V For Vendetta: Between the Panels

Some of my favorite moments in V For Vendetta were moments in which no dialogue was occuring. In Understanding Comics, McCloud discussed having to read between the panels through recognizing different types of transitions, and Moore uses a number of these transitions in V for Vendetta that I believe added to the overall enjoyment I took away from the graphic novel. Unlike Blankets, which used a variety of creatively drawn panels to create meaning, the majority of panels in Moore's book are rectangular in shape, so it is easy to read the lettering while ignoring the visual aspect of the text. However, when no lettering is present for pages at a time, the reader is forced to try to understand the story solely from a visual standpoint, something a graphic novel can acheive that many other modes of writing cannot.

Page 77 of V For Vendetta is a page without lettering that uses multiple types of panel transitions. The page starts with a moment-to-moment transition in which the first two panels are nearly identical drawings of a gun. The third and fourth panels contain a subject-to-subject transition, and the rest of the panels are action-to-action transitions. The uses of these transitions in this order builds a momentum throughout the course of the page without the use of dialogue. Also, the very last portion of the book, entitled Vincent, contains no lettering at all; the entire four pages tell a story through drawings only, and it could be argued that every type of transition McCloud discusses is used other than non-sequitur transitions. It's cool moments like these that really make graphic novels stand out as a legitimate art form.