Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} For Vendetta by Purefoy Abandoned Vendetta Because Of Mask. British actor James Purefoy walked out in his role in after struggling to wear a mask for the entire film. The A KNIGHT'S TALE star, 41, became so frustrated at having to wear the facial prop until he went to bed at night, he eventually left the terrorist drama and was replaced by MATRIX star Hugo Weaving. He said before leaving the film, "That mask is the thing I'll be wearing through the movie. We'll never see my face. It's a great acting challenge. Wearing that thing takes. a lot of takes. "SPIDER-MAN'S mask comes off. 'S mask comes off. Even The Elephant Man had eyes. That's all I ask for, just an eye! "Every night I'm in that mask for another three hours when I go home. I have mirrors all over my apartment and I live in it until I go to bed. So my neighbours obviously think I'm mad." Australian actor Weaving admits he can understand Purefoy's annoyance with the mask after taking over the role of V. He says, "I know the difficulties James was having and I was warned by other people. "Certain difficulties with the mask. I just think it can feel very hot. You feel quite. cut off." V For Vendetta Summary. On November 5, 1997, , an impoverished sixteen-year-old orphan who has turned to prostitution out of a desperation to survive, tries to solicit a man on Guy Fawkes Night. The man turns out to be a Fingerman, a member of the state secret police. Evey watches helplessly as two more of his colleagues emerge from the darkness and announce their plans to rape and kill her. Suddenly, a mysterious cloaked figure wearing a rescues her using tear gas and a grenade disguised as a prosthetic hand. The enigmatic figure, known as V, brings Evey to a safe distance then blows up the Houses of Parliament, destroying it completely and treating onlookers to a pyrotechnics display issuing from the smoldering ruins. V then takes Evey to the Shadow Gallery, his underground hideout, which is full of banned materials like art, music, and non-state approved literature. In the safety of the gallery, Evey shares her life story, narrating the sad circumstances of how she lost her parents during the nuclear war of the 1980s, which also decimated the existing order and led to the hyper- oppressive totalitarian government that controls London. The focus changes from Evey and V to Eric Finch, a seasoned police detective who heads the police force, which members of Norsefire colloquially refer to as The Nose. Finch scrutinizes V’s anarchistic activities, relaying his findings to Norsefire’s various intelligence departments such as The Finger, headed by Derek Almond, and The Head, managed by , the enigmatic Leader of the organization. The Leader compulsively supervises government activities through the guidance of Fate, a computer surveillance system that has cameras and microphones trained on the people of London. Finch’s investigations take a series of interesting turns when V begins targeting key members of the Norsefire party. He first targets Lewis Prothero, head of Norsefire’s propaganda engine, driving him insane. Next, V pushes Bishop Anthony Liliman, the highly corrupt head of Westminster, to eat a cyanide-laced mass wafer after exposing him as a vicious pedophile. His next victim is the skilled doctor Delia Surridge, a medical researcher. Dr. Surridge was also Finch’s former lover and her death at V’s hands marks a turning point for him, causing him to reconsider his involvement in Norsefire. Being a capable detective, Finch manages to draw a connection between all of V’s targets: they all served as staff in a Larkhill Resettlement Camp. Finch sends Almond to Surridge's house, but V manages to kill her before Almond arrives; he then stabs Almond in the hall when Almond discovers his gun is unloaded. Dr. Surridge leaves a journal that divulges—at least in part—V’s identity. Entries in the journal reveal that V was an inmate in Room Five at the Larkhill facility and a recipient of her inhuman medical experiments. V succeeded in destroying and escaping the prison camp and is now systematically executing former Larkhill officers, presumably for the atrocities they have committed. Detective Finch sends his findings to the Leader, who worries that all these seemingly personal vendettas may just be a prelude to a much larger, more crippling anarchist attack. V’s next target is Roger Dascombe, head of The Mouth, the informal label given to Norsefire’s propaganda arm. V breaks into the Jordan Tower, forcing Dascombe to broadcast a speech urging the people to rebel against the government. V kills Dascombe and escapes. Finch is introduced to the new head of The Finger, Peter Creedy, who goads Finch into punching him. Finch goes on a forced vacation. Evey Hammond, meanwhile, has been abandoned by V. She starts a relationship with an older man named Gordon. In time the pair come across Rosemary Almond, widow of Derek Almond, former head of The Finger. She was also involved with another Norsefire head, Roger Dascombe, after the death of Derek Almond. Now that both men are dead, she works as a stripper at the Kitty-Kat Keller. The relative peace that Evey enjoys with Gordon is abruptly ended by Alistair Harper, a Scottish mobster