So, it’s November 5th, 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.
