Alan Moore – meet the man behind the protest mask --- Tom Lamont / Guardian

[Mira]

From Wall St to Athens and Occupy sit-ins worldwide, protesters are wearing masks inspired by V for Vendetta. Here, its author discusses why his avenging hero has such potency today


Tom Lamont
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 26 November 2011 15.05 EST





A protester wearing a 'V for Vendetta' mask at Occupy Madrid on 15 October.
The comic-book writer Alan Moore is not usually surprised when his creations find a life for themselves away from the printed page. Strips he penned in the 1980s and 90s have been fed through the Hollywood patty-maker, never to his great satisfaction, resulting in both critical hits and terrible flops; fads for T-shirts, badges and shouted slogans have emerged from characters and conceits he has dreamed up for titles such as Watchmen and From Hell. "I suppose I've gotten used to the fact," says the 58-year-old, "that some of my fictions percolate out into the material world."

But Moore has been caught off-guard in recent years, and particularly in 2011, by the inescapable presence of a certain mask being worn at protests around the world. A sallow, smirking likeness of Guy Fawkes – created by Moore and the artist David Lloyd for their 1982 series V for Vendetta. It has a confused lineage, this mask: the plastic replica that thousands of demonstrators have been wearing is actually a bit of tie-in merchandise from the film version of V for Vendetta, a Joel Silver production made (quite badly) in 2006. Nevertheless, at the disparate Occupy sit-ins this year – in New York, Moscow, Rio, Rome and elsewhere – as well as the repeated anti-government actions in Athens and the gatherings outside G20 and G8 conferences in London and L'Aquila in 2009, the V for Vendetta mask has been a fixture. Julian Assange recently stepped out wearing one, and last week there was a sort of official embalmment of the mask as a symbol of popular feeling when Shepard Fairey altered his famous "Hope" image of Barack Obama to portray a protester wearing one.
It all comes back to Moore – a private man with knotty greying hair and a magnificent beard, who prefers to live without an internet connection and who has not had a working telly for months "on an obscure point of principle" about the digital signal in his hometown of Northampton. He has never yet properly commented on the Vendetta mask phenomenon, and speaking on the phone from his home, Moore seems variously baffled, tickled, roused and quite pleased that his creation has become such a prominent emblem of modern activism.


for the rest go to:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/27/alan-moore-v-vendetta-mask-protest

[DJ13]

1. I hadnt seen this before you posted this article

[dipsydoodle]

2. and meanwhile

the mask earns Warner Bros, whose trademark it belongs to, significant sums. Nothing quite like supporting the Corporates. :sarcasm:

[Anatos]

4. "Chuckle"

Alan addresses that, quite well I thought, in the article. If you didn't click through, you might not realize that, eh?

[dipsydoodle]

5. Of course I realise that

don't change the fact that mugs are buying them. The movement might at least use a non corporate ID as did CND back in the sixties.

[Anatos]

6. I guess

they're just dumb and should all give up.

[Anatos]

3. It has always bugged me

a little bit how V for Vendetta, although a masterpiece, seems to get sole credit for the popularity of the Guy Fawkes mask in modern culture. As the article explains, it started with Anonymous, the underground organization of hackers who first rose up to battle Scientology. Obviously Mr. Moore's creativity was the springboard for that usage. But the very fact that he could and did use the Guy Fawkes mask for V is simply a testament to the recognizability of the idea of a Guy Fawkes mask. It does not come from a graphic novel, but from a long British tradition of celebrating a thwarted attempt to blow up Parliament. It isn't even original to Alan's work that this represents something of an ironic dichotomy in the English character, it becoming less clear over the years, decades, and now centuries whether it was the attempt or the thwarting which they are celebrating. A further irony for those who adopt the Guy Fawkes mask might be that, although it was not precisely a "ticking bomb" scenario, it appears that it was what we would today call "enhanced interrogation" that forced Guy to reveal the plot sufficiently to prevent any of the charges from detonating according to plan.

This ambiguity in the origins of the mask are entirely thematic. The reason we use the term 'guy' as a pointedly generic word for man traces from the effigies traditionally built to be burned in a symbolic continuation of justice for radicals and terrorists as symbolized by this hapless cretin. The very idea that Guy's face is a theatrical mask comes from the technique of somehow affixing a hand-drawn caricature of his face onto your stuffed Fawkes before parading him in the streets to his final (for this year) inflammation.

I was aware of all of this when I read the original V for Vendetta as it was published. I suppose most people aren't, and so it seems natural to them to consider that it "comes from" the graphic novel. It actually comes from much further back than that, and the reason Moore used it was because of that.