Alan Moore - V for Vendetta

Noise is relative to the silence preceding it. The more asolute the hush, the more shocking the thunderclap. (p. 194)

Alan Moore's V for Vendetta explores power, morality, and responsibility, and it manages – incredibly enough – to do justice to all three themes. The novel is a powerful and intelligent story that's a classic of its genre, one that is far more complex than it seems (and it doesn't seem particularly simple to start off with).

[Note: the following review contains SPOILERS]

The first thing that has to be understood about V for Vendetta is that it’s a text filled with questions and bereft of answers, both on a large and small scale. Who is V? We never find out. We find out just enough to create a compelling theory, and we know the sensational parts of his back-story, but everything from his name to his childhood is obscured. V is an enigma, and he remains an enigma, the actual man insignificant when compared to what he represents. As he says: There’s no flesh or blood within this cloak to kill. There’s only an idea. Ideas are bullet proof. (p. 236) He does not fit the archetype of hero. His every action, from his outlandishly disguised identity to his quote-filled dialogue, is fit more for the stage than for the battlefield.

In mannerism, the character he most resembles is the Joker. Both came from backgrounds of chemicals and insanity; the joker (depending on your origin story of choice), some kind of deviant who fell into a chemical vat, and V a man sorely abused and altered by hormonal testing at a concentration camp. Each of them sport an almost comical grin whilst sowing chaos, and each is flamboyant in dress (a purple suit here finding its counterpart in long hair and cape) and actions. This Vicious Cabaret of V for Vendetta’s second act and the humorous man-as-employee speech of his is even similar to the Joker’s song in Moore’s Killing Joke (released shortly after V's serialized beginning). Of course, that’s not to suggest that This Vicious Cabaret is equivalent to the Joker's song or V to the Joker. Joker maliciously cackles and spouts discontinuities and absurdities; V soliloquizes and quotes Shakespeare, a Joker tied to an enormous and incomprehensible intellect and pitted against a foe so dark that the maniacal one of the pair is actually the hero. Norsefire, too, can be roped into the comparison. Completing the utter inversion of your archetypical comic book, the villain here is Batman. Batman and Noresefire both overpower their foes with technologies and are muted in tone when compared to the vibrancy of their antagonists. More importantly, both emphasize order over everything else; Noresefire perhaps being comparable to Batman’s utopia gone awry, crime prevented at all costs. Perhaps this was the end that Fox feared when Batman showed his technological mastery as The Dark Knight came to a climax.

So V is the good guy. But can you really call him that? V is a revolutionary and not in the blandly heroic sense. There are hard choices that must be made when overthrowing a society, and V does not hesitate to make them. He kills again and again over the course of the novel. Some of his victims are the high ranking fascists of Norsefire, and so the reader can, perhaps, give him a pass on that, thinking that tyrants deserve what they get. What’s harder to excuse are those that die along the way. V blows up several government installations, not only killing the leaders but every man inside from sadistic secret policemen to janitors. As we see in Vertigo (one of the two bonus chapters), V can even be sadistic in his pursuit of his goals, not only killing his enemies but striving to emulate their methods and degrade them even in the moment of their demise. Harder still to excuse is the psychological torture that V causes, both to Rose Almond and to Evey, whom he’d led to believe he would protect. V was made who he was through the brutality of Norsefire's concentration camps and experiments, yet he has no qualms about using the same methods to achieve his own ends; he has willingly embraced the effectiveness of the enemy in his attempt to bring them down.

In addition to taking Norsefire’s physical and interrogative methods, V usurps Norsefire’s symbolism. Norsefire was a fundamentally unapproachable dictatorship that communicated with the people by trying to make itself both unquestionable and down to earth. The voice of Fate accomplished both tasks, undoubtable due to its moniker and its lack of competitors and relatable by means of helpfully reporting the weather in the midst of its warnings. In order to compete, V needs to be more than a man. His guy fawkes mask becomes an icon, the mystery of his identity a larger than life dilemma that the government cannot solve. When he appears to the public, his tone is, as it almost always is, theatrical and humorous. Like the supposed voice of the computerized Fate, he sets himself apart from those he addresses even as he claims to have their own best interest at heart.

