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Our friend Noel Orosa, an avid reader of graphic novels, spoke to David Lloyd, creator of V for Vendetta and most recently, Kickback.

Photo: Graphic novelist David Lloyd

Noel Orosa: How did you come up with the idea of not having the usual comic book sound effects like “kaboom” in V for Vendetta and keeping the page silent?

David Lloyd: Well it’s because I wanted to make the experience of reading V as close to the narrative experience of watching TV and cinema as possible and that’s why it was all designed for that effect.

It was all rectangle – because the medium through which we experience comes in mostly rectangles- and so that was the basic philosophy behind that.

But on top of that I’ve never really liked sound effects. If you’re talking to intelligent adults, you shouldn’t treat it like a children’s fantasy. If you’re telling stories to 6-year-olds then a sound effect like kaboom is an interesting decoration for them—it makes it nice and colorful—it’s for kids. But if you’re telling an intelligent story, there’s actually no reason to use it and it will co-opt any adult who is not familiar with comics. Immediately. Which it has done for decades.

NO: Somehow because there are no sound effects it makes things noisier.

DL: Absolutely, because with sound effects you read the sound effects—but of course it takes the skill of the artist to make that explosion, um, explosive.

NO: I read that, unlike Alan Moore, you were happy with how the movie V turned out. But if you could change anything about the movie, how would you change it?

DL: I would change it radically. I would make it as close to the original as could humanly be done within a cinematic context, within the structure of the two hours it runs. But you would expect that from me because I’m one of the originators.

The reason I was happy with it was because I knew that the intentions of the creators were honorable. And Larry and Andy (The Wachowski Brothers, who wrote the screenplay) were big fans of the original. They had written a screenplay some years earlier, which was closer to the original than the final script.

I think I was realistic about the situation of Hollywood. Hollywood has to speak to a bigger audience, speak to a larger demographic. There’s masses of money involved. So I was just very happy that it turned out the way it did. What I say to people mainly was that what was left in was more important than what was left out. There were strong performances in it. It’s well-directed. It’s powerful in some ways. It maintains the central message of V, which is the importance of the individual to hang on to his or her individuality or cause. And so I had no problems with it.

Alan’s got a different viewpoint and I respect that. I was happy that it was as good as it was.

NO: How did you come up with the idea of the Guy Fawkes mask in V?

DL: Well he had to have some mask of some kind. He couldn’t have operated in a public arena—especially in a world that was populated by CCTV cameras without being masked—so that mask was essential. It was not just a mask, it was his identity—his whole demeanor, his whole costume— because we had most of the pieces of the jigsaw of the story together apart from the appearance and the motivation.

We had a basic motivation. But his appearance was something that eluded us. And mainly, the problem was we wanted something that was kind of eccentric and flamboyant. Even though I didn’t have too much concern about that myself—it was something that Alan was concerned about. Because I was happy with a kind of prosaic urban guerrilla rather than somebody too theatrical, too flamboyant.

But Alan was interested in that, and, it was just one of those crazy brainwaves that I had that it would meet our needs if the character was a kind of resurrection of Guy Fawkes who had respect for this—our historical revolutionary who was executed by the establishment—and we need this kind of resurrection and it fit it just worked perfectly.

And as a person, Guy Fawkes was a very interesting character: he was both hero and villain, a terrorist and a freedom fighter. For centuries we had a festival where we burned an image of him. So in the general public’s mentality by the time we created V, Guy Fawkes as a celebration was beginning to fade.

And now the festival is not celebrated like it used to be. Halloween is more important now even though it’s an American festival. But at that time he was still an important figure in the public consciousness. But in historical terms he was only a hero to the Catholics because he was fighting the catholic cause.

But I have no religious interest at all. I’m interested in the catholic philosophy—guilt being expiated by atonement—which I think is a flawed catholic philosophy, I don’t want to get into that. But that idea of using Guy Fawkes was just a crazy brainwave. And it worked.

NO: How was the process of working with Alan Moore?

DL: It was a collaborative process.

Originally I’d been asked to create a kind of masked vigilante for this magazine which was similar to something else I’d been involved with a couple of years before called Night Raven who was a kind of crime fighter, and originally I was asked to write and draw it myself. But I knew Alan well at that time. And he was a brilliant writer and I was absolutely convinced that if Alan wrote it and I drew it, it would be a much better product than if I did it myself. And so I asked Alan if he wanted to work on it and we got together and we brainstormed it into shape and we both had similar ideas about an urban guerrilla fighting a totalitarian dictatorship and so we end up combining those two ideas, talking about the setting and then we brainwaved on Guy Fawkes and that’s it.

