Robot 6
Watchmen‘s legacy: ’20 years of very grim and often pretentious stories’
Alan Moore
Wired magazine has a lengthy Q&A with Alan Moore that’s just paragraph after paragraph of entertaining reading. It’s like the “Best of Alan Moore,” with the writer holding court on the impact of Watchmen, superheroes, his relationship with DC Comics, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and what comics does better than other mediums.
It’s filled with quotes that likely will leave critics of Moore, and/or fans of superhero comics, seething, and the writer’s devotees nodding in agreement. A little sampling:
On superhero comics: “I have to say that I haven’t seen a comic, much less a superhero comic, for a very, very long time now—years, probably almost a decade since I’ve really looked at one closely. But it seems to be that things that were meant satirically or critically in Watchmen now seem to be simply accepted as kind of what they appear to be on the surface. So yeah, I’m pretty jaundiced about the entire ‘caped crusader’ concept at the moment.”
On the impact of Watchmen: “At the time I thought that a book like Watchmen would perhaps unlock a lot of potential creativity, that perhaps other writers and artists in the industry would see it and would think, ‘This is great, this shows what comics can do. We can now take our own ideas and thanks to the success of Watchmen we’ll have a better chance of editors giving us a shot at them.’ I was hoping naively for a great rash of individual comic books that were exploring different storytelling ideas and trying to break new ground.
“That isn’t really what happened. Instead it seemed that the existence of Watchmen had pretty much doomed the mainstream comic industry to about 20 years of very grim and often pretentious stories that seemed to be unable to get around the massive psychological stumbling block that Watchmen had turned out to be, although that had never been my intention with the work.”
On DC’s purchase of Wildstorm: “When I returned to work for—well, I didn’t return. I was kind of press-ganged. I had DC buying the company I had just signed contracts with, which is flattering in one way and very creepy in another. It’s like being stalked by a very rich demented girlfriend who can just buy your entire street in order to be close to you.”
There’s much more at the link — six pages, in all.
The magazine also interviews Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons, who talks about the movie adaptation, and working with Moore on the miniseries.
Related: Tom Spurgeon’s 10 ways to read Watchmen
- February 24, 2009 @ 05:24 AM by Kevin Melrose
5 Comments
Chris
February 24, 2009 at 7:30 am
I’m going to buy Wired just for that article.
ElCoyote's Prophet
February 24, 2009 at 9:00 am
I’m not jaundiced about the idea of super hero comics.
I’m jaundiced about the way the people in the industry are obsessed with their tropes. And their inability to try new things to fix the inherent flaws in the genre.
Busiek did it with Power Company, the industry and fans ignored it. Heroes for Hire tried it, was equally ignored. Marvel even attempted to create a line wide shift from the cliches and got lambasted and backed down.
And stuff like Irredeemable does not seem to at all want to move away from the tropes. Secret identities, and families as targets, Superman Gone Bad. Nothing NEW. Just another of the books that looks at Watchmen and doesn’t see a finely crafted comic book that tells a story that’s not inline with what was going on around it, no, they see “realistic” super heroes who have sex and kill people.
I think Moore was too young when he wrote Watchmen. If he had done it ten years later it would have had the impact he wanted, because he likely would not have told the same story.
And maybe he would’ve told a story that forced people to understand that the way he told the story is more important than the story itself.
I look at all these other ‘dark sup hero comics’ and I see none of them really understood the strength of Watchmen lie in it’s FORM, it’s attention to detail and storytelling, not the story itself.
Which is why making a movie of it makes little sense, besides being far too dense and detailed to be adaptable, it is INHERENTLY A STORY TOLD THROUGH THE COMIC BOOK FORM. It works as a comic book because Moore had the vision and skill and Gibbons the talent to make those visions look beautiful on the page.
It was never about the story.
It’s like trying to make a movie from a piece of instrumental music. It just makes no sense to me.
ElCoyote's Prophet
February 24, 2009 at 9:04 am
I would also like to point out that the other obsessive cliche people need to get over is the pamphlet.
Of course, there’s an entire generation of kids who likely have never bought a pamphlet yet love graphic fiction and super heroes[mostly in films, but also in trade paperback form].
Marvel and DC need to stop catering to dead audience.
nicholas
February 24, 2009 at 10:40 am
Oh, for god’s sake; STOP using the word “pamphlet” as some derogatory term; it’s insulting and pretentious. Some comic books work better in “pamphlet” form – I would even say that Watchmen is a better book because it was released initially in that format; I think that it would have been structured completely differently had it been done as a stand-alone graphic novel.
Two of my favorite books of all time (Savage Dragon and Groo) work best in a serialized, monthly, format. While I personally have no interest in reading Amazing Spider-Man comics at all, I can’t say that I would be any more likely to pick them up if they were published in an original “graphic novel” versus the individual comics.
People need to get over themselves and realize there is not one “right way” for comics to be published. Sometimes, the “juvenile” “pamphlet” format works just fine.
Bob
August 17, 2009 at 11:01 am
Just my two cents:
While the dictionary definition of “pamphlet” may describe the traditional comic magazine format, the word connotes something that’s used for advertising or proselytizing. IMHO, “magazine” is just as descriptive, and carries less baggage.