From Watchmen to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to Batman: The Killing Joke to From Hell to V for Vendetta, many of the biggest comic book adaptations of all time are based on works by Alan Moore. The British author is one of the biggest names in the comics industry, with his works counted among the most influential in the medium; for instance, Watchmen is the only graphic novel named in Time’s 100 Best Novels of all-time list.
Despite all of the onscreen versions of his works, Alan Moore has disowned all of them. There an are numerous reasons for this, but mainly he seems to think that in giving his work the “Hollywood treatment,” the studios remove the deeper meaning of his comics.
Take HBO’s Watchmen show, produced by Damon Lindelof and aired in 2019. The series was set after the events of the comic book and served as a standalone sequel, unconnected to Zack Snyder’s popular movie. Watchmen was a huge success among critics and fans… but Moore never bothered to watch it. In fact, he didn’t even want his name attached to it, and used his royalties to support the Black Lives Matter movement. From now on, he’s requested to DC that all royalty money be sent to BLM.
“I don’t really feel, with the recent films, that they have stood by what I assumed were their original principles,” Moore said in an interview with The Telegraph. “So I asked for DC Comics to send all of the money from any future TV series or films to Black Lives Matter.”
Comics legend Alan Moore wishes he’d never written comics
In recent years, Moore has given up on writing graphic novels and hasn’t looked back. Rather, he’s writing novels. “It does make me wish that I’d maybe gone into writing prose fiction back in the late Seventies.” As for comics, the evolution of the medium has become intolerable to him. “Now they’re called ‘graphic novels’, which sounds sophisticated and you can charge a lot more for them”
Moore, 69, is no longer regularly attending conventions and fan meet-ups. “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.”
So don’t expect any more comics from Alan Moore. He’s fully retired from the medium; he wishes “all the time” that he’d never written comics in the first place. Even so, pretty much every comic he’s written is beloved to this day.
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