Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore
Page 11
The artist doubled up as art director for Warrior, so he worked in the same office as Skinn and they would discuss plot points, but there is no evidence of Moore having the same the lengthy back-and-forth discussions with Leach that he had with David Lloyd and many subsequent collaborators. Leach received a script every month, and when it arrived, ‘I’d brew up a coffee, sit back and have a damned good read because they were too dense to skim’.
The decision that the title for the mystery strip would be V for Vendetta concentrated Moore and Lloyd’s minds, as did the 10 July 1981 deadline all Warrior’s writers were set for #1 scripts. The main question became a simple one: what was the motivation for the character’s ‘vendetta’? Moore now decided that their hero was an escapee from a concentration camp out for revenge. But there remained the issue of what their protagonist looked like. Moore credits Lloyd for finding the solution: ‘The big breakthrough was Dave’s, much as it sickens me to admit it … this was the best idea I’d ever heard in my entire life.’ This was that Vendetta should be a ‘resurrected Guy Fawkes’. Lloyd included a sketch that’s identical to the final V, but with a pointy hat (though he also suggested, ‘let’s scrub V for Vendetta. Call the strip Good Guy.’) Lloyd’s notes also have the prescient comment that ‘we shouldn’t burn the chap every Nov 5th but celebrate his attempt to blow up Parliament … we’d be actually shaping public consciousness in a way in which some Conservative politicians might regard as subversive’.
Moore was enthusiastic: ‘There was something so British and so striking about that iconic image, and it played well into the kind of thinking that was already starting to develop on the strip.’ This was a reference to both Moore and Lloyd latching on to another Vincent Price movie in a similar vein to Phibes: Theatre of Blood (1973), which featured Price as a hammy Shakespearean actor who kills off a series of his critics.
In the same letter he suggested the Guy Fawkes look, Lloyd also explained that he wanted to avoid the use of thought balloons and sound effects captions. The idea terrified and excited Moore. Although not unprecedented, it was extremely unusual in mainstream comics and he suspected Lloyd had suggested it ‘almost as a joke, I don’t think he expected me to go along with it’.
Things moved rapidly from this point. V’s mannerisms now took on a more overtly theatrical, Jacobean flavour to match his Guy Fawkes appearance. Moore was able to make this more than a gimmick. In the first chapter, the mentality of the two sides in the battle is efficiently contrasted when a policeman concludes from the odd way V speaks that he ‘must be some kinda retard got out of a hospital’, failing to recognise that his opponent is quoting from Macbeth.
Moore and Lloyd had started out with a series about a vigilante fighting generic totalitarian forces, but the 1997 setting was not very far in the future and Moore had got there by extrapolating current headlines. While most British comics were set in imaginary places like Melchester, Northpool or Bunkerton, V for Vendetta was rooted in a Britain with real place names and even some real people. A telling detail is a one-off mention of Queen Zara in the first instalment – Zara Phillips was born in May 1981, only a few months after Amber Moore. As one letter to Warrior later noted, something catastrophic must have happened to the royal family if Princess Anne’s second child was now on the throne (Zara was sixth in line when she was born, tenth in the real 1997).
As Moore began drawing up a list of the fascist supporting characters, the various authority figures V was pursuing and the investigators sent after him, it made him look at the situation from their point of view. Whereas the ‘hero’ of the piece was a masked killer out for personal vengeance, the ‘bad guys’ were simply ordinary people doing what they believed was best for the country:
I didn’t want to just come into this as a self-confessed anarchist and say ‘right, here’s this anarchist: he’s the good guy; here are all those bad fascists: they’re the bad guys’. That’s trivial and insulting to the reader. I wanted to present some of the fascists as being ordinary, and in some instances even likeable, human beings. They weren’t just Nazi cartoons with monocles and University of Heidelberg duelling scars. They were people who’d made their choices for a reason. Sometimes that reason was cowardice, sometimes that reason was wanting to get on, sometimes it was a genuine belief in those principles.
