V for Vendetta Original Art on eBay

The artwork for V for Vendetta
offered on eBay

I'm selling an original piece of art from Alan Moore and David Lloyd's classic story V for Vendetta on eBay.

With the byline "We shouldn't have to live like this" - a line from the page - the art was first first published in Warrior Issue 19 (June 1984) and forms part of Book 2, Chapter 6: Variety.

The art came to me via David after I helped him with some pre-production work for another of his wonderful comics, Espers, back in the 1980s.

Initially appearing in Dez Skinn's Warrior, V for Vendetta was ultimately completed as a ten-issue dystopian comic book series published by Vertigo. It's a story set in a dystopian future United Kingdom imagined from the 1980s to about the 1990s in which a mysterious revolutionary calling himself "V" works to destroy the totalitarian government, profoundly affecting the people he encounters.

The page as it appeared
in print in Warrior

The series depicts a near-future Britain after a nuclear war, which has left much of the world destroyed, though most of the damage to Britain 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.

On the page being auctioned, after watching another gangster get beaten to death for the crime of speaking the truth, Evey asks her companion, Gordon, "We shouldn't have to live like this.  Should we?"

Gordon's answer:  "No, kid, we shouldn't.  What are you going to do about it?"

"In one of the best word-image juxtapositions in a comic that's loaded with them, V watches over this exchange," notes fan Marc Singer on his blog, "departing silently after hearing Gordon's complacent, defeatist answer."

Detail from the page for sale from V for Vendetta

This is original art by David Lloyd in very good condition. Be warned: I set a high reserve on this, which it has already met, given the amounts past pieces have sold for - and I will be making a donation to from the hoped-for sale to "Cartoon Classroom", a project I know is dear to David's heart.

The ambition of the Classroom is to provide a means of centralising all information available on the study of cartooning and sequential art in the UK and Ireland, and to facilitate easy access to tutors in these subjects for all recognised educational institutions.

• View the item here on eBay


• More about V for Vendetta on 'The Shadow Gallery'