Alan Moore’s recent interview with IGN is causing the usual kerfuffle & arguments, about which I frankly do not wish to comment… except… EXCEPT… for this one astonishing remark he made…
“Now they’re called ‘graphic novels’, which sounds sophisticated and you can charge a lot more for them. What appealed to me most about comics is no more, and these innocent and inventive and imaginative superhero characters from the Forties, Fifties, Sixties are being recycled to a modern audience as if they were adult fare.”
This man is an absolute loon.
Where do I start?! Firstly, I agree 100% with this statement.
Secondly, Alan Moore making this statement is epic, cosmic levels of batshit.
WHO, Mister Alan Moore, helped to start this asinine trend where superhero/fantasy comics, aimed primarily at children/youth, an all-ages audience if you will, were filtered through a hazy fug of Post-Modernism & Revisionism?
Was it YOU, Mister Alan Moore? I do believe it was you, along with Frank Miller. I do believe the apex was 1986—Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen—the hideously stupid “Comics Aren’t Just For Kids” slogan—the hysterial, raving hyperbole, as if the Second Coming was made manifest and his name(s) was Millermoore.
This was willful vandalism of a completely harmless, kid-friendly area of entertainment. On Miller’s part, I think it was driven by pure self-indulgence; on Moore’s part, I think abiding guilt and ambivalence about his own, enduring obsession with “kid stuff” led him to trying to deconstruct this work and make it into… what, exactly? Sophisticated adult literature?
Oh, are there people who actually think DKR and Watchmen are sophisticated adult literature? I think there are. It defies reason, to my mind, but there it is.
But now, Alan Moore, who made superhero comics where, for instance, two people dressed in spandex get turned-on by their kinky outfits and have a steamy sex sesh—TEH SOFFISTYCATE ADULT LITTERIES—characters which were based on the old Charlton heroes of the 1960s, BTW—complains that the old comics he loves from the “Forties, Fifties, Sixties are being recycled to a modern audience as if they were adult fare.”
Alan Moore is fucking insane. Simple as that. Prove me wrong.
Chrissie,
Both Miller and Moore are talented men, but the dark path that superhero comics have traveled in the past 35 plus years has taken a genre that was aimed at kids and made them mostly suited to adult fans. I think Moore worked best away from superhero fare, on titles like Swamp Thing. Of course, there were comics aimed at adults long before Miller and Moore; undergrounds and alternative/independent publishers where one could go to explore all types of stories. In the past few decades that is what I mostly read, having grown bored of the mainstream superhero fare. Crumb, Pekar, Hernandez brothers, Seth, Peter Bagge, Adrian Tomine and Paco Roca are a few that I’ve appreciated, with nary a superhero is in sight.
Superhero fare has become largely a venue for older fans who continue to support the product, either due to habit or familiarity. Yes, there are some exceptions and good work, but overall I don’t see innovators the likes of Kirby, Ditko, Wood, etc. The truly imaginative creators, who were able to entertain a young audience while crafting stories that could hold the attention of older readers, appears to be a thing of the past.
The only modern superhero comic I’ve enjoyed recently was modern only in so much as it was published this year: Avengers: War Across Time by Paul Levitz and Alan Davies, which is set immediately after the group’s first clash with Kang. There’s nothing else from the big two comics companies I find remotely interesting.
I have to agree about superheroes. When Kirby persuaded Goodman it was time to bring them back, he knew their success wasn’t meant to be forever. When he finally broke free of Lee’s dictates, he returned to science fiction, crime, romance, horror, and war at DC.
IMO,Miller and Moore are merely the continuation of a trend that began when WW II ended. The world gradually became more cynical. Comics got darker in the 50’s, with EC, but after the Code, they tried to return to some sort of pre-War innocence. The late 50’s and early 60’s was a schism between the optimism of the surging US economy and the pessimism of Cold War paranoia. After Kennedy was assassinated, people grew even more cynical. By the time I was 19, I felt like I’d outgrown comics. That was around 1972. I was occasionally picking up Buscema’s Savage Sword of Conan and reading Sword and Sorcery. then nothing.
