Alan Moore, the writer behind Watchmen, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and V for Vendetta, revealed recently to the Telegraph that he is not satisfied with how Hollywood has adapted his work.
“Now they’re called ‘graphic novels,’ which sounds sophisticated and you can charge a lot more for them,” Moore said. “What appealed to me most about comics is no more, and these innocent and inventive and imaginative superhero characters from the ’40s, ‘50s, [and] ‘60s are being recycled to a modern audience as if they were adult fare.”
Moore said that his own writing may be partly to blame for comics becoming more of an adult-centered industry. “I didn’t mean my experiments with comics to be immediately taken up as something that the whole industry should do,” he said. “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.”
Because of his dissatisfaction with his own adaptations, Moore had an unusual request for the future royalties of all his works. “I don’t really feel, with the recent films, that they have stood by what I assumed were their original principles,” he told. “So I asked for DC Comics to send all of the money from any future TV series or films to Black Lives Matter.”
Meanwhile, Moore has been venturing into writing prose. His debut collection of short stories, Illuminations, will be published in the United States in October.
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