble to lack a tail, be on the wrong side of the panel, or look like it was almost deliberately being attributed to the wrong character. V’s squiggly word bubbles were inconsistent, with no apparent rhyme or reason to why he sometimes had them and sometimes not (at first I thought he had them because he was talking through the mask, but as the book went on he got regular word-bubbles more and more often) and he would sometimes switch between word bubbles and “narration-boxes” without any visual change in the story or any other reason I could tell to do so.

That wasn’t V who got gunned down in the broadcasting studio, he put his clothes and mask on somebody else.

Two points.

V does not die in the television studio. That’s one of the heads of BBC (or what it devolved to) that V placed there. V does not die until the scene in Victoria Station with Evey.

As for the art and balloons you should know some history. Moore and company did V for Vendetta for a while in the late 70s/early 80s and got through (I think) issue 7. Then never finished.

When it was published in the mid/late 80s they published the original issues then ran the new stuff after those ran out. So some inconsistencies are, to my mind, to be expected.

For all of me, though, V is some of the finest comic book work ever. Stunning in what they pulled off.

I kind of sort of thought that, but it confused me when someone commented that “he just stood there.” Wouldn’t someone in that situation be waving his arms and screaming, “I’m not V! I’m not V!”, or, alternatively, just take the clothes and mask off?

I haven’t read it in a while, but I assumed the real V knocked the guy out, or possibly gagged him and tied him up, then put his mask and costume on him.

I forgot to ask a couple of things:

What was the deal with the acid trip? The guy gave the prisoners acid way back when so he thought he had to do it to pay pennance or…?

Why did they make such a big deal about V being “more than human” (I’m pretty sure the leader made comments to this effect at least twice and possibly some other characters did as well) and then never expanded on it? How did he make that first guy go crazy? Didn’t it at least imply at one point that he had stabbed someone with his finger (I hope I’m not making that up, I seem to remember it being in there)?

LSD => expanded conciousness, only way he can get into V’s expanded state of mind, as all good detectives must.

All the bit about how he was the only sucessful (i.e. supergenius) result of Mengele-style human experiments went right by you?

By psychologically torturing him. C’mon, they showed it.

Fancy martial arts, although we also know he uses knives.

Well, yes and no. I of course realized that he was the only surviving test-subject and therefore somehow special, but Moore didn’t seem to really flesh this out at all.

Did they? I’ll have to go back and look, I don’t remember that.

No, that’s not quite accurate. The detective assigned to the case – Finch – discovered an obviously altered diary containing crossed out names, obliterated information about subject V’s race and ethnicity, and with missing pages that apparently gave concrete information about V’s background and the precise nature of the experimental treatments given to The Man In Room Five. It’s not that it wasn’t fleshed out – we, the readers, were meant to be in the dark as much as the police were.