Watchmen Creator Alan Moore Thinks Superhero Movies Are a Blight to Cinema
There are few names within the comic books industry that are spoken of with the same reverence as Alan Moore among both fans and artists. In a career spanning 40+ decades, Moore created some of the most iconic comic series of all time, from Watchmen to V for Vendetta. In an interview with Deadline, Moore explained why the current state of comic book culture is not one he is personally a fan of.
“Most people equate comics with superhero movies now. That adds another layer of difficulty for me. I haven’t seen a superhero movie since the first Tim Burton Batman film. They have blighted cinema, and also blighted culture to a degree. Several years ago I said I thought it was a really worrying sign, that hundreds of thousands of adults were queuing up to see characters that were created 50 years ago to entertain 12-year-old boys. That seemed to speak to some kind of longing to escape from the complexities of the modern world, and go back to a nostalgic, remembered childhood. That seemed dangerous, it was infantilizing the population.”
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Despite writing some of the most iconic comics of all time, Alan Moore famously has a troubled relationship with both his fanbase and the movies made that were based on his work. He was so dissatisfied with V for Vendetta that he demanded his name be removed from the end credits. He refused to watch Zack Snyder’s Watchmen movie and refused to have anything to do with Damon Lidelof’s TV series based on the same material. Despite his frequent attempts to distance himself from his comics legacy, Moore acknowledges the current state of comics culture was something he had a big hand in creating:
“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…”
Some sections of fans might be outraged to discover that Moore seems to share many of the same opinions as Martin Scorsese, who landed himself in hot water with the comic book movie fandom last year when he compared superhero films to “theme-park rides” and insisted they were not “real” cinema.
The fact is, while you can be a fan of an artist for creating a work of art you admire, whether it was Moore with Batman: The Killing Joker, or Scorsese with Raging Bull, it is also human nature to bristle at the thought of the same artists telling you how you should or should not be enjoying a piece of art based on your age or gender. At the end of the day, Moore’s opinions are his own and based on his own experiences after more than four decades of experience with comics culture. This news comes from Deadline.
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