V for Value Judgment....

Curse my fanboy hide, it’s stopping me from enjoying a decent movie. When I first heard about V for Vendetta I was informed by snippets like the first announcement from Variety that it was to be set in an alternative history where ‘Hilter Won World War II’ the starting point of much lacklustre sci-fi. Thankfully, this was not the case and a world where Britain could easily slip into fascism by its own accord, not by some parallel dimension ploy, is portrayed. Then I read a Web report that it included a character talking about ‘eggy in a basket’ and I freaked out, thinking it would include some sort of Jack the Ripper view of olde Laaawdaan town where huddled masses would eat some sort of concoction that actually involved eating scrambled eggs and chips in a basket and say things like “aaaw I luv a bit ole eggy in the basket when I’s wotchin’ the queen on the telly, I ‘ope saaam terrooorist character don’t displace ‘er….”

Thankfully this is not the case ( I’ve just been to see it with the great HH where we discussed the 'eggy in a basket' conundrum, yes we have both had a situation where cutting a circular hole in a slice of bread, I normally use a highball glass, and breaking a egg into in and then frying the thing is quite common, but calling it 'eggy in a basket' is insane...ps you can fry the little remaining circle for the craic and have a little tiny round bit of French bread as well, how cool is that?).

Whatever Alan Moore’s problems with the film, I’m so glad David Lloyd got his moment of celluloid glory. I agree with Alan Moore’s problems, but he is in a relatively more comfortable position in comparison with most comic creators. He’s had his name up there twice on the screen (with From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) and has refused to have it up there for this one, where folks were practically begging for his approval.

It seems ironic that Siegel and Shuster had so many problems regaining creative control over Superman and just getting their names attached to a creative property, yet, churlishly, Moore wants his name taken off a creative work. He sold the rights, I can’t believe that Moore even in the 1980s was naïve about what that entailed. Although I did enjoy a 1988 ‘puplishorial’ from Jenatte Kahn on the back cover of Doom Patrol 9, yes kids the ole patrol did exist before Grant Morrison, where see gushes over Joel Silver’s credentials for making Watchmen as a movie, a meeting with Moore and the fact that she had pitched Watchmen as a movie when it was only three issues in!

As Moore himself said, and Stephen King has quoted this many times: "Apparently, someone asked Raymond Chandler once what he thought of Hollywood ruining all of his books. And he took them into his study and pointed up to the shelf where they all were, and he said, "Look, they're there. They're fine. They're okay."

As Warren Ellis recently noticed, about half of the hipsters in San Francisco now have a copy of V under their arms. This can’t be a bad thing. The movie reminded me of starting Media Studies for the first time and getting all hot and bothered about how news is put together, how the chaos of daily existence of the world is packaged into manageable stories. I hoped that V will get some current undergrads creaming themselves with geeky excitement over the possibilities of this area rather than trying to get the best mark with the least work. Ahh whatever, I'm a bitter geek but I think that whatever burgeoning comic intelligensia there is seems to treat Alan Moore like some mystic magical wizard from neverwhere, forgetting that he's the guy who burped Skizz onto this world. His word is not gospel, the introduction to the original V for Vendetta DC reprints implied he was so scared of living under Thatcher he was going to leave Britain, now he is going to stay in England forever and ever. The mystical treatment of his work belies that the simple fact that, when it comes down to it, he's a guy from Northampton that writes amazing stories.