My Journey in Understanding Comics

Intermission "V"

This was written as my inaugural Letterboxd review. It got a bit out of hand so I have decided to present it here as well.

While Part 3 of my writing on my personal journey into reading comic books continues to bake in my brain (a fancy way of saying I am still brainstorming its final format) (a fancy way of saying I have not yet started writing it) as the list of included comics grows, I wanted to stop for a moment and write about one in particular for selfish reasons.

On November 5th, 2024 I began reading V For Vendetta, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd. This was on the whim of having read Alex Jaffe’s recommendation on the DC Blog and the vague understanding that this was the important date to read it on. This is the part where I reiterate that as a teenager my dad had given me a copy of Watchmen, then question why he only gave me that and never other Alan Moore books even after I expressed a love for Watchmen, leading in asking why, especially with him showing me Fight Club not long after, he would a few years later become fearful of my leftist radicalization. Instead of briefly ruminating on the chudification of anything with leftist morals, of red pills and project mayhems and Fawkes masks, an aside consisting mainly of “I’m too scared to know too much about the other side to properly critique them.”, I have decided to first write whatever this is: a paragraph about not writing things. I fall easy prey to the gimmick of writing something about itself when I lack the time to write something lengthy or god-willing something good. Only at my laziest, when I so badly want to splash paint onto a canvas and call it art to try and feel the relief granted by having created something again, do I create a piece of writing about what itself isn’t.

So instead I will write about my day, and hope you can make something more of it than I can.

I began November 5th, 2024 expecting the worst. I was scheduled for a 7 hour shift. This is not the place I will go into detail about the way my brain comprehends the passage of time, except saying that this is beyond the limit that my short-term memory can comprehend as Now. By the end of a 7 hour day it feels like my entire existence has been that day.

Before work I was hoping to start playing Planet Coaster 2, a theme park simulator I had pre-ordered. Unfortunately I was a day off on its release, it came out today, November 6th. Instead I played Dead Estate, which I really had to think about right now to remember. Before leaving for work at Noon I remembered that November 5th was the day of that one rhyme that I was vaguely aware was tied to V for Vendetta, a comic I heard was good but knew nothing about. I started reading the first issue before heading out.

At this time the vibe on social media was one of trepidatious optimism. Panic had not yet set in, but doom was creeping at the edges of every post. Those that engaged in the stage-show were sharing graphs: maps and analytics, populace represented by numbers and figures. Those that hide were still standing in the open, sharing their strategies for their planned retreats: assuring each other that there were games to play, films to watch. Smoke them if you got them. I would have headed their advice if not for my usual required time to temporarily become a machine again.

I found myself behind the kiosk of the grocery store Starbucks counter, tightening my apron, as my manager was already whispering to my co-worker, pointing at her phone, pointing at a map that showed the city of Seattle in bright blue and the rest of the state a deep red. It was not by my choice that I would not be among those hiding through today.

I won’t bore you with the ins and outs of running a Starbucks kiosk. I use “running” because I am usually alone, I was on that particular day for the final 3 hours at least. It is a ceaseless stress: there is always something to get done, someone to attend to, or something to worry about. They keep adding more responsibilities, berating me for doing a wrong thing I have done a hundred times without being berated before, and introducing further uncertainties and unwinnable scenarios. It is a job where they try their hardest to make life unlivable and I try to scrape together every ounce of relief from stress. Like all jobs.

The only interaction that mattered enough to mention here was one from a regular. An older man who was before this simply another vertice from which stress radiated: a notification that arrived at the counter and asked for me to recall the piece of information that is his usual order, to which my brain would offer me no help. A Diner Dash icon asking to be clicked. He complimented my lipstick.

I’ve been carrying around the same lipstick for a couple years now. It was a gift. I have been told it is too bright, too red for me. It makes me stand out, to stand out of place. The phrase “pig with lipstick” stands out despite its meaning not fitting here, more just the visceral imagery that it brings forth. I know I am overcompensating. Everyone who looks at me does. The lipstick tube is doubled-sided: one side the too-bright red, the other a layer of glitter, meant to be added on-top to dull the red. I have told myself the glitter side is meant for special outings, I wear the red at work to make my machine-self look feminine, I would wear the glitter on top to feel beautiful on days I am not a machine. The red is nearly worn down to nothing, I have not touched the side with the glitter.

“You look good.”

“I am trying. It’s a process.”

“I know. It’s good you are trying.
Are you on estrogen?”

“Yeah.”

"That will help. You'll notice."

I did not tell him I’ve been on it already for half a decade.

I finished the first issue of V for Vendetta on my lunch break. I saw that I had missed the slow creep of doom take hold of the zeitgeist. The world had turned dark outside while I was busy not existing.

