Comic book writer Alan Moore reportedly wants future royalties from TV and film projects sent to Black Lives Matter. The prolific English author rose to fame for writing comic books such as Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Swamp Thing, and Batman: The Killing Joke.
“I don’t really feel, with the recent films, that [film companies] have stood by what I assumed were their original principles,” says Moore to The Telegraph. “So I asked for DC Comics to send all of the money from any future TV series or films to Black Lives Matter.”
Alan Moore Scoffs at the Term “Graphic Novels”
Moore has no control over which of his projects get adapted into movies or TV shows. He says that his publisher, Bloomsbury, respects his opinions and decisions. “I own my own work,” says Moore to The Telegraph. “It doesn’t sound like a lot if you’re used to traditional grown-up publishing, but it means an awful lot if you’re used to the comic books industry. It does make me wish that I’d maybe gone into writing prose fiction back in the late Seventies.” He continues:
“Now they’re called ‘graphic novels,' which sounds sophisticated and you can charge a lot more for them. What appealed to me most about comics is no more, and these innocent and inventive and imaginative superhero characters from the Forties, Fifties, Sixties are being recycled to a modern audience as if they were adult fare.”
Moore understands that he shoulders blame for post-Watchmen comic books exploring darker subject matter. “I didn’t mean my experiments with comics to be immediately taken up as something that the whole industry should do,” says Moore. “When I was doing things like Watchmen, I was not saying that dark psychopathic characters are really cool, but that does seem to be the message that the industry took for the next 20 years.”
Although Moore says he wishes that he never entered the comic book industry, he relishes being part of the literary publishing world. “I’ve become used to a more virtual world,” he says. “And I’ve kind of forgone public appearances, partly because I’m a bit old and doddery – and, as I get older, as you can see I get more unsightly – but also I was finding at comic conventions I’d talk to people and they were looking at me like they were having some sort of religious experience rather than an ordinary conversation. So I’ve sort of retired into what I probably originally thought a writer’s life was like, where you sit at home and write books.”
Moore prefers writing fantasy books. “Fantasy has no restrictions whatsoever, so it’s a bit lame to be constantly hitting the same note on the piano,” says Moore. “Let’s have fantastic visions that nobody has ever seen before – and lay off people of restricted height for a change.”
Moore's debut collection of short stories, Illuminations, is now out on paperback.