All this could be read as a simple critique of the usual logic that there had to be goodies and baddies, and everyone was on one side or the other – an idea as prevalent in political discussion as in comic books. However, as Lloyd began interpreting Moore’s first few scripts and the finished product started to appear, they both came to realise they were creating something more sophisticated than they had planned.
Much of the credit can be put down to Lloyd. His most recent work, Golden Amazon and Doctor Who, had included painted wash effects and elaborate grey tones. On V for Vendetta, he chose an approach that was a visual joke: ‘David Lloyd was using this stark chiaroscuro style where you’d got no bordering outlines on the characters, you’ve got hard black up against hard white in the artwork. Whereas in the story, in the text, there was nothing but shades of grey in moral terms.’ The way characters merge into the shadows, the repeated panel compositions, use of close-ups, the intercutting with flashback scenes … all these make the reader work to see what is going on, encourage them to go back and re-read and reinterpret. Some panels almost resemble optical illusions that take a second or two to snap into place. An iconic early example occurs in the second chapter: there’s a panel of V standing on a railway bridge, his cloak flapping. Another character glances up and, like the reader, can’t quite work out what he’s looking at. This panel was later reproduced on house ads, badges and other promotional material.
It is in V for Vendetta that we see Moore’s first systematic use of what would become a trademark technique, exploiting one of the key strengths of the medium: the artistic effect to be gained by combining a picture and text.
A progression in comic art is evident here. In an unsophisticated early comic, the words would simply support or describe the picture: we might see an image of Superman with red lines coming out of his eyes that connect with a blob in the hand of a gangster and a caption saying ‘Superman melts the crook’s gun with his incredible heat vision!’ The Marvel comics of the sixties concentrated more on the inner life of their characters, revealing them to be troubled. Now we might see a picture of Spider-Man fighting Doctor Octopus, but a thought bubble saying something like ‘I hope I won’t be late for my date with Mary Jane’.
Comic art was now going beyond that, beginning to explore the far greater poetic effect to be had by using an image and text that seem to contradict each other or to have no obvious connection. It forces the reader to work out what link the creators might be implying. Moore was not the first comics creator to understand that this could add layers of meaning, as well as a degree of ambiguity, but his use of the technique has always been unusually sustained and sophisticated. Moore called it ‘ironic counterpoint’ in his first V for Vendetta script, and there is a good example on the second page of the first chapter.
The text is an announcement of ‘the Queen’s first public appearance since her sixteenth birthday’ where she wore a ‘suit of peach silk created specially for the occasion by the Royal Couturier’, while the picture is of a very young woman in a bedsit awkwardly putting on a dress. That contrast is obvious, but it’s the next page before we learn that this woman, like Queen Zara, is only sixteen years old. (It will be the third chapter before we learn the girl’s name is Evey Hammond and find out how her situation became so desperate.) The next panel juxtaposes that image of Evey in a dress that’s too small even for her slight frame with a close-up of V snapping on a glove. We’ll learn that both V and Evey are getting dressed to go out onto the London streets at night. Desperation has driven Evey to an ill-thought-through attempt to earn some money prostituting herself, whereas V will orchestrate an elaborate plan to destroy the Houses of Parliament. What
Moore has understood is that the act of contrasting the words and images in one panel, then contrasting that panel with the next, creates patterns. The story can say two things, but mean a third, and the narrative can have a highly elaborate, allusive structure.
Without thought balloons giving convenient access to eloquent inner monologues of the characters, the dialogue Moore wrote and the faces Lloyd drew had to become more subtle and expressive. It was not only V who wore a mask – readers of V for Vendetta have to imagine what all the characters are thinking, and can never be certain what they really understand about those characters’ situations. A fascist government with bold slogans and fancy uniforms and equipment, the population under constant CCTV surveillance, individuals like Evey Hammond dolling themselves up – all of them are ‘putting on a brave face’.
