Alan Moore pretty notoriously wants nothing to do with any adaptation of his comic book work. In fact, he wishes “all the time” that he’d never even written any comic books, he says in a new interview with The Telegraph. He is so enjoying a well-deserved career pivot to traditional publishing that “It does make me wish that I’d maybe gone into writing prose fiction back in the late Seventies.”
He reportedly lives a humble life in his hometown of Northampton, England, where he has no use for any of the royalty checks coming in for adaptations of Watchmen, The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, V For Vendetta, and so on. At one point he’d offered his slice of the profits to the other creatives who worked on the adaptation, but “I no longer wish it to even be shared with them,” he tells The Telegraph. “I don’t really feel, with the recent films, that they have stood by what I assumed were their original principles. So I asked for DC Comics to send all of the money from any future TV series or films to Black Lives Matter.”
Nowadays Moore writes fiction, side-eyes the comic book industry from afar (“Now they’re called ‘graphic novels’, which sounds sophisticated and you can charge a lot more for them”), and stays home. “I’ve become used to a more virtual world,” says Moore, who along with his wife have health issues that make them more COVID-cautious. “And I’ve kind of forgone public appearances, partly because I’m a bit old and doddery—and, as I get older, as you can see I get more unsightly—but also I was finding at comic conventions I’d talk to people and they were looking at me like they were having some sort of religious experience rather than an ordinary conversation. So I’ve sort of retired into what I probably originally thought a writer’s life was like, where you sit at home and write books.”