‘Watchmen’ Creator Alan Moore: Adults Loving Superhero Movies Is ‘Infantile’ and Can Be a ‘Precursor to Fascism’

Zack Sharf
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“Watchmen” creator Alan Moore’s hatred for superhero movies is well known, as he once called them a “blight” to cinema and “also to culture to a degree,” but he dragged them even more during a recent interview with The Guardian. Moore described adults’ continued love of superhero movies an “infantilization” that can act as “a precursor to fascism.”

“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,” Moore said. “Because that kind of infantilization – that urge towards simpler times, simpler realities – that can very often be a precursor to fascism.”

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Moore expressed worry with the notion that “hundreds of thousands of adults” are now “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,” Moore said. “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 continued, “I tend to think that, no, comics hadn’t grown up. There were a few titles that were more adult than people were used to. But the majority of comics titles were pretty much the same as they’d ever been. It wasn’t comics growing up. I think it was more comics meeting the emotional age of the audience coming the other way… I will always love and adore the comics medium but the comics industry and all of the stuff attached to it just became unbearable.”

In an Oct. 2020 interview, Moore revealed that he had not seen a superhero movie since Tim Burton’s original “Batman” in 1989. He added, “I don’t watch any of them. All of these characters have been stolen from their original creators, all of them… if you try to make them for the adult world then I think it becomes kind of grotesque.”

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