6. Alan MooreV For Vendetta
In some ways, V For Vendetta is a better comic than Watchmen. The art is probably better, it’s a little more politically sharp, and it’s more interesting from an emotional perspective. In that sense, it’s better than Watchmen, but for the reasons that I said before, the fact that Watchmen is so irredeemably pulpy, that to me is why Watchmen is a better or more interesting artistic piece, because it has it both ways. Plus Watchmen has more going on in terms of the layers of the narrative and the little pieces of the puzzle that you’re allowed to fit together in your own creative ways as a reader. V For Vendetta doesn’t have that game complexity to it, the way that Watchmen is like playing a game as you’re reading. V For Vendetta is just a really well written story with incredible art and a depth to the perspective that you don’t really find in a lot of other comics, especially at that time. But the flaws of something like V For Vendetta or Miracleman are that he wrote them as two different Alan Moores. There’s the chapters that he wrote in the early ’80s in the first part of his career and then he finished the stories in the late ’80s as a much different writer than he was a few years earlier. So V For Vendetta doesn’t have the kind of consistency that some of his other works do, and it suffers a little from that. But still nobody could make a list of the ten greatest comics of all time and not include V For Vendetta. Probably half the greatest comics of all time are Alan Moore comics; at least three of them are. And that’s an achievement that still hasn’t been topped.
