6. V For Vendetta Gave A Face To Political Protest
Had you popped into your local fancy dress shop in late 2006, buying a Guy Fawkes mask would have marked you out as a fan of V for Vendetta. Nothing wrong with that. It's a pretty cool costume. Now, however, it has taken on a rather more subversive edge. The mask (inspired by the film and, of course, its 1982 source graphic novel) neatly embodied the growing voice of anti-government dissent. Given that it was the face that almost blew up the House of Lords in 1605, the symmetry proved too sweet to resist. Emerging from Internet imageboards such as 4chan, the image was used by the notorious 'hacktivist' gathering Anonymous for their Project Chanology protests against the Church of Scientology. Later it became a familiar face at the Occupy Wall Street and London Stock Exchange demonstrations (with a masked Julian Assange putting in a guest appearance at the latter). Now it appears that Anonymous have claimed it outright. According to Time magazine in 2011, the protesters' adoption of the accessory had led to it becoming the top-selling mask on Amazon.com, with hundreds of thousands a year winging their way to demonstrations across the world. While it must have been a surreal sight for Alan Moore, the author of the graphic novel, to switch on the national news and be confronted with his own creation peering back at him, he admitted that the spectacle gave him ''a warm little glow''. But as the mask dissociates itself further from its original source, that warm glow may quickly disappear...