being tapped by Creedy, a member of the Norsefire party. Creedy needs Harper to provide them with manpower—his thugs—in preparation for an uprising he is planning. Harper murders Gordon by stabbing him with a sword through his door. Evey attempts to avenge his death by shooting Harper outside the Kitty-Kat Keller, but she is captured and trapped before she can pull the trigger. Evey is tortured and cross-examined nearly to the point of breaking. While imprisoned, she finds an old letter secreted in her cell wall. The letter was written by Valerie, a former actress who was imprisoned, tortured, and finally executed because she was a lesbian. The letter speaks of her defiance of the system and it moves Evey to endure her situation. Evey’s tormentor finally gives her an ultimatum: ally with the current régime or die by firing squad. Inspired by Valerie’s example, Evey defies her tormenters. Evey then learns that her imprisonment was all an elaborate ruse set up by V to test her loyalty and provide her with insight into the pivotal incidences that birthed the V persona at Larkhill. V informs Evey that Valerie was a prisoner in Room Four, and that the letter provided him with the inspiration he needed to escape. Evey forgives V for the abuses she received at his hands and V divulges the next step in his grand plan for vengeance: he has hacked into the Fate system and has begun to manipulate Adam Susan, playing with his emotions and mental condition through a series of intricate mind games. Subsequently, Adam Susan has begun to go mad; he feels romantically attached to Fate, fawning over its statements like a spurned lover. The year is now 1998. On Guy Fawkes night V destroys three major government agencies: The Eye, The Ear, and The Mouth, killing a Norsefire party head, Brian Etheridge, manager of The Ear, in the process. In a conversation, V mentions that he seeks to achieve a working revolutionary society that he calls the Land of Do-as-You-Please, but he has not yet realized this dream. He muses that they are in a transitory social phase that he calls the Land of Take-What-You-Want. While all of these events are going on, Finch and his protégé, Dominic Stone, have been busy piecing together clues from V’s activities. Dominic comes to the conclusion that V has somehow managed to hack into Fate and has been manipulating events all along, explaining V’s supernatural ability to predict Norsefire movements. Finch, attempting to uncover V’s identity and get a better handle on predicting his activities, heads off to the former Larkhill site. Once there Finch takes LSD in an attempt to gain insight into how V came to be. His gamble pays off when he infers that the Shadow Gallery is located in an abandoned Victoria line Underground station. In the Underground station, Finch finds a train car full of flowers. V greets him by name and Finch fires four shots. Finch stabs his shoulder and defiantly claims that he cannot be killed, as he is an idea, and ideas are bulletproof. Finch gives up chasing after V; seeing the copious amounts of blood pooled on the floor, he assumes that V is now dead from excessive bleeding. V retreats into the depths of the gallery and dies in Evey’s arms. Evey briefly contemplates removing V’s trademark mask but decides against it, maintaining that V is not a person so much as an icon of their struggle for freedom. Evey then dons a different Guy Fawkes mask and assumes V's identity, continuing his legacy. While Finch and V are fighting for their lives deep underground, within the ranks of Norsefire’s top officers, there is a jockeying for power between Creedy and Adam Susan. Creedy has been trying to compel Susan to make public appearances, as a show that they are still in control. His true intention is to expose him to danger, giving would-be assassins a chance to kill him. This ploy pays off: Adam Susan is shot in the head by a vengeful Rosemary Almond in retribution for the death of her husband and her lover and for the miserable life that she is now forced to live. Creedy takes up the mantle of leadership after Susan’s death. Finch proclaims that V is now dead; however, he pretends not to remember where V's hideout is. His experiences and the discoveries he’s made about V, Larkhill, and Norsefire lead Finch to resign from The Nose and live following no one's orders. The death of Adam Susan leaves a power vacuum within Norsefire. Alistair Harper murders Creedy after having been seduced by Helen Heyer, wife of Conrad Heyer, who leads The Eye. Harper and Conrad Heyer kill each other, each having been manipulated by Helen. Dominic Stone assumes leadership of the peacekeeping police forces responsible for suppressing the riots and patrolling the streets as a precaution in case V should survive and make his awaited public address. A crowd witnesses the appearance of V, who is in truth Evey; she announces that 10 Downing Street (the prime minister's residence) will be bombed the next day. She tells the crowd to choose what comes next: live lives of their own, or return to life in chains. The residents promptly reply with an uprising and rush the police. The next night, Evey gives V a Viking funeral by putting V's body in the underground train full of flowers and gelignite explosives. She sends it to a