V For Vendetta #5, page 2 (Warrior #16, page 33) by Lloyd and Moore

Trust me, I will get to "V" in a little bit, but first, I want to talk about how, in 1984, I was hanging out in the English Dept. of UNCC talking with an assistant professor who told me he had played with Bruce Springsteen before "The Boss" had become famous. So, yeah, he was a way cool dude. He even loved comics.

At some point, he found out I liked comics, too, and he asked me if I was reading Swamp Thing. I had been, I said, as I liked Thomas Yeates' art but that the stories never quite connected with me. I was going to quit the book after Yeates left the book with issue 13, but some local North Carolina boys, the Hampton brothers, drew issues #14 and 15, and, well, I had to support Bo and Scott, but those were the last issues I had bought.

The cool professor told me that the book had a new writer named Alan Moore and that the writing had vastly improved. He even went so far as to say that Moore's writing was the closest thing to actual literature that he'd seen in a comic book published by a major comic book publisher up to that point. After a recommendation like that, how could I not check it out?

I went to my LCS and picked up the beginning of the Etrigan the Demon vs the Monkey King story. Well, Assistant Professor Cool did not steer me wrong, and, bonus, Steve Bissette and John Totleben were killing it on the art, so I quickly went and picked up the back issues I had missed.

I loved the book so much that, when I found a page from issue 29 at a con, I forked over $100, which was probably my expenses for a month or more back in those days. However, I loved that page. I framed it and had it hanging on my walls from that point forward... until I saw the page you are viewing now. I had been trying to find a good V for Vendetta page for a while, and Ruben Azcona of the Comic Book Art Gallery had this one in his for-sale-or-trade gallery.

I had started reading "V," "Marvelman" and the assorted other ongoing series in "Warrior," the famous British B&W magazine after my LCS started carrying it when Moore's popularity started to grow. Of the lot, "V" which was kind of like a cross between Vincent Price's "Dr. Phibes" and Orwell's "1984", was my favorite.

I think back then, Ruben wanted either an exceptional trade or (I may be slightly wrong here) $2500 cash (for me, an unimaginable price back in those days). Maybe because that page had been through a few hands at that time or maybe because "V" had not yet settled into its place in the pantheon of Moore's works, he had yet to find a taker. I really wanted that page, so I offered up any number of pieces, including, because I figured it was okay to trade a page from one of Moore's works for another, the Swampy as bait.

If I may say so myself, the Swampy, artistically, was, at the time, one of the better pages I'd seen from the series, and Ruben recognized this. It also had been off the market for 20 years, and hardly anybody back then had any Bissette and Totleben pages for sale. Anyway, we pretty much knew we had a deal, and after a bit more haggling (he made me throw in a 2-up Gil Kane Tower Comics page), the deal was done.

There are, to be sure, not enough superlatives I can say about David Lloyd's art. On this page, he drew some great images of V, who has made a TV program of his own where he is playing God ("Well done thou good and faithful servant,") telling mankind (the masses watching government-sponsored TV) that he is disappointed with them for letting themselves be ruled by a jackbooted authoritarian government. The great shots of V at the top are followed by images of the government forces breaking into the broadcast building in a counter-offensive to try and capture/kill the real V, who is holding the TV station crew as hostages as he forces them to play his video lest he blow them all to kingdom come with a suicide bomb.

Seriously, though I know some may disagree, the content on this page is up there with the best of the other pages I've seen from this series. I love the way he inks the figures so that none of them have solid outlines. Rather, the figures blend in with the backgrounds to create the illusion that they are solid figures. I even love the mechanical stats he added, which, when you look at the art, are placed so well on the page that they almost seem to be part of the art rather than added to it.

Anyway, at the time, Ruben and I were pretty convinced it was a good trade for both of us. He even gave me this great scan, so you didn't have to look at my crummy digital camera picture. (If you haven't already, go check out his site. He's a pleasure to deal with.)

PS
The Swampy changed hands at least three more times, and it disappeared into a private collection; I know not where. The Undersea Agent page, however, is (at the time of this writing) still in kelly b's gallery.