Nope, what you said was this: “Moore doesn’t even have the characters’ legal owners’ permission to piss on them.” I characterized that is factually incorrect and slanderous.

Sorry, man — I’m not letting you get away with this one.

The comparison is specious. As Paul points out above, there is considerably more ideological critique in LOEG than in mainstream continuity porn. What’s more, there are also more distinctive characters in LOEG, more flavorful writing, more wit (verbal and visual), and, in sum, more to chew on, more to think about, more to laugh about, more to learn from and dig into and simply dig. LOEG is capable delivering much more than the “worst of superhero comics.”

Finally, LOEG is, like a lot of Moore’s work, metafiction. His relationship to his source material is like that of Borges or Barth to theirs. He isn’t simply ringing changes on continuity; he’s asking readers to think about what they’re doing when they read fiction. That may not be your cuppa, but arguing that Moore is simply writing continuity porn seems pretty obtuse.

The point is, it isn’t “his” book. In terms of who controls the book and its ancillary merchandising, the book is DC’s, not Moore’s.

Of course, in every important ethical and artistic sense, the book is Moore & Gibbons’. But not in the financial or the legal IP sense. Speaking practically, DC controls the work. Moore has of necessity divorced himself from current and future exploitation of the work in the marketplace, including the film.

Why the hell should Moore care about whether a film serves as an extended advertisement for a property that was essentially stolen from him? Why should it matter to him that DC gets some advertising?

He’s got other, better things to do, surely, than abasing himself by participating in the hyping of a property over which he has been robbed of proprietary interest and artistic control?

I said nothing of the kind. I said that unlike the authors of Marvel/DC continuity porn, Moore doesn’t have the excuse that somebody hired him to do it to their property.

Yeah Alan Moore! Why don’t you just write us up a sequel to Watchmen and do what we want! Screw you for having artistic integrity or caring about your work! You think you’re better than me? Do you! I almost wrote a comic once, damn near finished th whole outline. Yeah! You’re not so hot Alan Moore. Mr. Smarty-pants, with your books and thinking and stuff. Why can’t you just go write Captain British and those other gay marvel books that suck now. You could make so much monies! You’re crazy! Why don’t you love DC? What are you a commie? You’re crazy. You’re a hypocrite, you’re weird.

*Sigh*

People like you are the reason Alan Moore doesn’t want anything to do with people like you.

When I say that particular LOEG ish is some of the best, I mean that every facet of that issue worked perfectly for me as a reader–and for me at least, I had the sensation of being a kid again reading comics with a sense of wonder and the larger-than-life. Of course I am a sucker for Mars-related sci-fi but this one was particularly good.

I would guess he likes to use public domane characters to tell some of his stories, because they are easilly understood archatypes. Moore has always seemed interested in the underlieing meaning, of the kind stories he tells.
What does the kind of adventure fiction popular in Victorian times say about that culture? And how dose it relate to the reallitty of what was going on at that time?

Moore has every right to defend his own work/complain about its use. Moore has every right to use public domain characters in his work because that’s the entire purpose of public domain. You have every right to feel like his work is crap and point out why on the internet. No one has any right to call someone an IP thief when they aren’t.

Well, there are narrative advantages to using characters that have an established history, both within their stories and as part of the greater pop-culture universe. You might try to make up a loose history for your faux Allen Quatermain but you won’t really *have* such a history until you’ve written a fair quantity of your own stories with that character. And if like Moore you’re less interested in writing such a character than in commenting on the culture that gave him birth, then if he’s public domain you might be better off using the real thing. It doesn’t really damage the corpus of what Rider Haggard wrote any more than millions of later Spidey stories eradicate the Lee-Ditko works.

I’d grant that Moore *may* be more concerned with the work being bad than because other creators have messed with his works. Still, since in his original stories he does sometimes “rewrite” the histories of other peoples’ characters, I’d say that from the viewpoint of the original authors (if one could ask them) they’d probably feel that Moore has messed with their works by so doing, and not always to the better.

And here’s a guy who knows a little sumpin’ about Martian-themed comics!