There was yet another twist to standard conventions. While comics are full of masked figures, their masks are usually disguises. The readers are in on the secret identity of, say, Batman or Spider-Man. In a similar vein, the early instalments of V for Vendetta encourage the idea that we will eventually see the mask come off and learn that V has been one of the other characters all along – that there will be, in Moore’s words, ‘a satisfactory revelation’. This was a deliberate deception, and Lloyd says ‘we never had any intention of doing that’. The people who wrote letters to Warrior quickly came to a consensus that V would turn out to be Evey’s father, who she had not seen since he was dragged away by the authorities years before – few readers will have noticed that her father resembles Steve Moore, and like him, lived on Shooter’s Hill. When the series began in those early issues of Warrior, it was essential to keep the man under the mask an entirely mysterious figure, to the point that we can’t be entirely sure of V’s gender (while V is referred to as ‘the man in Room V’, some of the inmates were treated with hormones and changed sex).
Instead of pinning down who V is and what he really believes, the story is about piecing those things together. The other characters in the story are trying to, the reader has to. Because the narrative can’t look at V directly, we have to see him through the eyes of others. The story was presented in short chapters, and each had to remind the reader of where the story stood – but Moore and Lloyd had banned the use of lengthy captions, so they had to find a less direct way of recapping. By an alchemical combination of design, accident, genre expectation, form and the unintended consequences of storytelling choices, the result is that Moore and Lloyd tell the story as a series of vignettes. We are shown V’s world, often the same event or the consequences of that event, from a variety of viewpoints.
There is a main viewpoint character, though, and that’s Evey Hammond. She is not mentioned in the Warrior article, nor in any of the published notes or sketches, and Lloyd later stated that ‘the basic plot, and the characters involved, were all Alan’s, apart from Evey’. Lloyd also says, ‘she was a late addition to things … in Theatre of Blood, Vincent Price has a team of people helping him, and this was one of the ideas that Alan was bringing, so there was an idea that V would have an assistant that would help him in his sabotage, like the character Vulnavia in The Abominable Dr Phibes … that evolved into Evelina Falconbridge becoming Evey. It was a way of introducing Falconbridge, but not as an urban guerilla, just as this girl.’ It’s worth noting that the Falconbridge sample page features Evelina poised to save a woman from being raped by policemen, while the first chapter of V for Vendetta sees V saving Evey from the same fate.
Evey is not a major character at the start of the story. She becomes V’s accomplice in the murder of the corrupt Bishop of Westminster, but is little seen after that in Book One. V abandons her in the opening chapter of Book Two, then she drops out of the strip for several chapters, and it is only after she returns that she becomes a central character. Evey is immediately appealing and memorable – as well as one of very few women in the story – and it is not hard to infer that Moore was thinking of her when he told Bryan Talbot a few months later he had found ‘you can spin entire plotlines out of one supporting character if your character is strong enough’.
V for Vendetta was certainly a story that evolved as it was being told. In 1988, in his introduction to the first American edition, Moore acknowledged that the series changed under them while it was being written: ‘There are things that ring oddly in earlier episodes when judged in the light of the strip’s later development. I trust you’ll bear with us during any initial clumsiness and share our opinion that it was for the best to show the early episodes unrevised, warts and all, rather than go back and eradicate all trace of youthful creative inexperience.’ One element that emerged organically was one of the most memorable chapters in the story. It starts in Chapter 11 of Book One, as David Lloyd explains: ‘Alan had written a script with V in the Shadow Gallery and said “put him wherever you like”, and I put him in a private cinema. The one thing that bothered me at that point about V was that he had no real humanity to him. He was a guy in a mask. So I had him looking at pictures on a screen, and there’s this woman and you don’t know who she is. It might be a past love or a lost sister, you don’t know who they are. And you get this panel where he covers his eyes.’
In Chapter 11 of Book Two (first published in Warrior #25, December 1984), we learn that the woman was an actress, Valerie. She is a lesbian, and following the fascist coup, that was enough to have her sent to the concentration camp at Larkhill. She was in the cell next to V and passed him a note explaining her story, and that although she knows she will die, they have not broken her will.