I returned to reading comics in 1986 with Daredevil #228. That book was like a dash of ice water in my face. It was so hard boiled. This was probably happening because of the Cold War between the US and Russia threatening to get hot. (BTW, here we go again in 2023.)
I ran through the earlier DD Miller run but the charge and the initial thrill was starting to wear off when my local Comic book guy told me I had to get Watchmen. I read the first issue and was impressed. I continued buying the series and started reading Moore obsessively. As the years went by, I began to regard both Miller and Moore with less and less reverence, with the exception of Watchmen which I still regard as a singular masterpiece. Moore shot his wad long ago. I can’t read V for Vendetta anymore. It’s too Crowley-inspired and much too dark. Most of his stuff is too dark, except for Watchmen, which is not much less dark, but still displays to me an uncanny understanding of human nature and the supernatural, the magic and mystery related to the human condition. The problem is that all of the people that he influenced were only able to mimic the darkness in Moore’s work but utterly incapable of depicting the sense of wonder in the nature of humanity. Moore can’t do it anymore either, so he just complains. Comics will never be as important as they were, but so what? There will always be a place for them, and there is so much in the past to chose from.
V For Vendetta is also completely adolescent-minded in terms of its politics. Moore’s idea of “anarchy” is about as nuanced as Rik in the YOUNG ONES.
I thought WATCHMEN was an entertaining book (with its plot swiped from THE OUTER LIMITS), but as a teenager back in 1986 I also felt I was witnessing a kind of group hysteria in terms of the reaction to it. I don’t believe personally Moore has any insight into anything, beyond a weird blend of clinical analysis and heavy drug use. There is a level of highly textured obsessiveness in it that is purely a result of perpetual hash intake—smoke-induced OCD & autism, really—rather than rigorous intellect.
This is the man who destroyed SWAMP THING, after all, and so few fans even noticed. He turned the character from a tragically mutated MAN into a mound of walking MOSS which THINKS it’s a man. And he did this because his idea, derived from debunked pseudo-science, had the appearance of being more “clever” than the simple origin story Wein & Wrightson offered. Even the title “Anatomy Lesson”, is pregnant with the arrogant self-belief that he’s showing everyone how it’s REALLY done. Bah and Humbug. Alan, you removed the HEART AND SOUL from the idea of the Swamp Thing—just to look clever.
With a lot of these writers—and the worst by far is Neil Gaiman—to me, the King’s BOLLOCKS are swinging freely in the open air. Moore may well call himself a magician—it was all a trick. Gaiman did an anthology called SMOKE & MIRRORS… indeed. All show. All fake. None of these punks have any clue about anything except the smell of their own farts.
To start with an observation on another comment, I doubt that Kirby had anything to do with persuading Martin Goodman that superheroes were on their way back. Remember, Atlas/Marvel was once called Timely and were in the habit of publishing comicbooks based on subjects that were ‘timely’ (in vogue). Goodman was a canny businessman who was (usually) good at spotting trends. Whatever the exact details, it’s more than likely just as Stan claimed – Goodman learned that The JLA was selling well and instructed Stan to come up with something similar.
Anyway, I’ve met Alan Moore twice; he’s an affable, amiable kind of bloke in person, but he does tend not to see things as they are and is a bit of an attention seeker, prepared to indulge in controversy to achieve it. I wasn’t too happy about Swamp Thing suddenly not being Alec Holland and it was good to see that Len Wein largely ignored this aspect when he wrote his six-issue ST series a few years back. Also, considering that he’s made a career out of writing other people’s characters – and doing things to them that would’ve appalled their creators – he has a cheek to complain about ‘his’ Watchmen heroes being written by others, especially as they were only thinly-veiled stand-ins for Charlton characters. He really needs to rein it in as he’s making a fool of himself. I always thought that he wrote entertaining stories (in the main) when he worked within the parameters of the Comics Code, but once he was given Carte Blanche, his stuff became not worth reading. And what the hell was he thinking of with Lost Girls?