Alan Moore is one of the type of person who often keeps his opinions to himself, rarely outspoken and almost always with positive things to say. So it came as a bit of a shock today when the writer of such classics Watchmen, V for Vendetta and The Killing Joke made an announcement where he discussed how he feels about the industry today and his dislike of a popular character. He also took the opportunity to reveal that is soon to be retiring from the medium. Read on to find out more.
The Guardian reports that whilst promoting his latest novel, Jerusalem, at a press conference in London Moore announced his intention to retire from the world of Comic Books. He revealed to the crowd he had ‘about 250 pages of comics left in me‘ before going on to add:
“And those will probably be very enjoyable. There are a couple of issues of an Avatar [Press] book that I am doing at the moment, part of the HP Lovecraft work I’ve been working on recently. Me and Kevin will be finishing Cinema Purgatorio and we’ve got about one more book, a final book of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to complete. After that, although I may do the odd little comics piece at some point in the future, I am pretty much done with comics.
I think I have done enough for comics. I’ve done all that I can. I think if I were to continue to work in comics, inevitably the ideas would suffer, inevitably you’d start to see me retread old ground and I think both you and I probably deserve something better than that.”
He also touched a little on where he would see himself in the future. Explaining:
“So, the things that interest me at the moment are the things I don’t know if I can do, like films, where I haven’t got a clue what I am doing, or giant literary novels. Things I wasn’t sure I’d even have the stamina to finish … I know I am able to do anything anyone is capable of doing in the comic book medium. I don’t need to prove anything to myself or anyone else. Whereas these other fields are much more exciting to me. I will always revere comics as a medium. It is a wonderful medium.”
He also revealed some insight into what he thought of the comic world today. He told the press:
“I am sure there is probably a very good reason for the hundreds of thousands of adults who are flocking to see the latest adventures of Batman, but I for one am a little in the dark for what that reason is. The superhero movies – characters that were invented by Jack Kirby in the 1960s or earlier – I have great love for those characters as they were to me when I was a 13-year-old boy. They were brilliantly designed and created characters. But they were for 50 years ago. I think this century needs, deserves, its own culture. It deserves artists that are actually going to attempt to say things that are relevant to the times we are actually living in. That’s a longwinded way of me saying I am really, really sick of Batman.”
Given all the great work that Moore has done for Comics it definitely will be sad to see him go, although with the large range of comics available out there, many which do touch on current events, it’s hard to agree that comics aren’t relevant to the time we live in. Although with the majority of DC’s brand revolving around Batman as a character it’s easy to see why he would be sick of seeing him.
What do you think? Are you sad to see Moore leave the medium? What would you like to see him move onto? Let us know below!