The woman depicted on the screen was in fact an actress Lloyd knew at the time who’d sent him some pictures: ‘I wouldn’t dream of saying her name – I asked if she minded me using the photos and she was a big fan of V. And so I used those, and that led to the Valerie sequence, which for me is the core of the thing …’ As he admits, it was ‘an accident. And there’s a lot of accidents in V. The name is an accident, the Guy Fawkes thing was an accident … It’s perfect, but it’s an absolute accident.’
Lloyd concludes, ‘One of the great things that happens to me is that going to conventions, people come up to me and say the Valerie chapter changed their lives. And that’s a great thing, that you’ve not only created a great entertaining thriller, but it’s also meant something.’
What had started out as Dez Skinn simply trying to recreate Night-Raven was becoming something quite different. While V for Vendetta was grounded in the Britain of the early eighties, Moore and Lloyd started to realise as the story developed that ‘the strip was turning out all of these possibilities for things that hadn’t been there in the initial conception, but which we could then explore and exploit … it could be a love story, it could be a political drama, it could be, to some degree, a metaphysical tale. It could be all these things and still be a kind of pulp adventure, a kind of superhero strip, a kind of science fiction strip. And I think that we were just interested in letting it grow and seeing what it turned into without trying to trap it into any preconceived categories.’
With the first chapters of Marvelman and V for Vendetta completed, Skinn was very happy with Moore’s work. Moore was now more than a voice on the phone, he was visiting the Warrior offices and being encouraged to pitch more stories. Skinn explains, ‘We’d have regular monthly meetings. In part to up the ante. When artists saw what great work the others were doing I know that made them try harder! It was also to create a feeling of community. We all wanted the same things: more mature products and greater creative rights and freedom. Keeping everybody in the picture helped enable that.’
Moore used the opportunity to build up a list of contacts. Steve Parkhouse recalls: ‘When the first few issues were in preparation, I was visiting Dez Skinn’s editorial bullpit on a regular basis. On one occasion, I walked into Dez’s office to find a very large man with a very large beard looking at some of my artwork.’ This was the first time Parkhouse and Moore had met for ten years. Moore said it would be nice to work
together on something, which Parkhouse assumed was the usual pleasantry. Shortly afterwards, he was surprised to be presented by Moore with ‘a choice of three different scenarios that he had been working on’. We know Parkhouse chose The Bojeffries Saga, and that he and Moore started work on the strip shortly after Warrior launched in early 1982. The three strips Moore developed once Warrior was underway signalled major interests that would recur in his later work.
The Bojeffries Saga was the first, and it appeared in Warrior #12–13 (1983) and #19–20 (1984). Parkhouse had been the writer and artist on one of the launch series in Warrior. Originally this was to be named Dragonsong, but it mutated into The Spiral Path. Although given carte blanche by Skinn, Parkhouse had found the result – a labyrinthine stream-of-consciousness fantasy story – deeply unenjoyable to create. With The Bojeffries Saga, ‘Alan made it very easy by delivering scripts of stunning innovation. We both knew exactly what was needed and almost by unspoken agreement we didn’t interfere with each other’s processes.’
Formally, The Bojeffries Saga is a rather straightforward, even old-fashioned strip, with large panels telling a linear story. It even has the dreaded thought balloons. Moore described the series as taking place ‘in an unnamed urban mass – possibly Birmingham, possibly Northampton’, but he was consciously trying to tie it back to his upbringing. As he said in 1986: ‘Me and the artist Steve Parkhouse have been trying to get the feel of the really stupid bits of England we can remember from when we were kids … we boiled all this down into a fantasy on the English landscape in which we set these various werewolves and mutants. In a funny way it’s a lot more personal than a lot of the strips I’ve done.’ Twenty years on, he stressed the same point: ‘Bojeffries was important in that it was one of the personal things that I’ve done … it looks very surrealistic to Americans, whereas, to me, it’s a thing that I’ve done that I’ve come closest to actually describing the flavour of an ordinary working-class childhood in Northampton.’ In some places The Bojeffries Saga is simply Alan Moore’s childhood with the names changed and slight exaggeration for comic effect.