point on that track where V said it would be blocked with rubble, directly beneath Downing Street. She goes to the roof to watch the explosion, then descends to the Shadow Gallery where Stone has woken up. She introduces herself in the way V did to her, implying that she will begin grooming Stone as her successor. The story ends with Finch walking north out of London on the darkened and empty M1 motorway. ‘I’m bursting with fiction’: Alan Moore announces five-volume fantasy epic. Two years after announcing that he had retired from comics, Alan Moore, the illustrious author of and V for Vendetta, has signed a six- figure deal for a “groundbreaking” five-volume fantasy series as well as a “momentous” collection of short stories. Bloomsbury, home to the Harry Potter novels, acquired what it described as two “major” projects from the 67-year-old. The first, Illuminations, is a short story collection which will be published in autumn 2022 and which moves from the four horsemen of the apocalypse to the “Boltzmann brains” fashioning the universe. Bloomsbury said it was “dazzlingly original and brimming with energy”, promising a series of “beguiling and elegantly crafted tales that reveal the full power of imagination and magic”. The second acquisition is a fantasy quintet titled Long London, which will launch in 2024. The series will move from the “shell-shocked and unravelled” London of 1949 to “a version of London just beyond our knowledge”, encompassing murder, magic and madness. Bloomsbury said it “promises to be epic and unforgettable, a tour-de-force of magic and history”. “Alan Moore is simply a legend and it has been such a pleasure to listen to him talk about his ambitious Long London series as well as discovering the range of his shorter fiction,” said Bloomsbury editor-in-chief Paul Baggaley. “These projects have set Bloomsbury alight.” Moore stopped writing comics in 2019, leaving behind him a roster of work including The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, his influential Batman comic The Killing Joke, and . In 2016, he published the 1,000-plus page novel , about his home town of Northampton, with comics publisher Knockabout. “There is much here that is magnificent,” wrote the Guardian at the time. “Somewhere in this sprawling behemoth, this teeming leviathan, this pythonic mammoth of a novel there is a very good – even visionary – book struggling to get out.” Speaking about his book deal, Moore said that he was at a moment in his career when he was “bursting with fiction, bursting with prose”. “I couldn’t be happier with the new home that I’ve found at Bloomsbury: a near-legendary independent publisher with a spectacular list and a fierce commitment to expanding the empire of the word,” said Moore. “I have a feeling this will be a very productive partnership.” This article was amended on 5 May 2021 to correct a reference to Moore’s novel Jerusalem, which was his second novel, not his first. V for Vendetta. V for Vendetta is one of Alan Moore's revolutionary works in the comics field. Created in conjunction with and originally serialized in , it was left unfinished when Warrior was cancelled and finally picked up, reprinted, and finished under the aegis of DC. It is the story of Britain after a limited nuclear war that's left the nation under fascist rule, of a mysterious anarchist named V who is systematically killing government officials and undermining the government, and of a young, desperate girl named Evey Hammond who is rescued by V and who is drawn into his world and his fight. There are aspects of an adventure novel and a detective novel, the latter most notably in the person of Eric Finch, the government investigator who untangles V's past and intentions, but more fundamentally it is a story of oppression and learning how to fight. The aspect of this story that most intrigued me is V's decidedly ambiguous status. He's neither hero nor anti-hero; he's more a force of monofocused human revenge mixed with anarchism. The world fell apart around the British, they're scared and insecure, they've sought refuge in racism and homophobia, and in so doing have ceded control to a fascist government that provides an illusion of security and control. The government here is extremely intrusive, making extensive use of video surveillance and wiretapping to watch the populace. This control is built on a vast computer called Fate, which is used as a symbol to the populace of reliable central control, down to regular radio broadcasts by a voice actor who is supposedly the voice of the computer. In this world, V, with his ever-present Guy Fawkes mask, 1600s tall hat, and floor-length cape, who blows up the Houses of Parliament on Guy Fawkes day, writes his initial in the sky with fireworks, and has a secret lair called the Shadow Gallery, is like the suppressed subconscious of the people. He represents adventure, danger, resistance, independence, and comfort with chaos and disorder from which the country has fled and now misses. Evey, though, is the center of the story. Desperate for money, she starts the story by attempting to sell herself as a prostitute, happens upon the government police, and is rescued by V from being raped and murdered. She serves as a foil and audience for his musings, eventually