Alan Moore weighs in on V for Victory and the rather painful experiences he’s gone through as it’s been adapted for the screen (opening this weekend). He’s quite irked that it’s changed from “fascism vs anarchy” to “conservatives vs liberals,” and has spent a fair amount of effort trying to get his name removed from the book (let alone the movie) altogether.
And so where I’m at, at the moment, it was heartbreak. When I got that package of books I took them straight out to the garage and threw them straight into a skid. I didn’t even want to recycle them. That night at 4 in the morning I woke up and I had black thunder rolling in my heart. I could not sleep, I was just lying there thinking well, they’re just going to ignore everything I say. It’s not my book. It’s their book, but the only reason they’ve my name on that book is it sells more copies, and it gives them a certain amount of integrity and credibility that I don’t think they would otherwise have had.
I’m perhaps overstating my case here a bit, but I think I lent an awful lot of literary and intellectual credibility to the American comics business and to the comics business in general when I entered it. I don’t feel the same way about comics any more, I really don’t. I never loved the comic industry. I used to love the comics medium. I still do love the comics medium in its pure platonic, essential form, but the comics medium as it stands seems to me to have been allowed to become a cucumber patch for producing new movie franchise.
V for Vendetta is a very quirky, oddly riveting, English sort of tale, driven by an extrapolation of the Thatcherite 80s. It’s perhaps inevitable that it would get tweaked for a 2006 world audience. Hopefully what’s been done to it won’t turn out to be as painful to its fans as it has been to its writer.