“V for Vendetta” by Alan Moore and Dave Lloyd is the graphic novel that was the inspiration for the eponymous movie by the Wachowski brothers. I was quite impressed by the movie and was eager to read the book. The book did not disappoint me at all. I found out that the movie and the book had many differences in the plot and the characters, but for once I did not mind it - in fact, I quite liked each of the forks in both the media.
The hero of the book is a masked anarchist, known only as “V”, who rebels against the fascist and totalitarian regime that has taken over England in the near future after a nuclear war. The regime has killed, imprisoned or evicted nearly all dissidents, blacks and homosexuals and tightly controls all media. The situation is somewhat similar to that in George Orwell's “1984”. Those of us outside England will have to know about Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot to be able to appreciate the book better, though the movie does a nice job of providing this background information in the beginning.
This was my first graphic novel and I really liked it. The only problems I had with it was that it was a bit too darkly drawn (literally) and that it was coloured in what I consider to be a very arbitrary and irritating style.