I recently finished V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. I have to say that I have mixed feelings about this book. On one hand, I very much enjoyed the fact that it was written out as a comic. Being able to actually see the action play out instead of imagining it in my head made the reading go by much faster. However, some of the pictures confused me as to what was going on and some of the characters were so similar looking to one another that I became confused more often than not as to which character was doing what. While there were some definite perks to having the book as a comic, I think that I would have preferred it written as a standard novel.
I think that comic books should be made for much shorter stories. While the comic was broken down into different volumes in V for Vendetta, I still think that there was too much going on. A lot of the time I was too distracted by the pictures to really grasp what was happening in the story. I would have to reread a blurb twenty times just so I could actually understand and process what was going on at that particular moment. While it was really interesting to see what the authors had in mind whenever they wrote the story, some of the graphics just left me more confused, especially in terms of which character was which. Could you spot the differences between Mr. Almond and Mr. Susan just by a glance? You couldn’t? Yeah, me either.
Can you tell who these three characters are? It took me a while too.
Earlier I stated that the pictures made the reading go by much faster and it is true that it went by faster. However, I don’t think that I was able to get everything that I could out of this book since it was written as a comic. Maybe it being produced as a comic made me take it less seriously. I felt like I didn’t need to focus on it as much as I would have if it would have been written as a regular novel. I also feel like I lost out on the detail of the story. Since it was portrayed as a comic all of the action of the story was drawn out. I feel as though I missed small details of the action that I would not have missed otherwise.
I guess my overriding opinion is that I would have much rather read this book as a novel rather than a comic book. I think that novels are more suited to my style of reading and processing the information presented to me. In a debate about comics v. novels one man wrote this statement and I find that I very much agree with it: