This Never Would’ve Happened Under Harold Ross

I got so distracted by the boneheaded political grumbling in David Denby’s V for Vendetta review for the New Yorker that I overlooked a more glaring problem: Denby’s claim that “The Phantom of the Opera, Batman, and the Darkman graphic-novel series that was made into a movie in 1990, by Sam Raimi, are obvious influences” on V.

Which isn’t wrong, exactly—except that, John Hodgman mentioned in an email pointing that passage out, there has never been a Darkman graphic-novel series. First of all, the film wasn’t an adaptation of a comic book; it’s Sam Raimi’s original story. Second, although there were Marvel Darkman comics in the ’90s, and Dynamite is about to launch a new series, there’s a major difference between comic books and graphic novels…especially when the comics in question were never collected into trade paperbacks (although the three-issue adaptation of the original movie was collected in a single-issue magazine format). It’s a sad day when an error this blatant—and so easily avoidable—manages to slip past the New Yorker fact checking department. And the funny thing is, I’d give even money that the original V for Vendetta comics were, in fact, an influence on Sam Raimi.

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