BEHIND THE MASK!
London’s Cartoon Museum is a unique venue that champions cartoon and comic art, highlighting its value to culture and society. Through their programme of exhibitions, events and workshops, they aim to conserve and provide access to Britain’s cartoon and comic art heritage, encourage participation in and raise awareness of a popular art form and support new work by cartoonists and comics artists.
They are also currently running a very intriguing exhibition which invites you to step inside the story and characters of one of the world’s most iconic graphic novels, V for Vendetta, illustrated by David Lloyd and written by Alan Moore.
The exhibition, entitled V for Vendetta: Behind the Mask, comes at an appropriate time when interest in V for Vendetta continues to rise. Original pages of David Lloyd’s work have been sold at auction for over £20,000, while the graphic novel continues to top best-seller lists four decades after its original release. And the central character of the masked and mysterious ‘V’ became an iconic symbol of comics, cinema and the hacker group, Anonymous. Its cultural impact, spanning nearly 40 years, is explored in the exhibition through 36 original artworks by David Lloyd, including black and white pages and colour paintings. These are displayed alongside the original mask worn by Hugo Weaving in Warner Bros’ blockbuster 2005 movie adaptation, one of only three that were used during production, as well as costume designs and storyboards.