Panel Vision - V for Vendetta, book vs film

So, it’s November 5^th, Guy Fawkes day, in which we Americans celebrate this holiday we’ve generally never heard of and don’t grasp the actual meaning behind by wearing a mask we saw in a movie adapted from a comic in 2006.  All of which is my very round about way of saying that I’m going to be talking about V for Vendetta today, specifically looking at the movie adaptation compared to the Alan Moore comic book that inspired it.  These two works loom large in popular and comic book culture as landmarks of the superhero genre and with good reason as they’re both very well made and enjoyable works.  

The graphic novel comes to us from comics’ legend Alan Moore as a sort of follow-up to the mass success he’d enjoyed with Watchmen a few years prior.  Meanwhile, the film adaptation comes to us from a screenplay by the excellent Wachowskis and starred Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving.  Both works are of excellent caliber even though their actual importance and deeper themes tend to be misinterpreted by their very large fan bases, a fact that’s actually quite impressive given how monumentally different both stories actually are.

Panel Vision - Suicide Squad: Raise the Flag

If you like this review feel free to 'like' Lido Shuffle on Facebook here or follow me on Twitter here.

So, as part of my ongoing celebration of the Suicide Squad trailer that’s been blowing up the internet I thought it’d be fun to look at one of the squad’s craziest comic incarnations with Suicide Squad: Raise the Flag.  In case you’ve never heard of the team, the Suicide Squad is a group of super criminals assembled by the US government for black ops missions of low survival rate.  The thinking is that they take easily controllable and super powered bad guys and have them take on problems so that if things go wrong the only people who get hurt were already evil and if anything gets exposed there’s plausible deniability. 

Though the roster is constantly shifting due to character deaths, these are SUICIDE missions after all, there are a handful of consistent team members.  Deadshot, an expert marksman and D-list Batman villain, Captain Boomerang, an Australian Flash foe, Count Vertigo, European aristocrat who fought Green Arrow, and Bronze Tiger, another bat foe, make up the team’s core membership.  There’s also the squad’s government handler Amanda Waller, one of the most badass women in all of comics.  The only other major human character on the team is the in field government asset Rick Flag Jr., the man from whom this mini-series takes its name.