The store grew more busy. There were whispers by customers, talk of coming violence no matter the outcome. The sun set earlier than it had any right, and I found myself on one last bathroom break, seeing the first footage of the protests beginning not too far outside the building. As I clocked out and made my way down the street I could see photos of the very same street, a few blocks further down, of arrests being made. A car drove down the street with its bumper scraping against the ground, it sounded like a car crash in a constant state of occurrence. The screaming car and I kept almost perfect sync the entire length of my walk down the street.. It screamed over someone playing a saxophone on the corner of the closed-down Rite-Aid. It screamed over the guy playing folk music on his guitar next to the walk-up burger place. It kept screaming, down the street, towards the protests where people like me where being shoved to the ground by police. I did not follow it. I walked home and it was in complete silence that I stood on the street corner and watched the Sheriff’s new $6,000,000 helicopter flying over the city.

I watched John Wick with my girlfriend and I knew there was still screaming out there.

This morning I woke up and read four more issues of V for Vendetta. I played Planet Coaster 2 for just long enough to feel like I was wasting my time. I read four more issues of V for Vendetta.

I walked up the hill, I passed the grocery store I was regularly a machine at and saw they had their metal shutters locked down over the windows. One of my managers was on a smoke break outside and I almost said something but didn’t. I sat at a nearby restaurant and ate a burger and finished the last issue of V for Vendetta.

I’m home now, typing this while being mostly silent in a discord call with my friends. I don’t know if I’m hiding or surviving. I know this is not as good a thing as I wanted to write. I don’t know if I will ever let anyone else read this, or why they would want to, or what they would gain from it. I just know that as much as I feel like a fraud who copies the style of others, I know that I do not have the gift of memory possessed by the current writer I would be accused of copying if I let any of my friends read this. Maybe I’m just borrowing his style in hope I borrow the ability to remember all these details.

“Maybe they’ll give meaning to a plot one day.” is the god-awful sentence I typed next.

=====

It is now November 30th.

On November 12th I finally watched the film adaptation of "V for Vendetta". I watched it in a hurry, trying to squeeze it in before an important appointment I had before lunch. I had bought a DVD version a couple days prior but opted to watch it digitally instead, I feared the screech of my CRT.

I had been pleasantly surprised when I found the DVD on the shelf. It had somehow gotten into my head, perhaps the color palette or the concept of a dark comic character, that this was a Zach Snyder film. My brain lit up when I saw the Wachowskis listed instead. I could not think of better people to adapt this comic. I've found that many of the things my Dad did not enjoy or did not opt to show me have been because they do not line up with his personal beliefs. Naturally I've loved all of those so far.

Sadly, "V for Vendetta" did not live up to the vision of the film that spontaneously popped into my head upon reading the word Wachowski. This film pulls almost every punch. It waters down characters and motivations: it removes themes of drug use and sexual abuse, it takes away the agency of every supporting character, it keeps the film away from any of the story's original historical context. Re-ordering scenes for the sake of movie pacing is necessary but it does so with wild abandon. It is the big slop Hollywood loves.

This is a film by people who's extremely personal queer project had blown up to massive proportions. The public wanted Matrix sequels and franchising of the standard Hollywood variety and the Wachowskis did not waver in their vision. The people with money knew that The Matrix could have been the next Star Wars and the Wachowskis did not allow it to be. They were under pressure to create something mainstream again, and they were still deep in the closet.

So what did they do?

They made this film 15 minutes long.

"V for Vendetta", as directed by the Wachowskis, is the sequence consisting of Evey's imprisonment, torture, and release. It is untouched as it is from the comic. It is a shortfilm of raw queer emotion. It is an echo that reverberates from the 80s British Thatcherism it was birthed in by Alan Moore, to the 2000s Bush-era the Wachowskis fought to mass-broadcast it in, to November 5th 2024 as Trump was re-elected and I was quivering in the toilet stall at work, without losing an iota of resonance.

It lays there, between the watered down adaptation, between the storybeats with their sharp edges sanded, between the kind of flavorless dystopian fiction they feed us to make us feel like we're being naughty when we're not and the big explosions that do nothing but set off primal dopamine responses, between the removal of the stories' main theme of individual action (replaced with the common group uprising plot you'd see in The Hunger Games or Star Wars that is usually a type of Imperialism masquerading as Anarchy) and an honest to god bullet-time sequence that no doubt some exec said HAD to be in a movie with Wachowski in the credits.

Two hours of runtime exist to fool the Hollywood execs. Fifteen minutes belong to us.

I thought of none of these things the day I watched the film on November 12th. I watched it, I shut off my monitor, and I went to tour an apartment I will soon be moving into with my girlfriend. We are alive and we will soon be together.