Legendary comic book author Alan Moore is done with the genre that made him famous.
Moore, known for his comics including V for Vendetta, From Hell, and Watchmen, told the Guardian that his graphic-novel days are over.
“I’m definitely done with comics,” Moore said. “I haven’t written one for getting on for five years. I will always love and adore the comics medium, but the comics industry and all of the stuff attached to it just became unbearable.”
Moore’s latest book, Illuminations, is a short story collection without any artwork. A critic for Kirkus called the book “a mixed bag with a misshapen boulder in it.”
Moore, whose comics have formed the basis for several screen adaptations, including the recent Emmy Award-winning HBO series Watchmen, took aim at comic-book movies in the interview, criticizing “adults 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.”
Moore noted that in the 1980s, journalists were fond of writing articles, often citing Watchmen, that claimed comic books had “grown up.”
“I tend to think that, no, comics hadn’t grown up,” he said. “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.”
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