And yet one of Norsefire’s directors says that the the Noresfire regime never capitalized on symbolism, a statement that is simply bewildering. Norsefire is a totalitarian regime styled on the Nazis. Yet it claims to have avoided symbolism. How is such a thing even possible? Furthermore, the claim flies directly in the face of the regime’s use of the voice of fate. Thinking further, however, I realized that – with the exception of Fate – Norsefire is curiously devoid of the common trappings of an oppressive regime. There is no one unified style to the cities. The enforcement of law is left to openly acknowledged thugs recruited off the street, lacking even a recognizable uniform. Cameras are watching, yet we never see them do it. We’re told that Norsefire is evil and invasive, and we get proof of it to some extent in the first chapter’s sting operation (though, to be fair, such a thing’s not so outlandish that you need a fictional tyrant to conceive), but examples after that are hard to come by. Moore and Lloyd are so focused on depicting Norsefire’s fall that they essentially neglect its rise and reign. We see incredible brutality from flashbacks, but the present day storyline shows Norsefire as nothing much besides a tad invasive. Without ever seeing its effects on a significant number of characters, it’s hard to feel the organized evil that we are obviously intended to feel. Still, such things are easy to forgive. After all, the strength of Moore's writing isn't what it says about his fictional world but rather about what it says about our own.

V is an idealist. He is fighting for equality, yes, but he is not fighting for justice. V is, as he himself proclaims time and time again, an anarchist. This is not a sugar coated anarchism, soon evolving into democracy or whatever model of a just society you, the reader, happen to believe in. No, V’s byword is chaos, and disorder is his ultimate aim. As V asserts more and more of his power, and as the state crumbles around him, we are not entering a utopia. The dubious morality of the opening – prostitutes accosted, killed, and raped by secret policemen – is exchanged for a world of lootings and riots. Will this transition into something better, the security of Norsefire without the oppression? There’s no way to tell, but it’s plain that V could never bring such a world around, could not even stand aside and let it happen. That is why Finch, Norsefire's arbiter of justice, must kill him.

Finch is, in many ways, comparable to V. He shares V’s desire for equality and admits to himself that he knew that Norsefire was wrong, oppressive, and unjust all along. And yet he went along with them, joined them, played a part in leading them. Why? His own answer is weakness, but it’s not clear that things are so simple. V focuses exclusively on the big picture. In order to bring down Norsefire, he will do anything. On a personal scale, V commits horrible crimes. He is no common criminal, though, but rather a revolutionary; these small crimes are steps along the way. The people he killed entering the television station were necessary in order for him to broadcast his message and help the general good.

Finch chooses the opposite path. He is a police officer. For him, the personal crimes against individuals cannot be allowed to continue; he must hunt V down, no matter the cost or overall morality of the hunt, because V has killed those around him. In return, Finch does his best to turn a blind eye to the overall results of Norsefire’s actions. Unlike V, however, Finch is conflicted and unsatisfied with his choice. His world does not allow for the black and white absolutes of V’s. The regime he supports puts monsters on the streets and gives them guns and uniforms. It leads to rapes and murders on scales small and large, injustices that Finch cannot account or atone for. Pushed away from that society, however, Finch is cut adrift and wanders, aimless.

