C for Comic (and "cookie," which is good enough for me)

I have a couple of things to bitch about first, then I will get to the good thing.

Bitch the first: I don't quite have enough black yarn to finish this afghan I'm making for my grandmother. Rosie's ordered some at my request, and they said they had it, so I went to get it tonight (since it was also time for knitting circle). The problem is, their supplier had actually sent them dark green yarn, because the lighting was bad in the stockroom or something and they didn't bother me to look at it closely. I hadn't brought the Jayne hat I was working on, so I left knitting circle early.

Bitch the second: This one's more serious. I don't want to go into details about the whole backstory, but suffice it say that at work we are switching from one health insurance plan to another later this month. We are supposed to be covered by the old plan until then: my boss made a special arrangement with the health insurance company to make sure it would be so. Problem is, it ain't so. When I went to refill my prescriptions today, my card was apparently invalid. The guy at the counter called the company, which said that my insurance group had been deactivated. I was able to buy one of my prescriptions without insurance, since it cost only a little more than the co-pay would have, but the other one is too expensive. Fortunately I have some lower doses of the latter from my little brother (he switched to a different dosage and had a lot of spares), so that will tide me over.

Here's the non-bitch thing - I stopped in the comic book store on the way home and bought the TPB of V for Vendetta. In a sense, this is a good thing, as many of you will agree. In another sense, it may not be such a great thing. I'll tell you why.

Even before I went to see the movie, when I was hearing people talk about it and how it compared to the comic book, I was sort of fascinated by the whole concept. Not just of the story, but from what I knew of the character of V himself. Characters, for me, tend to be the most interesting part of any story. So after what I'd heard I just had to see the movie, because I was curious about it, and since I would almost certainly be disappointed with it in comparison to the comic book, I had to see it before I read the comic.

Well, I saw it, and it got stuck in my brain for the next few days. Good stories tend to get stuck in my brain that way. They make me restless and agitated; I imagine myself in the world of the story; I dream about it. It drives me to distraction. This can happen with a story in any medium, but for me the effect seems to be strongest with graphic novels. Maybe it's just the kinds of graphic novels I picked to read - Sandman, Frank Miller's Batman comics, JMS's Midnight Nation.[1].

My point is, if the movie got stuck in my brain, the comic book probably will too, and it will be worse. But I can't not read it.

Anyway, I won't be cracking it open just yet - I have other stuff I need to do first, and I just know that if I start reading now I'll never get things done.


[1] Ruse too, but I don't really have an excuse for that. The other comics I mentioned are "classic" or "literary," which Ruse isn't.

D for Done. or F for Finished

Well, I did it - I finished reading V for Vendetta.

Yeah, it's good stuff. A lot creepier and denser than the movie, of course. And Alan Moore and David Lloyd's dystopian society doesn't pull any punches. The only thing that really irked me was the art - I heard it was originally drawn in black and white, with color added later, and it sort of shows. But it was great to read. I recognized parts of it from the movie, but they were often in a different order. It was also missing something that I expected to see - in the film, Evey says her father told her that artists use lies to tell the truth, while politicians use lies to cover up the truth. I was sure that Moore had come up with that one, but it doesn't seem so.

Speaking of the movie, I do not find it as awful in comparison to the book as some other people seem to. This is odd, because usually I can't stand the way films butcher books (Like Secret of NIMH or The Neverending Story). The Wachowskis weren't willing to make the setting of the film as Orwellian as Moore and Lloyd did: they didn't address V's anarchic political agenda, which is a great loss. But at least they didn't turn "anarchy" into "democracy," the way they were apparently planning to. Or so shinyhappygoth tells me.

The whole film is like that. While the Wachowskis didn't get everything in, and I can see why Alan Moore was upset, they didn't simply take the story and chop bits off to make it fit movie length. They reinterpreted it, the way filmmakers have reinterpreted other comic books such as Superman and Batman, for better or for worse. This time, it was more towards "for better," although not perfect. Moore's V for Vendetta dealt with the concerns of the era in which it was written, and doing so in the film would have made it dated[1]. The Wachowskis' version addresses the concerns of our time, while still keeping the spirit of the story mostly intact. And I think, if they thought they could get away with it, the Wachowskis would have pulled out the stops, made the future Britain look like a real totalitarian nightmare of a place, and put back in all the stuff about anarchy. I honestly think they pushed the envelope as much as they were able. Considering some of the subtler and more impressive ideas that were in the first Matrix film, I think they understood and have a deep respect for the message inherent in V for Vendetta.

You can disagree with me if you like, but I really don't care.

Contrary to what I thought, reading the book seems to have settled me somewhat, so I don't have the movie on the brain. It's odd.

Going to bed now...

PS: I don't wonder about V's identity. I have heard that there are many theories floating around: the only certain thing (because Alan Moore said it himself) is that V is not Evey's father (she thought he was for a while, or she wanted him to be). And it doesn't really matter who he was. Whoever he used to be died at Larkhill: afterwards, he was just rebellion incarnate. He was a masked hero, or rather anti-hero, without a secret identity. And that's fine: he doesn't need one.


[1] Not to mention that, as Moore admits in the introduction to the book, not even a limited nuclear war would be survivable. The way the Wachowskis handled that - attributing the collapse of the world to unrest caused by American involvement in the Middle East - was sort of vague but a good substitute, and seems as scarily plausible now as nuclear war did in the 80s.