Legendary Comic Books Writer Alan Moore Says Superhero Movies Have Ruined Cinema And Turning Adults Into Children

It is not unknown that the relationship between Alan Moore and the contemporary cinema has always been a rocky one for the creator of Watchmen and The Killing Joke comics. He has always harshly criticized the way his stories were brought to the big screen, even leading him to make the decision of not allowing his name to be tied to these projects or profiting from them, a decision he estimates has cost him millions of dollars.

This time the legendary writer has not missed the opportunity to criticize superhero movies during an interview with Deadline for the occasion of presenting his own project, The Show. It is about Alan Moore trying to break into the movie business by setting his own terms with a film he has written and for which his first trailer was released recently.

Directed by Mitch Jenkins and starring Tom Burke, which tells a fantastic adventure set in Northampton, the hometown of writer and screenwriter Alan Moore, The Show follows a man's search for a stolen artifact, a journey that takes him to a surreal world of crime and mystery.

Comic Books Are For Children and Poor Workers

Moore, in his interview with Deadline to discuss The Show, stated that it has been an exciting project for him and his producers, keeping it independent every step of the way, insisting on maintaining creative control and rights to his own intellectual property.

After making several short films and now this feature film, Moore has plans for a television series based on the same characters and has already produced material for 4 or 5 seasons. But he also spoke of the moment in which he decided to retire from the world of comics after finishing The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in 2018 and how he felt about the comic and film industry.

He said: “I’m not so interested in comics anymore, I don’t want anything to do with them. I had been doing comics for 40-something years when I finally retired. When I entered the comics industry, the big attraction was that this was a medium that was vulgar, it had been created to entertain working-class people, particularly children."

"The way that the industry has changed, it’s ‘graphic novels’ now, it’s entirely priced for an audience of middle-class people. I have nothing against middle-class people but it wasn’t meant to be a medium for middle-aged hobbyists. It was meant to be a medium for people who haven’t got much money."

Superhero Movies Have Ruined Cinema and Culture

Alan Moore further criticized the way his former comics have been conflated with superhero movies which he strongly dislikes: "Most people equate comics with superhero movies now. That adds another layer of difficulty for me. I haven’t seen a superhero movie since the first Tim Burton Batman film. They have blighted cinema, and also blighted culture to a degree."

"Several years ago I said I thought it was a really worrying sign, that hundreds of thousands of adults were queuing up to see characters that were created 50 years ago to entertain 12-year-old boys. That seemed to speak to some kind of longing to escape from the complexities of the modern world, and go back to a nostalgic, remembered childhood."

"That seemed dangerous, it was infantilizing the population."

"This may be entirely coincidence but in 2016 when the American people elected a National Socialist satsuma and the UK voted to leave the European Union, six of the top 12 highest-grossing films were superhero movies. Not to say that one causes the other but I think they’re both symptoms of the same thing – a denial of reality and an urge for simplistic and sensational solutions."

Comic Books are Going Through Tough Times

About the difficult situation that the comic industry is going through due to the pandemic, he said: “I doubt the major companies will be coming out of lockdown in any shape at all. The mainstream comics industry is about 80 years old and it has lots of pre-existing health conditions. It wasn’t looking that great before COVID happened."

"Most of our entertainment industries have been a bit top-heavy for a while. The huge corporations, business interests, have so much money they can produce these gigantic blockbusters of one sort or another that will dominate their markets. I can see that changing, and perhaps for the better."

"It’s too early to make optimistic predictions but you might hope that the bigger interests will find it more difficult to maneuver in this new landscape, whereas the smaller independent concerns might find that they are a bit more adapted. These times might be an opportunity for genuinely radical and new voices to come to the fore in the absence of yesteryear."

Alan Moore Doesn't Care For the Joker or Anything Like That

But the most critical moment of the interview came when they asked him if he watched superhero movies and what he thought of Joker, the movie starring Joaquin Phoenix and the rave reviews it had received: “Oh Christ no I don’t watch any of them. All of these characters have been stolen from their original creators, all of them. They have a long line of ghosts standing behind them."

"In the case of Marvel films, Jack Kirby [the Marvel artist and writer]. I have no interest in superheroes, they were a thing that was invented in the late 1930s for children, and they are perfectly good as children’s entertainment. But if you try to make them for the adult world then I think it becomes kind of grotesque."

The Best Version of Batman was Adam West, Said Alan Moore

Despite being the creator of one of the most iconic Batman and Joker comic book issue, Moore continues to criticize the direction comic movies have taken: "I’ve been told the Joker film wouldn’t exist without my Joker story (1988’s Batman: The Killing Joke), but three months after I’d written that I was disowning it, it was far too violent – it was Batman for christ’s sake, it’s a guy dressed as a bat."

"Increasingly I think the best version of Batman was Adam West, which didn’t take it at all seriously. We have a kind of superhero character in The Show but if we get the chance to develop them more then people will be able to see all of the characters have quite unusual aspects to them."

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