Reagan and Thatcher were attacked for refusing to allocate federal funds for AIDS research. The AIDS virus killed millions of people during the 1980s, most of them homosexuals. Reagan and Thatcher were widely criticized for their indifference to blacks, feminists, homosexuals, socialists, and other demographic groups whose identities were said to oppose “traditional moral values.” Never was this clearer than during the AIDS epidemic. During this decade, Ronald Reagan was the President of the United States, and Margaret Thatcher was the Prime Minister of England. Another important event to which V for Vendetta responds is the rise of conservatism in both the U.K. The premise of V for Vendetta is that this war has occurred: both Russia and America have been destroyed, along with Africa. and the United States would result in a nuclear war, which could easily destroy the entire planet. There was widespread fear that the arms race between the U.S.S.R. increased their defense budgets and devoted huge sums of money to building more nuclear missiles. Their competition took many forms, and perhaps the most notorious was the stockpiling of nuclear missiles. (Although it would end only two years after the graphic novel was published.) The world’s two dominant superpowers, the United States and the U.S.S.R., competed with one another for economic and political control of the world. At the time when Moore was writing V for Vendetta, the Cold War was still a reality, and was, in many ways, still escalating. V for Vendetta alludes to many historical events, some of the most important being the Cold War, the conservative values of the Reagan/Thatcher era, the AIDS epidemic, and the Guy Fawkes Gunpowder Plot. Moore has been honored with virtually every award given for comic books, and his comic Watchmen was included on Time Magazine’s list of the 100 greatest works of fiction written in the 20th century. Since 1990, he’s worked on more than 50 graphic novels, including From Hell, a reimagining of the Jack the Ripper murders, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, an adventure comic featuring heroes of Victorian literature, and Promethea, which blends comic book conventions with Kabbalistic traditions. In 1989, Moore completed work on V for Vendetta, one of his most popular works. Arguably Moore’s best-known work is Watchmen, which was released between 19. Moore was widely praised for “deconstructing” the Swamp Thing character, essentially writing a satire of comic book superheroes themselves. His major career breakthrough came in 1983, when he was hired by DC Comics, the most prominent American comic company, to reinvent The Saga of the Swamp Thing, an old, unpopular comic strip. He became known as a quick and creative writer with a strong visual sense, and all in all, he wrote more than 50 stories for 2000AD. Moore worked as a freelance comic strip writer, often writing stories for other people’s characters. In 1980, he finally succeeded in selling an idea for a comic strip in 2000AD. It was Moore’s dream to write for 2000AD, the most prestigious comic magazine in Britain at the time. It was during this period that Moore married his wife, Phyllis, and had a child, Leah. For the next five years, Moore earned less than 50 pounds a week. He didn’t begin writing and illustrating comic books full-time until 1978, when he sent his first cartoons to the music magazine NME. Following his expulsion, Moore worked a number of odd jobs, including toilet cleaning and tanning. It was also around this time that Moore began experimenting with drugs like LSD, and in 1970 he was expelled from his college (the English counterpart to American high school) for drug use. As a teenager, he began sending in poems and essays to local newspapers. He was a voracious reader as a child, and showed a talent for drawing and writing. Alan Moore was raised in an impoverished part of the United Kingdom.
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