McCloud. V for Vendetta, and Sandman

In McCloud's Understanding Comics he explains to us on pages 178 - 184 that most artist must decide if they want their work to show a certain idea or point the author wants to make or does the author want to let the art take over and become his purpose and create ideas. We recently have read V for Vendetta and Sandman and so I question which of these two choices did each of the author's make?

I believe that both artists decided to write these tales for a specific meaning. We see in V for Vendetta that the message clearly stated is that people shouldn't let the government control everything and sometimes it takes anarchy to recreate the system of freedom and justice. Sandman seems to try and portrays a number of messages like how our dreams can basically control destiny and about our perspective of how the world works. Of course we must question how we get these messages out of the author's work and what is the signifigance of how they are presented?

McCloud writes in his book that an comic artist will use various iconic and non-iconic images to help portray their message. McCloud also explains to us that the transition of panels express a message of their own and they show that time has passed throughout a comic. We see in V for Vendetta that the panels are very orderly and the art very dark, so we can tell that the message from this is mainly about how society in the story is; the control of the government is very orderly, but there is no freedom in the panels and the darkness gives us a dark evil view of how the world in the graphic novel is run. We see the art in Sandman is rather bizarre and creative; the panels tend to be placed in random orders and sizes to help express certain parts of the story and we see that with these panels it is rather dream like with it's crazy approach. We get dragged into this creative dream style and it perhaps gives us an even closer feel to Dream as a character since he is the master of dreams and in a way he tends to bring order to the craziness we see. What about the art of the main character's though?

Well, McCloud discusses how people identify with a character on page 42. V in V for Vendetta does not truly have a face of his own except for his mask and in that since we can imagine that anyone can truly be V. This is proven even in the story because we see Eve take V's place; wearing his mask and costume and claiming to be him. Dream in Sandman is not as easy to identify with as V, but we can still identify with his bold nature and somewhat compassionate side for people, we view him as a hero figure much like V even if they do have their own agenda. V wants to create anarachy and change the world and we see that not everyone else wants this change to occur, but we believe V is doing the right thing for the people. It is possible however to say that V is doing this just for himself; even if he does not live after it he can find joy in the fact that his last act destroyed the thing his past tormentors had created. Dream of course we view as a hero because he challenges dangers and comes to show mercy on people like Rachel, John Constantine, and even Dee or Dr. Destiny; but he is also only associating with these people to recover his items that make him powerful, so we can not for surly say that he saved these people because it was important to him but perhaps it was just more convientent to.

So now the question is why or why not should we perceive these two as heros? I suppose that is only a matter of your own opinion.