What will happen to society after V’s death? It is obvious that Norsefire was inimical to freedom and justice, and it is equally obvious that V’s perfect, utopian anarchy cannot last. But what is to replace it? We’re left, at the end, with Evey behind V’s mask, a new symbol to lead us into a new world. But what kind of person is Evey? The Evey of the novel’s beginning is obviously unsuitable for such a role. She bends her principles for her survival, an action too human to be grandly symbolic. Left without enough to eat, she tries to turn to prostitution, and only V’s timely arrival averts her untimely death. The Evey of the novel’s middle is, likewise, ill-fitting. She goes so far as to become happy with the enemy, living with one of Norsefire’s leading members and managing to turn a blind eye to the pain all around her. The Evey of the novel’s end, however, is a very different beast. Brought to and then over the brink by V’s molding, by his cruelty, she rejects her own wellbeing for the sake of her principles. She is, finally, fit to take V’s place. But is she fit to usher in a new world? She was, after all, made in the same way that V was. Is it possible to make two different creations with the same method? There’s no way to know. Our only hint to the positive comes when V offers her vengeance – and she declines. There is, as the novel closes, a chance that things will change for the better. And, of course, a chance that they will simply deteriorate further.

Towards the novel’s end, V says: There is no coincidence, only the illusion of coincidence. Though V seems like a reactionary beast, ala the Joker, he is actually a deep planner, though there's no way to tell exactly what was planned and what was a welcome coincidence. Every layer seems more impossible than the last, and yet each seems to support itself. However far down his machinations go, V is a master manipulator, and he plays the characters of the novel like puppets. Though he does, on several occasions, fight himself, V is not an action hero. Once the initial stage of violence has passed, V’s plan turns to one of building tensions and turning the hierarchy of Norsefire against itself.

When a key portion of your plot is concerned with the gradual changes in the relationship of a large cast, it’s obviously instrumental that that cast be both expansive and, more importantly, distinctive. The cast list seems to grow exponentially as the novel progresses, and some of the minor players can be hard to keep track of, but the various character driven twists of the ending feel organic and natural. Moore proves capable of characterization with only a few words, and the juxtaposition of scenes is excellent, though not quite to the degree of Watchmen. One scene shows various key Norsefire members conspiring in the pews while a preacher gives his oration, his words manipulative and apocalyptic while the various members of the directorate muse on V’s actions and their own.  

V for Vedetta doesn’t distribute its pages equally among its characters. There’s always one dominant storyline running, and other characters either appear in the periphery or not at all. As to what that dominant story is, the focus shifts considerably over the course of the novel, and there are quite a few sections focusing on events almost unrelated to V (though generally caused by him). These subplots are given their own space to develop, which makes the individual issues/chapters satisfying in their own right. On the other hand, some events that are never given the spotlight end up coming out as shallow. The head of Norsefire’s dependence on Fate is well established, but how quickly he turns into a slobbering mess after Fate is gone makes it hard to imagine him ever coming to dominate a high school technology class, let alone the UK.

Lloyd's art style is a dark one, realistic in feel for all but V, who struts across the page while fitting in as (brilliantly) poorly with his background as he does with his world. The best part of the art is that it is mature. This is a gritty text, devoid of the juvenility of sound effects and their ilk. All that being said, Lloyd seems to struggle with the volume of characters. I can’t conclusively say how much is the fault of his style and how much is a simple result of my relative unfamiliarity with the graphic form, but the secondary and tertiary members of the cast easily blend together, and a few main characters are, at times, difficult to distinguish. This is especially bad for the female characters, and that’s magnified further still by the scenes taking place in the more stylized location of the nightclub; I’ll admit that I had to reread an entire section because I wrongly identified the acting character in just about every frame of it.

If you're looking for a heroic read, something filled with heroes for whom you can stand up and cheer, V for Vendetta will fill your expectations for a handful of pages before leaving you cold and alone, sickened by what's passed. This world is sprawling, both alien and familiar, and it’s cast is treated horribly, often by the very people who (supposedly) have their best interests at heart. Though Moore isn't always successful at displaying life under Norsefire's regime, he's a master at showing how his characters attempt to cope with such a reality. In interviews, Moore's said that the inspiration for the book was his unease with Thatcher's government. Nowadays, in a world scarred by the twin towers burning, it would be perfectly justifiable to read the text as an examination of terrorism and the methods used to combat it. I predict that, decades from now, other potential readings will appear and will be just as valid, because what Moore's created here truly transcends the years in which it was written and the paper that it's written on.

