I finally got around to finishing V For Vendetta the other day. I’d wanted to read it before seeing the movie…how long ago did that come out?

Anyway, I have to say, and sorry comic book fans, but I didn’t much care for it. The story was just OK. In a nutshell, V is the name of a vigilante in a near-future England. There’s been some kind of limited nuclear war that’s left England pretty much an island unto itself (har har). The government is a melange of Nazi and Orwellian Big Brother regime, and V is trying to topple it. Heavy stuff for a graphic novel, and I bet the movie was pretty good.

But for me, it was the visual presentation that disappointed me. The art style felt muddy and out-of-focus. There were a lot of places where the details were so abstracted that I wasn’t sure which character was being represented. There were lots of expositional narrative ‘balloons’ but it often wasn’t clear who was narrating. If it was one of the characters’ voices or just an unbodied narrator. Sometimes these bubble would connect to dialog bubbles, but it didn’t make sense for the narrative and the dialog to be coming from one character.

Perhaps the problem was in the printing? Maybe the original comics were in a larger format and so things were more clear. Whatever the reason, though, I would steer you away from this print of V For Vendetta.

I’m still going to watch the movie though.