V for Vendetta special

Below, excerpts from the David Lloyd interview contained in Journey Planet n. 79. 

 

Journey Planet is an acclaimed sci-fi and comics fanzine. Its 79th issue, released this March, is a 92-page special fully focused on V for Vendetta.

You can download for free the complete pdf HERE. Highly recommended!

David Lloyd: [...] When I mentioned taking out thought bubbles and sound effects to Alan, he got on board with it, but what he did in response to that challenge was progressive. He turned thought balloons into captions–the thoughts of the characters into the streaming narrative. And we removed the lines around the captions and balloons, as I said. And the reason I did that is this: when you put lines around them, they’re on a different level, a different plane is created above the object of the art and separate from it. If you take them away, they become integral to the art, to the whole experience of the reading. That’s not some great idea of mine–I saw Alex Toth do it, who’s one of the great creators. When he did that, the art and the script became integrated. There was no separation. They were not on separate planes. When you take away the separation, you have a completely integrated experience. [...]

 

[...] But a lot of people don’t know it was a progression that was urged by an accident. Valerie Page’s appearance was an accident. 

After we revealed the existence of Surridge’s diary, Alan needed to write a lot of exposition in Finch’s meeting with the Leader, and he had no firm thoughts on what art might accompany some of that. So it was in my hands. I thought about it, and figured I’d set it in the Shadow Gallery, and figured it would be a great idea if there was a room in the Shadow Gallery where V might run old movies–or maybe home movies or slideshows of lost relatives, or something similar. One of the things I was concerned about at the time was that V was not seen as having any emotional depth at all. We’d seen him as a murderer with a philosophy, but we didn’t know anything of a backstory. I wanted to show him looking at some images in this private spot that might suggest one. At the time, I knew an actress who’d sent me some stage shots. I asked her if she’d mind if I used them as that anonymous character from V’s history, and she was fine with that. I wanted to show that there was someone who meant something to V. You don’t know why, you don’t know who it is on that screen. We just know he’s watching pictures of a lost love or maybe a lost sister, or whatever. We don’t know. So, I did that. And Alan bounced off that accident amazingly and created Valerie Page which became a central part of the whole story. Now, that was an accident that rachetted up the whole seriousness of the story’s tone. You can put that down to the cultural and social circumstances of the time, too, of course. But that moment illustrates one of the great values of V for Vendetta: that it grew organically and could. Alan could bounce off accidents like that, and create this character from nothing, because when we were first creating the comic, we were doing it in 6- to 8-page episodes per month. Slowly, with time to think. There was no great story arc we had to follow. We weren’t doing it like American comic books. That is the best of V–and we had complete control. And what Alan did with the completion of it all pulled it all together perfectly. [...]

Download the complete pdf HERE!