V For Vendetta (the graphic novel, not the movie)

I just finished reading the graphic novel yesterday. If you like dystopian fiction where there's no real "hero", and you know who Guy Fawkes is even if you're not British, then you ought to read this novel.

As for the movie...I ought to have learnt my lesson about seeing movies someone adapted from an Alan Moore comic, after The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which was an excellent set of graphic novels made into a crappy movie, and my friend Taliesin says the same of From Hell. Still, though I've not yet seen the V For Vendetta movie, something tells me I probably will. I know they totally changed the ending, but I was surprised to see characters listed in the cast list on IMDb that I expected would have to have been cut. This is a long graphic novel -- there's no doubt they had to condense it. So I'm curious about what they did cut.

But being the Wachowski Brothers, I'm expecting they'll be emphasising V's superhuman quickness in a fight -- which, while it certainly was there, and was pointed out many times, it was definitely not the focus of the story. Even more supernatural than his speed was V's ability to plan for every tiny detail in his complex plan for revolution, and his ability to carry it out with surgical precision, all the while quoting from various works of culture.

So far, I've enjoyed everything I've read from Alan Moore, which is a hell of a lot more than I can say about Neil Gaiman. Neil Gaiman's not so much a writer, as he is a collector and reteller of fairy tales and legends, and a weaver of atmosphere. As far as plot, pacing, and characterisation goes, his writing is weak. Much like Dan Brown's not so much a fiction writer, as he is a composer of essays on some neat ideas, and a writer of travel guides. Hmm, I could keep adding to this, but I think I'll expand on this and some others in a later entry I'll call "Writers Who Increasingly Piss Me Off the More I Read From Them."