Alan Moore says he’s pivoted his approach to sharing royalties, now opting to have DC Comics send them to Black Lives Matter.
In a new interview with The Telegraph published Wednesday, the comics legend behind Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Batman: The Killing Joke, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and more spoke about his journey into literary publishing following the release of his short story collection, Illuminations.
During the lengthy chat, Moore opened up about how his perspective on the state of comics has changed how he shares his royalties, in addition to talking about his thoughts on Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight and why he’s increasingly opted out of public appearances.
While speaking to his own works like Watchman and V for Vendetta, both of which have been adapted for the screen, the artist — who has long refused to have his name attached to screen adaptations of his work and has frequently been critical of said adaptations — revealed he’s stopped sharing royalties with the movies’ writers.
“I no longer wish it to even be shared with them. I don’t really feel, with the recent films, that they have stood by what I assumed were their original principles,” Moore said. “So I asked for DC Comics to send all of the money from any future TV series or films to Black Lives Matter.”
As part of the interview, the writer — who publicly retired from comics several years ago and said he’s partly “forgone public appearances” in favor of a quieter “writer’s life” after “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” — once again spoke of his grievances with modern comics.
At one point, he called Sin City creator Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight “a pretty sub-fascist vision,” adding that “the idea of one man, perhaps on horseback, who can sort out this mess — that’s a bit too Birth of a Nation.”
Discussing the growth of “adult fare” in the comics’ industry, Moore addressed his own role in it, noting that “I didn’t mean my experiments with comics to be immediately taken up as something that the whole industry should do.”
“When I was doing things like Watchmen, I was not saying that dark psychopathic characters are really cool, but that does seem to be the message that the industry took for the next 20 years,” he added.
The From Hell creator, who has been exploring the fantasy genre with an upcoming set of novels, not only lamented the “the gentrification of comics that happened post-Watchmen,” but what he believes fantasy has been shaped into by the success of shows like Game of Thrones and films like Lord of the Rings.
“Fantasy these days seems to have been boiled down to a kind of J.R.R. Tolkien, George R.R. Martin world of warriors and dragons and, for some reason, dwarves. The fantasy books that inspire me are things like Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, which is actually about the real world in some ways, the changing nature of British society,” he said.
“Fantasy has no restrictions whatsoever, so it’s a bit lame to be constantly hitting the same note on the piano,” he continued. “Let’s have fantastic visions that nobody has ever seen before — and lay off people of restricted height for a change.”
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