Yeah I guess I feel similarly about the racist stuff in LEAGUE (Fu Manchu, and the Pollywog). The series is all about taking these public domain characters, and telling an alternate history with them. There’s a lot of fucking racist shit in history, and in literature! So I get what he’s doing.
Also…if someone says that maybe Moore isn’t the best person to be reclaiming racist literary tropes by embracing them in a postmodern way, that’s a fair argument too!
He’s obviously a smart guy; I suspect at least some of the criticism is people expecting a Tights & Capes level of nuance, so his (hopefully intended) satire and commentary can get lost.
He really does ask a lot of his readers, doesn’t he? That’s not bad, of course, but when you’re elevating a genre often considered to be little more than for children, you have to expect bumps in the road…
Most people missed that even The Comedian finally realised violence isn’t the answer. There’s no heroes in Watchmen.
Not every piece of art is to be consumed, the more interesting work tends to make you think.
I loved The Invisibles by Grant Morrison, but it doesn’t have the same depth as most Moore comics.
On a tangent; I watched a Marc Maron show yesterday, End Times Fun, where he talks about comics being like a religion. Fair warning, it’s dark, gross and funny.
Yep! Which is the point of the series… to very much question the whole notion of superheroes in the first place…
Oh! I’ll have to dig that up! Thanks! I love Maron!
Here’s a fun interview with Mr Moore.
I wonder if part of “he’s a grumpy old curmudgeon” is from Moore coming from Northampton and having a Northamptonshire accent. Just like Stuart Lee’s Telford accent maybe sounds unfamiliar and flat to folk from foreign parts; like Cambridge, Peterborough or Derby, and beyond.
He’s large, he contains multitudes. He can be both!
I’ve been hung up on this for the past couple of days. This is for all future adaptations of his work. When did he make this request? If it were made prior to the release of the Watchmen HBO series, then we can see if Warner Bros. followed through. But if it were made after, like in response to the series, then that means no money has been donated so far.
It’s a great request that he’s made. I’m just confused about whether or not it’s happened yet.
is a more accurate representation.
The article says:
Is it true that he refuses all money he is entitled to from the film companies, asking for it to be divvied up among the film’s writers and other creatives? “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.”
And there is also this article from 2008 which seems to back that up:
ETA: So, the donate to BLM bit is new.
Grumpy he may seem. But what he did with Watchmen is to point out how horrible the idea of the super hero would be applied to the real world. My experience is that sometimes comic fans have a problem with Moore coming in and putting things on their head and using the medium of comics to take a good look at what super hero comics are.
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