FURTHER READING: 

Craig Klein has a fantastic and information filled "shrine" to V for Vendetta here.

Jeph Loeb - Batman: Hush

Jeph Loeb’s Hush is intense. If you are going to go into the book knowing one thing, make it that. This book is painfully difficult to put down, every scene flowing into every other with all the momentum of a train speeding off a cliff.

Of course, Hush is more than a collection of fun action scenes, though the main plot’s development due to it occurring almost entirely in the shadows of explosions and grand gestures. A large part of this is the narration of Batman’s thoughts which frequently color the scene and give information that would be otherwise impossible to convey.

Generally, these work quite well, but they bring up two problems. The first is the presence of Batman’s thoughts in scenes where Batman is obviously not present. Here, they act as more of an omniscient scene setter, but they are presented in the same style as the monologues, so telling the two apart is impossible. More important is Loeb’s tendency to litter fight scenes with thoughts, which works for the most part but can occasionally lead to the odd moment where the action is frantic and Batman’s thoughts are contemplative and, by comparison, almost bored, making it hard to really care about the action (you'll have to click the picture to read the text):

For reasons not completely clear to me, Jeph Loeb decided that Hush needed to include every single character to ever see a bat shaped light go off in the sky. As someone relatively unfamiliar with the Batman mythos, I saw a huge number of new faces, but familiarity isn’t required as Loeb does a great job of bringing you up to speed in a few quick lines. The characters themselves generally come off quite well, even though most are only given a limited space to develop, and though none of the sub plots are particularly important on their own, they each do a good job of keeping you interested while the main story slowly builds behind them.

Of course, there’s the inevitable straining of suspension of disbelief that occurs whenever you’ve got more than one guy in tights on the page at once. For the most part, this is handled well enough with the standard Batman characters. It is at times hard to see how the seventeen sidekicks that Batman’s had over the years don’t bump into each other all the time, but Loeb focuses on the character’s on screen well enough, and gives them enough depth, that I can forgive that. What’s harder to forgive are the characters that come from elsewhere, namely the Superman mythos. I’ll just say it right here: I don’t like super hero crossovers. It just seems silly. Still, when Batman was in Metropolis, I was able to tread the whole thing as a mildly enjoyable cartoon, but even that slight connection was blown apart when a super dog came on stage, and I laughed the rest of the way to the issue’s end. Thankfully, superdog didn’t make another appearance.

By far the most important of the side characters, and the only one to really stay with the story for more than five minutes, was Catwoman, who begins a romance with batman towards the beginning of the story. Their relationship is more commented upon than acted upon, which can be fairly annoying, though fitting with Batman’s character, but their interactions do lead to several good scenes and do serve to lend both characters more of a human side than they might have otherwise have had, as well as providing the lion’s share of the text’s rare breather moments.

In the final issues, the main plot that’s been, we’re told, slowly building the whole time starts to emerge. I specify “we’re told,” because, despite a few out of place events, most of Batman’s theories come across as pointing fingers at random and seeing Cthulhu in the shadows behind his dresser. Still, the last issues do a good job of trashing our expectations, and the several layers of reveals at the end had me quite interested in who the villain would turn out to be.

As for that villain’s actual identity (I won’t spoil the particulars for you), I’m unsure if it’s a brilliant turn or a cheap trick. If this is one of your first Batman comics, try as hard as you can to guess the villain. You’ll never get it, because the villain’s scheme relies on an ability wholly unknown to the newcomer, but obvious to the veteran. At the time, I was more than a tad annoyed, but, in retrospect, I’m not sure that’s fair. How much of bringing us up to speed is really Loeb’s responsibility? If the device is already established in the Batman mythos, I guess it’s fair game, so I won’t hold the trick against him.

