Anyone who isn’t straight, white and compliant has been disappeared into concentration camps and Britain has long since been ethnically, socially and sexually “cleansed”. But the turmoil brought about by the conflicts allows hard-right organisations and surviving corporations to come together under the banner Norsefire, quickly establishing a dystopian, fascist order in a Britain on the edge of chaos.īy the time we meet desperate teenager Evey, about to be brutally punished by undercover policemen, Britain has achieved a sort-of even keel, though one without ethnic minorities, homosexuals, radicals, transgender people. A nuclear war has devastated much of the world Britain’s Labour government has succeeded in its disarmament policies so the UK is largely unscathed.
The story takes place in 1997 – which was at the time of writing the near future. The magazine folded in 1985 and DC comics picked up the series, first reprinting the story so far in colour (a suitably muted palette, but still akin to one of those ghastly “colourised” classic movies compared to the bleakness of the original) and then continuing and ultimately concluding the mini-epic. V for Vendetta was published in the 1980s in the avant garde British comic magazine Warrior.