an assistant, and then a challenge to his anarchist views and the moral lines he's choosing. She finally draws away from him and tries to return to her life, finding temporary refuge but discovering again how rotten the world is, leading up to the most startling and effective section of the story in which she learns the root of V's defiance and the core of dignity and defiance inside herself. This is a beautiful, amazing scene, the most memorable of the book, in part because it underscores V's moral ambiguity and simultaneously steps beyond it into a primal lesson that only someone that far outside of any social order may be able to teach. The conclusion is a tour de force of unravelling mysteries, political maneuvering, and exploitation of vulnerabilities that Moore and Lloyd pull off to a satisfying conclusion but not without a few bumps along the way. The conclusion of Eric Finch's investigation was the biggest hole for me: his epiphany coming out of an acid trip felt too surreal and too hard to identify with. I think I was looking for something more understated and grounded. I also had serious problems throughout the story with the villains, who felt like a collection of cliches more than a realistic fascist government. The Leader in love with his computer to the point of being dysfunctional and the completely stereotyped female dominant were only the worst of the lot. Too much of the government failed the sniff test: in order to be effective villains, I have to believe that they were capable of taking and holding power and weren't stupid about it, and while I believe those quirks could exist in competent dictators, they'd need to be paired with an efficiency and effectiveness that wasn't shown. V's actions would have carried more emotional weight if the flaws he was exploiting had been balanced with more personal (rather than structural) capability. That aside, I liked the subtlety, the lack of clear morality, and an ending that promises only hope and potential rather than solutions. There are also several masterpieces of storytelling: V's television speech is wonderful, "The Vicious Cabaret" musical interlude is both memorable and eery in how well it captures the plot, and V's careful construction of the dramatic ending is a beautiful piece of characterization. V for Vendetta takes one of the clearest bits of black-and-white morality that we have in our mythology, a rebellion against a fascist government, and makes it messy and disturbing without removing the idealism. I haven't to this point said anything about the art; unfortunately, that's because, for me, the art didn't help the story. Lloyd uses an extremely traditional panel structure with little variation in size; this makes for effective pacing, moving the reader through the story, but offers no dramatic flair. V is an inherently dramatic and passionate figure who, in the course of the book, does some grand and stunning things, and some variation in panel layout, some vertical panels or images without panel boundaries, or even an occasional full-page image could have better captured some of that drama and presence. I know that's the attitude of a very experienced comics reader, Moore and Lloyd may have been working under publishing constraints, and a simple panel structure is much more readable for the casual reader, but the layout still felt claustrophobic and limiting to me. The artwork also had a murky, smeared look to it that its coloring didn't help at all. There was an overuse of several techniques that I don't care for: monotone panels in yellow and red, strong wavy lines in the floors of rooms, and lots of deep shadows that make the small panels seem even smaller. Some of this is probably an intentional style choice to make the world feel more limited and closed-in, but the impression I came away with was cheap paper, blurry art, and a limited palette. The words are the highlight of the story and many of the best sections are told in captions and extended dialog, but even the dialog balloons are rarely crisp and occasionally lost in smears of color to the point where it's hard to tell who's saying what. Add to that the words under the music of "The Vicious Cabaret" being too small to read (thankfully they're also repeated in captions) and I was unimpressed. Still, that doesn't take away from the power of the story. This is one of the classics of the comics genre and one of the stories that crosses genre lines effectively. It's a plot that's only become more timely and more relevant and the resolution is much more honest than one normally gets from stories of this sort. Recommended. V for Vendetta is a manual for rebellion against injustice. In a way, V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd is almost too obvious a choice for the Guardian’s series on literature about fighting back. Defiance is in its DNA. Revolution is its bread and butter. Standing up against injustice and fascism runs through it like the name of a seaside town in a stick of rock. You may only know V for Vendetta from the Wachowskis’ adaptation starring Hugo Weaving and Natalie Portman, or you may be distantly aware of it thanks to the adoption of the Guy Fawkes mask by Anonymous and various protest groups. Or you may not know it at all. Photograph: