Originally published at: Alan Moore has been donating all his Watchmen money to Black Lives Matter | Boing Boing
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My first reaction was “Alan Moore knows the score”
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I think I still have some kind of PTSD from Neonomicon.
Steel yourself prior to reading.
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I have always admired Moore, in spite of his reputation for being surly; this news only increases my admiration.
Good on him.
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I have actively despised some of Moore’s comics, but I’ve done so guiltily, because he’s a glorious writer, his artistic collaborators have nothing but praise for him, and I’ve never heard of him being anything but kind and welcoming to fans of his books. And he has excellent reason to hate DC, because they’ve treated him like shit for decades.
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I was long an admirer of his comic book work, but his prose fiction is absolutely staggering in its brilliance, beauty and vision.
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I’m glad that there’s at least one British comics wizard who remains unproblematic.
I’ve felt that Moore’s reputation as a grump was an really unfair media creation - he gets asked about things (mostly the comic industry) that upset him and then those are the interviews/quotes that get propagated. In that dynamic, anyone will come off grumpy, if all you hear about them is selected quotes of them being annoyed. Given his treatment by the comic industry he has every right to be upset about it.
There were some definite shenanigans around that, too - DC kept the comics in print in circumstances that they otherwise wouldn’t have done (i.e. periods where it wasn’t selling well enough to justify it) for a non-creator-owned comic, just to screw Moore out of his rights. So it wasn’t a “this comic is so ground-breaking that it changed the dynamics” but more a deliberate decision by DC to violate at least the spirit of the agreement.
Kind of amazing DC send him royalties from the film at all, given what total weasels they are. Seems like a significant part of the decision to put Fables in the public domain was that DC wasn’t giving the author any of the money from the games based on it. Probably there’s so much money involved with the film that DC can’t pretend it doesn’t exist, and instead are sending him a fraction of what he’s actually owed.
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Alan Moore is a cranky old bastard who personifies “Get offa my lawn you dang kids!”, but he’s doing a good thing here.
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I imagine DC sends him a couple thousand bucks every now and then entirely as a PR move so they can say “Hey see? We paid! We’re the good guys! We don’t know what he’s mad about it.”
Kinda like how Marvel sends $5K bonuses to creators whose characters get featured in movies. On one hand, it’s generous (or at least looks it). But it’s a pittance compared to the profits they make in perpetuity.
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Which…one is problematic?
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He’s a cranky old wizard who refused to keep getting screwed over by the industry he works in, so he rebelled against it!
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I’m going with “Alan Moore is a complicated man who has written some iffy sexist content during a decades-long successful career, but in this instance he’s definitely doing a good thing.”
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I can understand Alan Moore’s argument that there is in fact a lot of sexual violence against women in the world, so his use of it in stories is, at worse, verisimilitude.
I can also understand the argument that, like, dude, there’s a lot of fucking rape and shit in your stories, and it’s totally fair that some folks might not be cool with it, because it starts to feel gratuitous and gazey after a while, even if your intentions are earnest!
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(“Lost Girls” is probably the best book I’ve ever read that I never actually want to recommend to anyone)
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I sometimes saw (British comics writer, not the musician) Warren Ellis similarly described as a wizard (albeit more about his vibe than his actual practices).
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Ahhh. Yeah. I thought you were referring to Morrison, and was very confused! I don’t think of Ellis as a wizard because his everyday practices don’t involve actual magic (as far as I’m aware). However he has done some disappointingly shitty stuff. No wonder he writes such great bastards.
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Sure, I was thinking specifically of
from a few years ago; and Watchmen has some really sketchy sexual violence that isn’t really interrogated as much as it could be… but it’s still many steps above the usual sexual violence portrayed in, well, most media, really.
The League Of Extraordinary Gentleman also has it, and some old-fashioned racism in the form of Fu Manchu. But in the context of Victorian heroic characters, perhaps you are supposed to feel uncomfortable that nobody in the stories thinks they are wrong to be unaccountably sexist, racist and violent, especially in the name of Empire…
Not that I’m slamming him, that’s three works with controversial content that come to my mind from literally hundreds, and they were written for an adult audience. Like I said, complicated.
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