Watchmen Creator Alan Moore Won’t Return to Comics

Alan Moore is known for an array of comics including Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Swamp Thing, and Batman: The Killing Joke, which he actually “disowned.” In fact, Moore recently spoke to Deadline and criticized more than his own previous work. He said superhero movies have “blighted the culture” while admitting he hasn’t actually seen one since Tim Burton’s Batman (1989). During the interview, which he was doing to promote his film The Show, he also confirmed that he’s not returning to comics.

“I’m not so interested in comics anymore, I don’t want anything to do with them,” Moore revealed.
“I had been doing comics for 40-something years when I finally retired. When I entered the comics industry, the big attraction was that this was a medium that was vulgar, it had been created to entertain working-class people, particularly children. The way that the industry has changed, it’s ‘graphic novels’ now, it’s entirely priced for an audience of middle-class people. I have nothing against middle-class people but it wasn’t meant to be a medium for middle-aged hobbyists. It was meant to be a medium for people who haven’t got much money.”

Moore added, “It was largely my work that attracted an adult audience, it was the way that was commercialized by the comics industry, there were tons of headlines saying that comics had ‘grown up’. But other than a couple of particular individual comics they really hadn’t. This thing happened with graphic novels in the 1980s. People wanted to carry on reading comics as they always had, and they could now do it in public and still feel sophisticated because they weren’t reading a children’s comic, it wasn’t seen as subnormal. You didn’t get the huge advances in adult comic books that I was thinking we might have. As witnessed by the endless superhero films…”

It’s also widely known that Moore didn’t want Watchmen to be adapted. In fact, Damon Lindelof, who ran the Emmy-winning Watchmen series, recently said he thinks that he may have to deal with some bad mojo from Alan Moore after the series’ debut.

“It wakes me up at night, but much less so now that it’s done. I’m about to say something very ridiculous, but in all sincerity, I was absolutely convinced that there was a magical curse placed upon me by Alan [Moore],” Lindelof told Variety.

Moore gave the interview in support of his upcoming film The Show, which has ties to the short films he produced a few years ago. Protagonist Pictures is handling the film, which will debuted online this week and will get a physical screening on October 12.