Who Owns Fu Manchu?

So, apparently in America we celebrate Guy Fawkes Night on March 17 now? (Actually, I'm not going to comment on the movie version of V for Vendetta, since a) I haven't seen it yet and b) I seem to be the only person in America not breathlessly interested in the status of Natalie Portman's shaved head and really, what else is there to say about the movie other than that?)

But I am interested in the comic book that it is based on, and in the complications behind Alan Moore's recent disavowals of the whole endeavor. As the New York Times reports, the noted author and crank wants nothing more to do with some of his greatest works. This includes V for Vendetta, which tells the story of an anarchist clad in a Guy Fawkes mask who works to overthrow a fascist government with the help of a 16-year-old girl. As he puts it, "...[the works] were stolen from me...knowingly stolen from me."

Now the obvious response here, of course, is "Cram it, Alan Moore," since by "stolen," he really means something more like, "given up by signing a lucrative contract transferring the film rights of this work to a known peddler of Hollywood pablum." (Yes, yes, the process was more complicated than that. My point stands). Yet what makes this brouhaha interesting to me at least, and what the New York Times didn't mention, is Moore's own interest in the status of literary property. His ongoing series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (itself subject to a rather horrifying cinematic interpretation) rests on the conceit that a group of characters from late-Victorian genre fiction--Mina Harker from Dracula, Alan Quatermain, the Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll, and Captain Nemo--band together to fight against a mysterious "Oriental" enemy. In the comic this enemy is never named, though it's clear from references and illustrations that he's meant to be the the devil doctor himself, Fu Manchu. Moore has acknowledged this in interviews and confirmed that the reason Fu Manchu cannot be named is because the character is still under copyright. Can we imagine Sax Rohmer, or H. Rider Haggard for that matter, rolling around in their graves grumping about their stolen property?

So how does V for Vendetta fit here? After all, Guy Fawkes isn't a literary character, he was a real, if possibly misguided, person. (And as an aside, I guess it's because I'm in the U.S., but I don't get the big deal about commemorating a failed act of domestic terrorism. No one's trying to celebrate the guys who got on board the Dartmouth but forgot their crowbar and couldn't open the crates of tea.) And the ultimate message of the comic is that, when governments oppress their people excessively, the people ought to respond by completely dismantling the structure of the society that created that government. I get that V sees himself as a facilitator of this destruction who must himself be destroyed for peace to continue (kind of like Chiwitel Ejiofor's character in Serenity, though on the other side), but why then would the "character" of Guy Fawkes continue into the new, post-fascist world, as it clearly seems to? It's because Moore can't really imagine a future which must invent its own cultural icons out of whole cloth--they need continuity in the form of Guy Fawkes, whose historical "reality" is now less important than the significance of his character.

Thus the reason Alan Moore is so cheesed off about Hollywood misappropriations of his creations, I suppose, is not just because they suck but also because of his inordinate faith in the power of literary/historical characters to act as self-contained beings that can continue to exist above and beyond their original narratives. If the characters act stupidly and, more importantly, uncharacteristically, as they frequently do in Warner Brothers releases, that's not only bad product, but a betrayal of creative responsiblity. It's a rent in the curtain that shows how vulnerable creative work is to the vagaries of the marketplace and the system of law.

In general literary fiction, doesn't play that way; the text is a specifically situated entity and the characters don't get to come out of that text and walk around doing new things (pace, Jean Rhys). But this is genre fiction, I guess, and maybe that kind of textual anarchy within a tightly controlled form is part of the reason I like genre fiction, and get hives around Michael Cunningham. I wish the text of V for Vendetta was a little better (David Lloyd's images are superb, I think) so that it could offer a stronger rebuttal to this historically-restrictive notion of art. As it is the comic just seems angry at the fascist government for killing off black people and their jolly music, and gay people and their beautiful art. But I applaud Alan Moore for trying, at least. It's much more common to hear old stories with new people in them, and I like that, but I also like to hear new stories with old people in them too. Just as long as they don't involve Natalie Portman's head.