Paul, did you read The Black Dossier? Any thoughts on that?

I love comics because of the spaces between panels, because of the element of time, and inevitability that is possible from the space between the first panel and the second.

And I don’t mind Moore being dismissive about the movies of his work. The people responsible for these things always try to use his name to sell a product he has never tried to be involved with, and his agitation, caused by years of corporate malfeasance and double-dealing, is just a protection from getting screwed over again in the future by some corporate asswad executive.

I believe this is the core nuance that everyone’s missing in their race to brand Moore a hypocrite. Seems to me his central problem with Watchmen is that he thinks it’s going to be a bad movie, not that it has no right to exist. And now he’s just tweaking the noses of interviewers asking him the same question for the umpteenth time. I imagine it must go something like this…

“Hi, Alan, we know you’ve already expressed a lack of interest in the Watchmen movie and film in general - many times, in fact - but…HOW ‘BOUT THAT WATCHMEN MOVIE, HUH?!!”

And every time he gives some dismissive answer, it flies around the blogosphere like the guy’s out there actively campaigning against it. He ain’t, folks. People just won’t stop asking him about it.

One more thing. Did anyone even read the interviewer’s note that, “Moore said all that with more mischievous glee than true malice”? I’m gonna guess not.

There’s an old saying that compares something, anything, say X, to a Picasso:

From 1000 feet away, it’s art, pure genius!
Up close, it’s just a big old mess.

I’m thinking that’s the way some people now feel about Moore. Just reading his work, you keep a proper distance, know nothing about the man, the author / artist. Meeting the person, in person, you see them up close and find, they may not be as pretty up close as they tend to appear, from a distance.

Copyright laws exist to protect living creators from abuses against their creative work. The concept of “Public domain” exists to protect the work itself from falling into disuse AFTER a creator’s death. Moore’s feelings aren’t hypocritical because he’s not criticizing the way someone else is using his characters 75 years after he’s dead but the way they’re being used now. I highly doubt he will give venomous interviews like this about Watchmen 75 years after he’s dead. If he does, please correct me.

Perhaps he should just look at the film as an extended advertisement for his book. As long as it actually gives a relatively good idea of what the book was like, it will probably work for book sales. The film versions of LoEG and From Hell were basically bad as movies and as adverts for the books, since they deviated too much. V was little better in both regards. This looks like a decent superhero movie that will probably also boost readership.

Don’t get me wrong, I know what Moore meant to say, but the fact is the majority of comics creators are working their asses off just to *make* comics. The back of the Previews Catalog isn’t 3x bigger than the exclusives in the front of the catalog for nothing.

Moore is right that a few companies are working aggressively to sell their products as film, but I hardly find that as the entire industry.

That merchandising is involved in some of the financial and success of comics, it should also not be used viewed or used for it’s lifeline, but it can certainly help the industry as a whole, when kept in check.

I used to have this same question about the apparent hypocrisy, but Moore apparently addressed it at one point. It’s a matter of degree; Moore does use characters created by others quite freely in his work. But he doesn’t do comic book adaptations of stories he didn’t create. In other words, he’s used Jeckyll/Hyde, but at no point did he do a comic book version of “The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde.”

My understanding is he would also be fine with other creators, in any medium, using his characters to tell new stories. What he’s not fine with is someone *retelling his stories,* and usually doing a much worse job on it given Hollywood’s track record with his stuff.

* * *

“Nice guy. “Curse” a project that your longtime art-partner clearly considers the pinnacle of his life’s work — maybe even the dearest thing in his life, aside from home and family. Maybe he can stomp on some puppies at his next public appearance.”

I’m not sure that Dave Gibbons considers the Watchmen *movie* to be the pinnacle of his life’s work, but I could be wrong. And if Moore follows suit from what he did on the “V” movie, Gibbons will likely receive Moore’s cut of the movie profits.

(And in terms of someone who “does their own @#$% and doesn’t worry about the other guy,” you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who embodies that more than he does.)

Of course, I’ll still go see “Watchmen” in the theaters and hope that it manages to capture something of the original work on film, but I’ll always have the book on my shelf for the full experience.