Alan Moore is turning down any compensation for film and TV series based on his comics. The “Watchmen” creator, notoriously outspoken about adaptations of his work, told The Telegraph that he instead wants DC Comics royalty checks sent to Black Lives Matter.
“I don’t really feel, with the recent films, that they have stood by what I assumed were their original principles. So I asked for DC Comics to send all of the money from any future TV series or films to Black Lives Matter,” Moore said.
Moore has long been critical of screen versions of his comics. Last year, he slammed the HBO and Warner Bros. TV series “Watchmen,” adapted from his 1986 graphic novel. Creator Damon Lindelof sent Moore a letter ahead of production admitting to “destroying” the original comic for his HBO series. Moore alleged that he was unaware HBO was even developing a “Watchmen” series at the time and later sent a “very abrupt and probably hostile reply” saying that Warner Bros. should never contact him again.
Looking back on his own “Watchmen,” Moore said he “disowned the work in question, and partly that was because the film industry and the comics industry seemed to have created things that had nothing to do with my work, but which would be associated with it in the public mind. I said, ‘Look, this is embarrassing to me. I don’t want anything to do with you or your show. Please don’t bother me again.’”
“Watchmen” was also adapted into a 2009 film by Zack Snyder.
He previously called the rise of superhero fare infantile, telling The Guardian in 2022, “I said round about 2011 that I thought that it had serious and worrying implications for the future if millions of adults were queueing up to see ‘Batman’ movies. Because that kind of infantilization — that urge towards simpler times, simpler realities — that can very often be a precursor to fascism.”
The “V For Vendetta” creator added, “Hundreds of thousands of adults lining up to see characters and situations that had been created to entertain the 12-year-old boys — and it was always boys — of 50 years ago. I didn’t really think that superheroes were adult fare. I think that this was a misunderstanding born of what happened in the 1980s — to which I must put my hand up to a considerable share of the blame, though it was not intentional — when things like ‘Watchmen’ were first appearing. There were an awful lot of headlines saying ‘Comics Have Grown Up.’”
Moore also addressed in the Telegraph Q&A how the comic book industry has changed in the last few decades, saying, “Now they’re called ‘graphic novels’, which sounds sophisticated and you can charge a lot more for them. These innocent and inventive and imaginative superhero characters from the Forties, Fifties, Sixties are being recycled to a modern audience as if they were adult fare.”