DC Comics. V for Vendetta was published in the 1980s in the avant garde British comic magazine Warrior. The magazine folded in 1985 and DC comics picked up the series, first reprinting the story so far in colour (a suitably muted palette, but still akin to one of those ghastly “colourised” classic movies compared to the bleakness of the original) and then continuing and ultimately concluding the mini-epic. The story takes place in 1997 – which was at the time of writing the near future. A nuclear war has devastated much of the world; Britain’s Labour government has succeeded in its disarmament policies so the UK is largely unscathed. But the turmoil brought about by the conflicts allows hard- right organisations and surviving corporations to come together under the banner Norsefire, quickly establishing a dystopian, fascist order in a Britain on the edge of chaos. By the time we meet desperate teenager Evey, about to be brutally punished by undercover policemen, Britain has achieved a sort-of even keel, though one without ethnic minorities, homosexuals, radicals, transgender people. Anyone who isn’t straight, white and compliant has been disappeared into concentration camps and Britain has long since been ethnically, socially and sexually “cleansed”. V rescues Evey and takes her to his secret hideout, furnished with the elements of British society that have been systematically erased. He employs her in his vendetta against those who incarcerated him and experimented on him in Larkhill Resettlement Camp in the early days of the reborn society, but V has a wider agenda; to bring down the state and create The Land of Do-As-You-Please. While V’s flash-bang terror tactics against the new world order are pleasingly rousing, they are just the catalyst. It is the smaller, more human acts of defiance that really drive the narrative: Evey’s realisation that the dictatorship she has lived most of her life under is not the only way; policeman Eric Finch, whose investigation of V leads him to question the difference between state-approved law and actual justice; the small girl writing BOLLOCKS on the pavement, having realised that the all-seeing gaze of London’s pervasive CCTV network has been blinded by V. At the heart of the story is the tale of Valerie Page, a gay actor who occupied the next cell to V in Larkhill. Her handwritten memoir, hidden in the wall, inspires him to escape the camp, and later encourages Evey in her own ultimate act of defiance during her apparent incarceration by the state. In 1987, I met Alan Moore in Manchester, where he was signing copies of Watchmen with artist . DC had just announced they were reprinting and continuing V for Vendetta, two years after the story had been left hanging by the cancellation of Warrior. Would we, I asked Moore somewhat nervously, be finding out who the perpetually-masked V actually was? To his credit, he didn’t reply as I expected (“What do you think this is, sonny? Some kind of bloody superhero comic?”). Instead, he smiled enigmatically and said: “After a fashion.” It would be a couple more years before I found out what he meant. The movie version made heavier weather of driving this message home, but the result was the same: we don’t find out who’s under the mask, because it’s potentially any of us. V is an idea, a symbol, and as he says himself: “Ideas are bulletproof.” The five Alan Moore comics you must read. V for Vendetta (1982 - 1989) This dystopian continues to be relevant even 30 years after it ended. With its warnings against fascism, white supremacy and the horrors of a police state, V for Vendetta follows one woman and a revolutionary anarchist on a campaign to challenge and change the world. : Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow (1986) Moore's quintessential Superman story. Though it has not aged as well as some of his work, this comic is still one of the best Man of Steel stories ever written, and one of the most memorable comics in DC's canon. A Small Killing (1991) This introspective, stream-of-consciousness comic follows a successful ad man who begins to have a midlife crisis after realising the moral failings of his life and work. (1999 - 2006) A love letter to the silver age of comics that nods to Buck Rogers and other classics of pulp fiction. Tom Strong embodies all of the ideals Moore holds for what a superhero should be. The League of Extraordinary Gentleman (1999-2019) One of Moore's best known comic series, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is the ultimate in crossover works, drawing on characters from all across the literary world who are on a mission to save it. Two things strike me now. One is how the majority of the British population were happy to accept control and turn a blind eye to atrocities, so long as they were fed a diet of vaguely familiar sitcoms and tabloids. The other is that even at the height of the Thatcher years, Moore and Lloyd thought that something as epochal as a nuclear war would be necessary before Britain embraced fascism. As we sleepwalk towards something closer to what Moore and Lloyd showed us, I am reminded of the cover of Warrior magazine number five, and its tagline, “Pray the future will never need … V for Vendetta”, and I can’t help but wonder: are we already there?