v for vendetta

Did you think to kill me? There's no flesh or blood within this cloak to kill. There is only an idea. Ideas are bulletproof.

Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

Is there a more straightforwardly hauntological comic than Alan's Moore's V for Vendetta, the tale of a superheroic anarchist's mission to bring down a totalitarian government?

Like all good vengeful revenants, V schemes from thickly inked shadows.  Like all good political hauntologies, he embodies a set of undead ideas opposed to a dominant system. This embodiment runs deep. As illustrated by the quote, V is both man and idea. V's humanity is almost entirely earned by proxy through his connections to other more conventional and sympathetic characters. We never see V without his mask and we're told almost nothing about his past.

His status as an idea is given much firmer footing. Everything about V is political, from his quest to overthrow the government, to his ghosts of revolutions past presentation: a Guy Fawkes costume and a plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Even his base of operations, The Shadow Gallery, a repository of forgotten cultural artefacts, is a microcosm of a world sculpted by political values quashed by Britain's fascist overlords. More fundamentally, V has some of the key features of a concept. He's transmittable, non local and capable of evolution. Demonstrated when he passes the role onto Evey, his protege, (I'll leave you to think about her name) and ultimately the mob who claim the nation for better or worse to the sound of V's disembodied voice over the radio waves.

For all this, Moore isn't content to abandon the physical collateral of political change. The body, the human mind, both are sacrificed in pursuit of it. The bullet wounds received just prior to the moment where V claims to be bulletproof kill him a few pages later. V's origins lie in imprisonment and torture, and Evey's transformation into V's successor is achieved in much the same way. Eric Finch, the policeman who pursues the truth about V's identity is driven to the point of insanity by what he finds. V's entire revolution is built upon the pain of characters who Moore goes to some effort to humanise.

Because Moore understands that the political isn't cosily abstract, even when we're dealing with political entities that are lost, marginal or suppressed. Perhaps especially then, given that these are concepts whose exhumation entails opposition by those who support a vigorous ideology. All the best ghost stories are grounded in a costly struggle between the living and the dead.