When I first started to give a crap about politics.

I had no major awakening into politics. No serious event goaded me into the quagmire that is modern international politics. Like a lot of people who were teenagers during the 80's I was scared shitless by nuclear war, but it wasn't until later I started to think more about it.

I'm kind of embarrassed, but after the jump you'll see what got me interested.

Okay so it's comics. Or comic books as our American cousins call them. True, I was getting into punk music, and punk - good punk anyway - has always been at least a little political.

But there are three things I was reading as I went from a young teenager to an older teenager and then headlong into my early twenties that really got me thinking.

Crisis - Third World War. Crisis was a politically left-leaning comic intended for more socially aware readers released during the English indy comics heyday, populated by Deadline and Revolver. It was an anthology series, usually running serialised instalments of 2-3 stories every issue. The main storyline I was interested in was Third World War, a play on words that suggested a world war that was ongoing and invisible, largely because it happened in the third world. It concerned a multinational called Multi-Foods, and the quasi-governmental, semi-paramilitary 'aid' program, called Free Aid, they ran in Central and South America. The main characters were 'Freeks' - volunteers, discipline cases and conscientious objectors put together to perform propaganda and social acclimation projects. The main character was Eve Collins, a young English black woman, who was conscripted to Free Aid because she was a pacifist. She is joined by Ivan, a punk who got kicked out of military school, Trisha, a South African fundamentalist Christian ex-pat, Gary, a football hooligan and Paul, a shady deserter from Northern Ireland, as well as being a pagan, and a covert eco-terrorist known as Finn.

Third World War covered death squads, oppressive regimes, the oppression of indigenous peoples, near-slave labour for major corporations, food additives, propaganda, low intensity conflict, and generally a damning indictment of corporate globalisation. It was written by Pat Mills, founder of the English comic series 2000AD and a co-creator of their most famous character Judge Dredd.

As the years go by, I look back at TWW and realise that a lot of it is still valid and very relevant.

Give Me Liberty. Before Frank Miller turned into a complete fuckbucket, I thought his specualtive fiction take on a second American Civil War was brilliant. It was brutally tongue in cheek, and almost cartoonish in its simplicity, but for all that it had some very engaging characters, including its heroine Martha Washington, a poor black woman who joins PAX, a peace-keeping army. I find it almost impossible to reconcile that the man who wrote this is the same man who recently called the OWS protestors 'thieves' and 'rapists'. The series is almost politically neutral - it doesn't push an ideology, just presents a series of twisted caracitures. Later series of this title became rather silly pieces of sci-fi, but the first 4-part series is still worth an occasional read.

V For Vendetta. Alan Moore's chilling epic of life in a fascist, post-nuclear war Britain. At the time it was written, nuclear war was an ever-present fear, something that modern generations simply cannot fathom. Britain was also under the rule of arch-conservative Margaret Thatcher, so V For Vendetta was an idea whose time had come. VFV concerns an enigmatic rebel and possible lunatic, only known as V. He sets about completely destroying and toppling the fascist dictatorship that runs post-war England. The sight of jackbooted racists running England, and references to camps where non-whites, gays and dissidents were executed en masse makes for grim but compelling reading.

VFV is responsible for a lot of protest sloganeering and imagery that stays with us today. The Guy Fawkes masks used by Anonymous are not a reference to Guy Fawkes himself but to V. The film adaptation by the Wachowski brothers, while flawed, and not liked by Alan Moore himself probably shows us the most stirring use of the mask. With the fascist government toppled and the people freed, a vast crowd of people, robed and masked to resemble V lift up their masks. We see faces from earlier in the film as well as many faces of people the government had killed. It is a stirring moment that shows an oppressed public freed and the ghosts of the past avenged.

The occasionally seen phrase, 'People should not be afraid of their Governments, Governments should be afraid of their people' comes (I think) from the film version, but it's sentiment sums up something primal about civil uprisings and protest in general. It is a reminder that government is to serve the people, not vice-versa. Of the three VFV is the one most people will have seen references to without realising it. Although it is reasonably dated now, it is incredible that at the time, it was recognised so easily for the stirring, pro-freedom work that it is. I found it incredibly despairing that when the film version came out, so many people said 'But, V is a terrorist!' without realising that they effectively said they'd prefer to live under a fascist dictatorship than accept freedom from a man labelled as a terrorist. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter after all.

The other enduring thing from V For Vendetta is the very nature of V himself. His identity is discovered, after a fashion, but his (some have said her) face or name is never revealed. As V dies towards the end his message is that he must not be identified or known, he must remain an idea. This notion, too, is a current in modern protest, with 'you can't evict an idea' - one of the calling cries of Occupy Wall Street occupying this sentiment beautifully.

These were all formative influences, and probably why I remain an incorrigible old lefty to this day. They taught me that, even through fiction, evils can be revealed, and a sense of social justice can be engaged. Third World War was meticulously footnoted, referring time and again to real world evils that had inspired the fiction. If I could recommend any of them today, I would still recommend V For Vendetta and Third World War. Until Frank Miller pulls his head out of his arse though, leave Give Me Liberty off the list.