Considered one of the greatest minds in his field, Alan Moore's most notable contributions to the comic book community are Watchmen and V for Vendetta. In the case of Watchmen, Alan Moore's work wound up paving the way for more mature depictions of superhero media. This medium which, at first, originated as family-friendly content (if not made specifically for children) was suddenly drenched in an unrecognizable coating of blood, sex, and violence. Without Watchmen, the world may have never gotten works in a similar vein, like The Boys. Not only that, but Watchmen is perhaps the earliest, most popular example of a graphic novel that uses superheroes as a deconstruction of real-world events, deconstructing the very idea of super heroism in the process.
On the other side of the coin, V for Vendetta has been just as influential, albeit in drastically different ways. While an argument can certainly be made for V for Vendetta also changing the way that comics are consumed and crafted, this graphic novel paved the way for how citizens exercise their right to protest. The protagonist, V, dons a Guy Fawkes mask to carry out his extreme acts of activism. Similarly, protestors in real life have adopted the mask as a symbol of (usually anti-government) activism to enforce their respective social messages. Most notably, the mask is recognized as the symbol for the popular hacktivist group Anonymous, as well as being featured prominently in anti-establishment protests like the Occupy Movement.
Alan Moore takes pride in the legacy left by V for Vendetta, so he tells The Guardian. "I can’t endorse everything that people who take that mask as an icon might do in the future, of course. But I’m heartened to see that it has been adopted by protest movements so widely across the world. Because we do need protest movements now, probably more than we’ve ever done before." Alternatively, he's not nearly as proud of the legacy he paved with Watchmen and the content that followed:
I didn’t really think that superheroes were adult fare. I think that this was a misunderstanding born of what happened in the 1980s – to which I must put my hand up to a considerable share of the blame, though it was not intentional – when things like Watchmen were first appearing. There were an awful lot of headlines saying ‘Comics Have Grown Up.’ I tend to think that, no, comics hadn’t grown up. There were a few titles that were more adult than people were used to. But the majority of comics titles were pretty much the same as they’d ever been. It wasn’t comics 'growing up.' I think it was more comics meeting the emotional age of the audience coming the other way.
The Distinction of Inspirations
It's interesting, maybe even ironic, that Alan Moore prefers one legacy of his works over another. It's ironic because both have an enduring legacy that went on to define the mediums they represent: the act of protesting for V for Vendetta and the comic book medium for Watchmen. It seems like Moore's biggest gripe with Watchmen is it's been suggested to be a definitive comic, defining the medium as a whole. For something to be definitive, it has to be the perfect representation of the medium itself. Watchmen isn't so much a "definitive" of the comic book medium as much as it is a subversion of it, as Moore's intention was to make a work of fiction for the audience who grew up reading the family-friendly Golden Age comics as children. This isn't to say that all comics are more adult-friendly, or even that they should be, as far as Moore is concerned.
What makes V for Vendetta more definitive in the protest medium than Watchmen in the comic book medium is because of the shared anti-government ideals between the V character and the real-life protestors who adopt his mask to send a message.
Source: The Guardian