The best word for Jim Lee’s artwork is iconic. Every frame and character that the man draws is larger than life, including the monolithic muscles under Batman’s suit to the fight scenes, which are just choreographed enough to have the feel of a martial arts master but just frantic enough to feel dangerous and unpredictable. Lee’s style is, in no real way, realistic, but none of his characters ever devolve into caricature, and he’s fluid enough for his super models to feel natural and powerful, fitting into the world rather than sticking out like an overly buff sore thumb:

Besides, the athleticism of the characters makes a degree of sense. Providing you weren’t immediately shot in the face, jumping from building to building to knock out criminals night in and night out would shape you up pretty well, I think. (Of course, that only explains one aspect of Lee’s universal male anatomy, and damn little of his female equivalent, but we’ll just let that slide).

When it comes to scenery and fight scenes, Lee is equally competent, blending subtle hints that bring the scene to life amidst the more boisterous elements of the artwork in much the same way that Loeb does with the plot.

At several points in the storyline events break into several strands, some operating in different chronologies, with the majority of the work of differentiating between them falling to the artwork. For the most part, different color choices keep the scenes distinct and provide each with its own feel, though the washed out palette of the recollections can make telling the details of the scene difficult. That could, of course, be argued as intentional – after all, it’s not like we really remember every part of that day twenty-five years ago equally – but whatever the intent, things have certainly gone too far when I mistook the two boys for each other on several occasions.

Hush can be a bit hard to take seriously at times, and not all of Loeb’s ideas work out with quite as much finesse as one might hope, but the ride is fun from beginning to end. If you’re willing to suspend your disbelief for a few hours, you won’t want to stop reading until the ending, and you’ll enjoy (almost) every minute of it. I wouldn’t recommend this to someone looking for their first taste of Batman, but if you’ve got a few Graphic Novels under your belt, Hush is an entertaining read.

Frank Miller - Batman: Year One

So far in comics, I’ve loved Watchmen and V for Vendetta, have been entertained by Y and Hush, thought the Killing Joke was very good, and have pretty much stuck with established opinion for all the Graphic Novels I’ve read. For Batman: Year One, however, it’s time to break out the dissenting opinions. Batman: Year One isn’t a bad story, but it’s not the titan that I’ve heard it was.

Though this story is supposedly the ultimate Batman origin story, the actual Batman origins portion of Year One is fairly weak. We begin as Wayne is returning from his training afar, when he’s on the point of beginning to clean up Gotham. But there’s no motivation. We don’t see Wayne’s parents killed, and we don’t see the resentment he’s built up over the years. Now, everyone obviously knows the basics and details of the origin story, but, without it being featured here, there’s no emotional core to the book. Batman’s here, and he’s pissed. There you go, that’s your character. Take it or leave it.

As for Batman’s martial skills, Miller creates a bizarre contrast between the realistic and the ridiculous. In the opening scenes, Batman kicks down trees. Later, he smashes a stone column. And yet, in his fight scenes, Batman is often in over his head and gets the shit beaten out of him at times. It’s totally fine to have an ungodlike Batman, and it’s (I guess) fine to have a stone smashing one, but, when they’re the same person, it’s just bewildering.

Unfortunately, Batman is a paragon of characterization when compared to Selina, catwoman. Selina is a whore who decides to leave her occupation and become Catwoman. Right there, you have the whole arc. There is simply no depth or motivation to the character at all. Worse, there’s no closure and no point to her existence. Alright, this is an origin story, so I suppose I should have expected some set up and all, but she quite literally affects the main plot in no way.

The best developed character – and, thankfully, the one Miller spends the most time on – is Jim Gordon. Gordon is the one straight cop in a city of criminals and crooked cop, and, to make matters worse, he’s held down by his wife’s pregnancy and his slowly developing affair with another officer. Gordon’s moral dilemma, and the odds stacked against him, draw the reader in more than Wayne’s bound-to-succeed struggles.

Still, there are some weaknesses here, too. The affair felt like it was taking us into interesting places, but when Gordon confesses the whole thing to his wife, we’re not even shown the following conversation. The overall plot, too, is both familiar and predictable, remarkable only for it’s over the top nature. Finally, Gordon is a martial arts master that makes Wayne look like a fool in tights. Not that this is necessarily a problem, but it’s just odd that the policeman is always much more confident in his fights than the super hero (not to mention that, as far as I’m aware, Gordon’s kung fu skills never come up again in the mythos).

