V de Vingança

Every year I tell myself, "This is it! This is the year I'm gonna get into graphic novels! I'm really gonna do it this time!" Well it turns out my book club finally pushed me over the ledge because I was taking too long to do it myself. Kinda wished I was jumping into a better book unfortunately.

Granted it's been almost two decades since I last watched the film based off this work, but I still went into this expecting an almost singular focus on the titular character of V and his kinda sorta accidental protégé Evie. The graphic novel however spends a lot of time on several separate side characters, who I honestly got jumbled up and confused because they were all drawn as nondescript white men who all kind of looked the same. Also damn near every scene occurred at night or in a dark room (apparently they don't have indoor lighting in alt-history fascist Britain), so visually this was a claustrophobic and difficult experience. Maybe that was intentional, but for me the book suffered for it.

Also not sure what the overall message was meant to be; obviously our protagonist is directly combating an oppressive government, but it comes off as personal vendetta first (I mean it's right there in the title) and ideological crusade second. He's also one of the most Mary Sue characters I've come across in fiction: nearly unstoppable in hand-to-hand combat, a master computer hacker, capable of planting hundreds of bombs in multiple government buildings alone without getting caught, and has a massive hideout in the middle of London that somehow escapes an otherwise ubiquitous surveillance system. Definitely doesn't inspire encouragement for people living under a fascist government when the only way you can envision resisting it is to fabricate a flawless superhuman that cannot be emulated.

Overall not a great introduction to the format, and I routinely found myself wishing this otherwise compelling setting and story was told through a written prose medium.