In a lot of comics we have what we call a full script, which is where every panel is described either briefly or in great detail together with the dialog and the captions that will go in that panel—and Alan works with full script.

What would happen was Alan would write a breakdown of the action of one book, which comprised a series of episodes, which would cover a whole sequence of actions, and we would talk about that, agree it, and Alan would write an individual script. Then when I got the individual script, if there was something, some change mainly in storytelling that I thought would work, like, changes in pacing or breaking frames up into more than one frame because I thought it would work or changing something I thought was more dramatic, then I would talk to him about it and we would agree it. And then before it was actually sent off to the editor he would see a copy of it.

I would have it lettered—somebody else would do the lettering—I would stick it on because I wanted to break the lettering artistically and in the correct form, so I would do that. And that’s how we worked book by book. Alan really supplied us first with a full script.

NO: Was Stan Lee unhappy with your illustration for Night Raven as previously reported?

DL: I don’t know where you read that.

One thing that’s true was that when I—I don’t know this is a very long complicated situation—when I was asked to do Night Raven I was asked to do the visualizations.

Visualization is: you create the character—what it looks like— you create the mask and the appearance of it.

When I did that I was told that I had full control over that. But it turned out that I didn’t because when I did the visualizations I was told that what they wanted was something different.

So my character was more of a Marvel-type character. He wore a flying jacket he was like Indiana Jones before Indiana Jones and I thought that was a natural because it was an action character and Marvel Comics were about action. So that’s what I created, but the editor and the writer wanted something like film noir. They wanted something that was like a guy in a trench coat so that’s why I had to give him a trench coat. And they wanted it to be more mysterious so it kind of cut out the action and made it more moody and I thought it was a bad idea because it was for Marvel.

Any criticism that came later on is entirely involved with that. I had the idea that I was working for Marvel and I created the character that was tailored for Marvel but the editors and the writer actually forced me not to do that and in fact later on when there was criticism from Marvel—I don’t know if it came from Stan Lee—I put more Marvel-style action into the story in a visual sense but it didn’t help. They took me off it and in fact, ironically, they took me off the story, they got another artist who’s also a great artist but an artist who was doing a very conservative style of work. So instead of giving it to someone who was going to knock up the Marvel atmosphere, they gave it to someone who actually knocked it down.

And shortly after that, the series ended so I think what you could describe it as was a fuck-up from day one.

But it wasn’t my fault. But that series was very important for me because with what I did with it, I did get a following. The work I did on that got a lot of interest from people, and it was a breakout.

NO: A lot of the things you do when you plot out a page or when you do your illustrations—they seem pretty intuitive, almost like it’s common sense—and it’s the only way to do things.

DL: A lot of things are intuitive. You’re either good at telling a story or you’re not good at telling a story, and I had great role models.

There were lots of experiments in V: There was a sequence in which we used a spiral stair case where Evey and V were having a conversation as they went down the spiral staircase and that was something I came up with because we had this conversation in the Shadow Gallery but you had no idea where it should be. So he gave me that and I said why don’t we—we had a lot of things in the Shadow Gallery, we had a spiral staircase—and I had this idea of timing it so the conversation worked as they went down the spiral staircase but that was because we had lots of time to think, you know—the original work was done from 6 to 8 pages a month so it was a very easy way of working. This is one of the reasons why V is so good: in the early days, we had time to think.

NO: Your pages look so cinematic.

DL: Film is my main influence, really.

When I was a kid, I read some very basic British comics. But I didn’t really start reading American comics until I was about 14.

My main influence was always the cinema, I thought, when I was a kid, I mean we were a TV family. My Dad used to work nights so we didn’t spend a lot of time going out. We were mainly watching TV and I love TV.

They were showing movies and I love Orson Welles and Hitchcock and David Lean.

NO: What inspired you to come up with Kickback?

DL: Well, I’m a big fan of crime movies too.

Kickback mainly comes from my love of crime movies in the 60’s and 70’s. I’ve always wanted to do a graphic novel that’s like my favorite crime movies and when I managed to get around to doing something substantial like Kickback I want it to be that.

NO: Does V reflect your politics?

DL: Alan Moore believed that anarchy was a viable way of running a society but I don’t believe that at all.

I think it’s a dream—it’s a great dream but it’s a dream. Human nature is incapable of embracing anarchy in a true way. I’m anti-fascist and anti-totalitarian, basically socialistic, and at the time we created V—this is an important thing—the British national party was gaining power and that’s what really spoke to us at the time. And this is why we both had the same idea about an urban guerrilla fighting a dictatorship in a near-future England because we thought it was a possibility but our model for the society of V is Germany in the 30’s. Because Germany in the 30’s was when ordinary decent people were seduced by a monster.

Kickback is available at National Bookstores.