Despite difficulties with character, Miller can get your blood pounding. The first portions of the book are more concerned with set up and detached stories than a building arc, but, later, things do kick into gear. When Miller brings his threads together, playing Batman off against the police, we are treated to some incredibly tense sequences. The ending, unfortunately, goes back to the model of the early stories, and, while it’s no doubt very traumatic for Gordon, it’s hard to even consider the possibility of a negative result.

A very large part of the story comes through thought. There’s generally nothing wrong with that, though it’s odd when the characters are narrating something incredibly obvious, such as when Gordon informs us he spilled his coffee a panel after he does so. The real annoyance with the style, however, comes when we’re hearing Wayne’s thoughts, which are, for some reason, written in a hard to decipher script.

The artwork has a rough feel that sacrifices detail for mood, or at least tries to. Ironically for something that, in its introduction, claims to be a far darker Batman, the artwork feels cheesy and cartoonish throughout:



This was a pretty negative review, I realize, and I should point out that Batman: Year One isn’t bad. It’s just that I was led to expect Watchmen, or at least The Killing Joke, and I got a basic origins story instead. Perhaps a large part of the appeal to hardcore comics fans is the difference in tone from other Batman works (which I’m just assuming there is from what I’ve heard, because compared to some of the other comics I’ve read – V for Vendetta, say – this was a walk through a sunny meadow). Billed as incredible, this isn’t so much bad as eh.

Alan Moore - Batman: The Killing Joke

So when you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there’s always madness. Madness is the Emergency Exit. You can just step outside, and close the door on all those dreadful things that happened. You can lock them away. Forever.

The Killing Joke is the familiar story of Batman and the Joker. We see the Joker begin his plan, some hints at the Joker’s origin, and then Comissionar Gordon and his daughter, Barbra, are at home, and the doorbell is ringing...

The Joker enters and, with no preamble whatsoever, blows both Barbara’s spine and any pretences of the rules away.

The Killing Joke is a psychological battle a personal duel between Batman and the Joker, where the stakes are reality. Convinced that all the separates sane from insane, perception from reality, is “one bad day,” the Joker puts Gordon through hell unimaginable. Shown photographs of his wounded, nude daughter. Stripped naked and surrounded by the deformed and the deranged. Subjected to the Joker’s arguments and ministrations. By the end of it, the Joker knows, Gordon will be insane.

The Joker is a mockery of everything that is human. Having seen beyond us, he is the master of everything that we are and hold dear. He is practically asexual himself, yet he strips Barbra and shows Gordon the pictures, all to destroy the man. At the height of his power in the novel, he speaks to his minions, those who have been enlightened, about humanity, and he does it by describing a creature in a cage, something obsolete, interesting in the same way as any specimen is, any part of the past, but something hopelessly inferior nonetheless. His expressions and poses are as manic as his dialogue. At times, he’s scared and almost comically intimidated, at others he’s maniacal, others terrified, and, at some times, he’s simply hidden by shadow:


Of course, Batman shows up, invited by the Joker. The two are opposites, diametrically opposed and fated to clash again and again:

I’ve been thinking lately. About you and me…We’re going to kill each other, aren’t we? Perhaps you’ll kill me. Perhaps I’ll kill you. Perhaps sooner. Perhaps later…Are you listening to me? It’s life and death that we’re discussing here. Maybe my death. Maybe yours.

Batman and the Joker are opposites, yes, but they are more than that. They are two heads of the same man, victims to that same One Bad Day, each taking a different lesson from their catalyst. The Joker dedicated himself to destroying that existence that he’d once had, proving to the rest of the world that darkness is all that matters. Batman dedicated his life to preserving the reality that he no longer shares.

