‘Watchmen’ Creator Alan Moore Asked DC to Send His Film and TV Royalties to Black Lives Matter: Recent Movies Don’t Stand By Their ‘Original Principles’
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Alan Moore, the comic book visionary best known for writing such revered works as “Watchmen,” “V for Vendetta” and “Batman: The Killing Joke,” revealed to The Telegraph that he is longer accepting royalty checks from DC Comics for films and television series based on his works. He’s asked the company to instead reroute these checks to Black Lives Matter.
The Telegraph asked Moore if reports were true about him taking all of the money he makes from film and TV series and dividing it among the writers and other creatives, to which the writer answered: “I no longer wish it to even be shared with them. 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.”
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Moore added that he is not interested in money and lives a quiet life in Northampton, England. He has been vocal in the past about not agreeing with adaptations of his work, and he’s highly critical of contemporary superhero movies, which he once called a “blight” to cinema and “also to culture to a degree.” He said in an October 2022 interview with The Guardian that adults’ continued love of superhero movies is an “infantilization” that can act as “a precursor to fascism.”
Moore expressed worry at the time over “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,” 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’. 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…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 his new interview with The Telegraph, Moore said that what appealed to him most about comic books in the past is “no more.”
“Now they’re called ‘graphic novels’, which sounds sophisticated and you can charge a lot more for them,” he added. “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.”
Head over to The Telegraph’s website to read more from Moore.
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