The big breakthrough was all Dave's, much as it sickens me to admit it. More remarkable still, it was all contained in one single letter that he'd dashed off the top of his head and which, like most of Dave's handwriting, needed the equivalent of a Rosetta Stone to actually interpret. I transcribe the relevant portions beneath:Here's one of the cardboard masks from 1965.
"Re. The script; While I was writing this, I had this idea about the hero, which is a bit redundant now we've got [can't read the next bit] but nonetheless... I was thinking, why don't we portray him as a resurrected Guy Fawkes, complete with one of those papier mache masks in a cape and conical hat? He'd look really bizarre and it would give Guy Fawkes the image he's deserved all these years. We shouldn't burn the chap every Nov. 5th but celebrate his attempt to blow up Parliament!"
The moment I read these words, two things occurred to me. Firstly, Dave was obviously a lot less sane than I'd hitherto believed him to be, and secondly, this was the best idea I'd ever heard in my entire life. All of the various fragments in my head suddenly fell into place, united behind the single image of a Guy Fawkes mask. -- Behind The Painted Smile
our current Doofus Culture
Serious mindfuck, would OWS even exist without V for Vendetta.Well, OWS got started by Adbusters and some other groups. Would people have joined if not for the V masks? well, who knows. Would OWS exist if Hillary hadn't picked Mark Penn to run her campaign into the ground? Would OWS exist if Bush had chosen someone besides Dick Cheney to be VP?
The Everyman Superheroposted by homunculus at 10:06 AM on November 28, 2011 [2 favorites]
What Pekar represented to Moore were the small heroics of making one's way in life, of stealing quiet victories against a backdrop of disappointment and disadvantage. "Harvey came from Cleveland, where the creators of Superman came from," says Moore. "But Harvey represented a very different kind of hero that exists in real life.
"What I really admired about Harvey was, he was a resolutely blue collar artist, and one of only working class voices that I'd come across in comics with a level of political commitment, especially a left-wing one," he adds. "I mean, this man had a spectacular meltdown on the Letterman show about a strike going on at the network that it was not publicizing. He never tried to rise above that class."
Hence Moore's recoil at Frank Miller's recent diatribe against the Occupy protesters. "I've not really had any taste for Frank Miller's work for a couple of decades. I'm not surprised by his reaction to the Occupy movement," he says. "The superhero as an assertion of one strong man's idea, can, if not careful, be a kind of fascist approach, and excludes the complexities and nuances of modern life. It's opposite of what I believe and why I wanted to distance myself from those types of comics. I'm gratified by the wave of condemnation, because it's an affirmation his views not shared by a majority."
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posted by jwhite1979 at 4:26 PM on November 26, 2011 [9 favorites]