V For Vendetta

This was an expanded collection of all 3 V for Vendetta chapters with some pretty cool essays from Alan Moore (written back in the 80s) as intros and outros. I was especially interested in the outro essay, which was a pretty fascinating behind the scenes of the creative process Moore and Lloyd took. It was satisfyingly honest — instead of a polished victory lap, Moore talks about the relationship between scriptwriting and putting strip images down, the hilarious names for the main character and book itself that were scrapped, and the fact that both Moore and Lloyd (without talking to one another) independently came up with the “Vendetta” name. It was also a window into just how long projects like this in the creative industries can take. Moore went for iterations of this concept many times, through many rejections, before finding the right match with Lloyd — and at that point, everything came together quite quickly.

One of the things I picked up from the story itself (and this will sound a bit random) was the use of the Milgram Experiment by one of the characters, as a way to concretize the totalitarian world in which the story is set in. Ever since reading Humankind (book 233), which disproved so many of these psychological experiments that have become a part the zeitgeist, I often wonder how stories like V for Vendetta would (or wouldn’t) be changed if it was more widely known that such studies were not entirely true. They have become so entrenched into society as a way of justifying evil human behavior as the base norm that it has had a compounding effect. So many lives have probably been in some ways affected by this core concept — it is featured across so much literature. I don’t want to overstate the point — books like this were not created around concepts like the Milgram Experiment, and thus it wouldn’t invalidate the plot’s underlying philosophy — but it certainly plays a role. And I think that matters.