B.W.'s Book Report: V For Vendetta

My old friend Wally Conger is so jazzed about the upcoming film "V for Vendetta" that I had to pull the original material off the shelf and read it through again. I remember slogging through all 10 issues of the 1988 DC Comics series, and then buying the hardcover, not because I was deeply enamored of it but because I thought it was an "important" work that I needed to keep.

Alan Moore's previous mini-series triumph, "Watchmen," now, that's one of the greatest comic book stories ever produced ... and reading Miracleman #1 made me a kid again, so I knew Moore had to be up to something good with "V for Vendetta." Maybe I just wasn't ready for it.

Because it was a bit of a chore the first time through. David Lloyd's art was/is a little too muddled for me. It takes me a long time to figure out which character is which, and - perhaps because so many of the book's characters are intended to be faceless bureaucrats - it's a struggle pinning down who's who.

That, and the lead protagonist is a stone-cold maniac killer. This is not a hero as easy to like as, say, Peter Parker. It's an ugly, violent story.

But sometimes you need ugly and violent to point the way to truth and beauty, I guess. And "V for Vendetta" has some intriguing things to say about the nature of freedom and - and here's why Wally loves the story, no doubt - about what anarchy has to offer as an alternative to an oppressive central government.

"Anarchy means 'without leaders,' not 'without order,'" says the mysterious masked figure V. "With anarchy comes an age of Ordnung, of true order, which is to say voluntary order." I don't know if I buy it, but it's interesting reading and, in the end, a compelling story.

How the bejeebers anyone is going to translate it onto film, I don't know. It'll be fascinating to see how it's done ... coming early next year to a theater near you.