‘Watchmen’ Writer Alan Moore Says Superhero Movies Are Ruining Culture
"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."
Alan Moore, the famed writer of Watchmen and From Hell, is one of the most innovative and game-changing artists working in the world of comics. Which is why it’s quietly amusing that every time he’s pinned down for an interview, he spends most of it talking about how much he hates the impact of comics on popular culture.
Moore, who took over the mainstream comics world along with writers like Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis and Grant Morrison as part of the “British invasion” of the ’80s, has an unbeatable track record. His work on Swamp Thing in particular set the high bar for superhero and genre storytelling, and books like V For Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen have permanently altered the fabric of culture.
But Moore is mostly dismissive of the changes that his work and the work of his contemporaries has made. As part of an interview designed to spruik a new film that he has written and stars in, The Show, Moore lambasted the industry at large. “I had been doing comics for 40-something years when I finally retired,” he told Deadline.
“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.”
Elsewhere, Moore criticised superhero movies for degrading expectations of art. “I haven’t seen a superhero movie since the first Tim Burton Batman film,” he said.
“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.”
Long live Alan Moore, I say.
Lead iamge credit: Flickr / Stew Dean