Lloyd, David - V for Vendetta, issue 8, page 26 (Feb 1989)

The first page I ever paid a 'ridiculous' price for - ridiculous only at the time. I miss the days of the best art sitting on convention tables for $50. I must be getting old.

V for Vendetta was written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd. The series is set in a dystopian future United Kingdom imagined from the 1980s to about the 1990s. The series depicts a near-future U.K. after a nuclear war, which has left much of the world destroyed, though most of the damage to the country is indirect, via floods and crop failures. In this future, a fascist party called Norsefire has exterminated its opponents in concentration camps and now rules the country as a police state. V, an anarchist revolutionary dressed in a Guy Fawkes mask, begins an elaborate, violent, and intentionally theatrical campaign to murder his former captors, bring down the government and convince the people to rule themselves.

The first episodes of V for Vendetta originally appeared in black-and-white between 1982 and 1985, in Warrior magazine, a British anthology comic published by Quality Comics. The strip became one of the most popular in that title; during the 26 issues of Warrior several covers featured V for Vendetta. When the publishers cancelled Warrior in 1985 (with two completed issues unpublished due to the cancellation), several companies attempted to convince Moore and Lloyd to let them publish and complete the story.

DC Comics eventually published a ten-issue series that reprinted the Warrior stories in color, and then continued the series to completion. The first issue was released in September 1988 and the last was released in May 1989. The first new material appeared in issue #7, which included the unpublished episodes that would have appeared in Warrior #27 and #28.

By way of further background, V is the only survivor of an experiment in which four-dozen prisoners were given injections of a compound called Batch 5. The compound caused vast cellular anomalies that eventually killed all of the subjects except V, who developed advanced strength, reflexes, endurance and pain tolerance. Throughout the novel, V almost always wears his trademark Guy Fawkes mask, a shoulder-length wig of straight dark-brown hair and an outfit consisting of black gloves, tunic, trousers and boots. When not wearing the mask, his face is not shown. When outside the Shadow Gallery, he completes this ensemble with a circa-17th century conical hat and floor-length cloak. His weapons of choice include daggers, explosives and tear gas. The book suggests that V took his name from the Roman numeral ‘V, the number of the room he was held in during the experiment.