The Killing Joke is marred by two flaws. The first, and the lesser, of the two, is Gordon’s sanity at the end. Now, I’m not disputing the end result. What I do have a problem with is that we never really see him change, at all. I don’t know if a man would truly break, no matter the man, in circumstances like those here, as the Joker claims, but it’s clear that it would change him. While I’m sure that Gordon does change, in the course of the narrative, we don’t see it. We see his horrified, naked figure as he’s tormented, we see him a cage, and then, at the end, we see him say: “I want him brought in by the book.” There’s no indication that Gordon felt anything at all; we are kept entirely out of his head, leaving us with a perfect picture of both extremes, but nothing much in the middle, no real grasp of how the common man fits into the picture.

My other complaint stems from Gordon’s aforementioned line. Let’s look at that for a second: “I want him brought in by the book.” Uh, by the book? Excuse me? I’m pretty sure that the book does not include a masked vigilante chasing down the criminals, beating them to a bloody pulp, and then handing over the leftovers. In fact, I’m pretty sure that that’s as far from any police procedural as you can get.

The second flaw is far more important. The Killing Joke is a novel that explores the human psyche, but it’s one that does so from firmly within the formula of its genre, and it even goes so far as to call attention to the tropes that it’s obeying…because. At times, it’s hard to feel like anything in The Killing Joke matters. Batman’s sending Joker back to Arkham, but neither character even bothers to pretend it’s the last time, and both of them openly acknowledge that there will be a final showdown someday, but certainly not here. The possibility that maybe Batman won’t find the Joker, or that the Joker will win, or that he’ll get away, none of that is even considered here.

The atmosphere and psychological aspects of The Killing Joke come off brilliantly, but the page turning suspense that one assumes to be the core of a super hero comic is totally missing. Still, if you’re a Batman fan, or are just curious about the genre, this is a great read.

Graphic Novels

[This is a Breaking New Ground post]

Graphic novels are a bit different from Urban Fantasy in that, if I’ve ever truly looked down upon them, that period ended long ago. Still, for the longest time, they just didn’t seem like something I’d be interested in. Why would I want to read a book where half the imagining was done for me? It almost seemed like a worst-of-both-worlds between books and movies, where the images hamstring your own mental picture, while the lack of motion leaves said images static and unimmersive. Besides which, I just wasn’t sure that there were any stories told in Graphic Novels that I would actually want to read. From my ignorant outsider’s perspective, all I could see was pretty much super heroes. Now, I used to love super heroes – and perhaps I still do, because I think that The Dark Knight was several hours of sheer perfection – but I wasn’t convinced that you could make a convincing book out of a guy who beats people up while wearing tights and a cape.

Then, back in April, I read Watchmen. Well, that was the end of any real prejudice on my part. The story was excellent, and the super hero framework made it quite plain that it would never have succeeded in another form. At the time, I said (in my Reading in April post) that Graphic Novels were: “something I’m going to definitely try and do more of, now.” Months later, I’ve read followed that initial success with…nothing.

So, unlike the Urban Fantasy challenge where I’m trying to go from distaste to some degree of enjoyment or at least a position of knowledge, here I’m just trying to read some fun stuff. But, seeing as this was a challenge, I did decide to jump in at the deep end of my old apprehensions about Graphic Novels. It is, it seems, superhero time.

Now, I originally did the same thing as I did for the other Breaking New Ground post. The problem is, there I actually researched the books. Here, knowing nothing about the field, I figured out what to read by the highly scientific method of emailing someone I’d seen reading a book with pictures in it, specifying that at least some of the five had to involve super heroes. In the end, I decided that writing several hundred variants of she said to read this one. And this one! would get sickeningly old, so just pretend it says that under the pictures if you want.

Anyway, the five lucky novels are:



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Seeing as I doubt I’m going to really hate any of these, I’m not going to bother with the Breaking New Ground posts that are following the Urban Fantasy reviews and just stick to the tried and true schedule of reviews broken up by random musings.

And yes, I’m aware there are seven titles here. Blame the person who picked them.