Watchmen creator Alan Moore is 'definitely done with comics,' decries 'unbearable' industry
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Alan Moore's Watchmen series, first released in the mid-80s, served to satirize and deconstruct the idea of the hero, so it's been interesting in the years since to watch the cantankerous author respond to the genre's massive explosion in popularity. In a new interview with The Guardian, Moore elaborates on comments he's made over the years about the "infantilizing" quality he feels superhero stories have had on modern culture.
In the interview, Moore voiced concern that "hundreds of thousands of adults" are "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 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."
He points out that Donald Trump's rise to the presidency — "a bit of a strange detour in our politics" — occurred around the same time that superhero films topped the worldwide box office. The year's biggest grossers included films like Captain America: Civil War, Doctor Strange, X-Men: Apocalypse, and Batman v. Superman.
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The 68-year-old added that he accepts accountability for his own role in creating superheroes that appealed to adults.
"I didn't really think that superheroes were adult fare," Moore explained. "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."
In a 2020 interview with IndieWire, Moore called superhero films "grotesque," noting that he hadn't seen one since Tim Burton's Batman in 1989.
"I don't watch any of them," he added. "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."
For now, he's focusing on his first collection of short stories Illuminations, which debuts on Tuesday.
"I'm definitely done with comics," he said. "I will always love and adore the comics medium but the comics industry and all of the stuff attached to it just became unbearable."
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