Cognitive Dissonance: An Open Letter to Alan Moore

Alan Moore is doing a reading of one of his non-comic things on Saturday, so he did an interview with a UK… tabloid? I think it’s a tabloid. Then again, I thought English tabloids were supposed to have titty shots, which I couldn’t find. But it’s not like I looked hard; after all, all I had access to was their Web site, and I’m not gonna spend time figuring out where “Page 3” is when I can smack my head against the keyboard, press the Enter key and get thousands of pages of hardcore pornography. But I digress.

The point is that Alan Moore did a short interview with this thing, and used the opportunity to talk about how awesome Alan Moore is:

At the moment I feel an awful lot of my comic career is behind me, particularly all of the superhero stuff – the stuff that’s owned by American corporations. I want to distance myself from that, so the stuff I’m proudest of is what I own: From Hell, Lost Girls, The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I don’t read my earlier work because there are too many unpleasant associations with it. I don’t have a copy of Watchmen in the house. I’m glad the work is out there in the world, having an effect, but it’s like I’ve gone through a messy divorce.

Oh, Alan… let’s start with the obvious stuff.

1. From Hell is about Jack The Ripper and is based on a series of books about the killer, so many that you included pages and pages of annotations documenting from where you took what.
2. Lost Girls is about Alice In Wonderland, Dorothy from Oz, and Wendy from Peter Pan.
3. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is about Mina from Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Invisible – oh, fuck it. You get the point.

And in case you don’t: the stuff that you “own” is pretty much entirely based on earlier works by someone else, to the point where the people who own the rights to Peter Pan in Great Britain threatened to sue you over Lost Girls and prevented you from releasing the book in the UK until that copyright lapsed.

If you go further back to your work that’s “owned by American corporations,” we’ve got Swamp Thing, which was straight-ahead comics work for hire on an existing character. Watchmen was an “original” work based on “original” characters… each of which was a pastiche based on old Charlton Comics characters (Which you explicitly stated in your original pitch for the book that’s included in the deluxe Absolute Watchmen collection). Even your latest comic work, Neonomicon from Avatar Comics, was a retelling of Lovecraft’s Cthuhlu mythos.

Other than V For Vendetta, pretty much everything you’ve ever done has been either a continuation or a pastiche of existing characters and stories. And that’s not really meant to be a slam, because that’s all most comics stories are. But by continuing this ongoing feud with Marvel and DC, you’re closing yourself off from literally thousands of possible stories. Stories that are right in your wheelhouse, which is adapting, updating and modernizing existing stories and characters.

I get you’re pissed about how you were treated by these companies, but let’s be realistic here. What did you expect? They’re corporations. You made deals with them when you were Alan Moore: pretty good comic writer with potential, and they weren’t very good deals. Duh. We’re talking about companies that made the same deals with the people who invented Superman and the Fantastic Four. Does that make it right? No. Does that make it the way things are, that you knew full well when you got into bed with them? Pretty much, yeah.

So you can sit there in England and bitch about how you were mistreated when you were nobody… or you can butch up and make a new deal now that you’re Alan Fucking Moore.

You think that if you picked up the phone and called Dan DiDio that he wouldn’t immediately call the typesetters to change the logo from Vertigo Comics to Alan Moore’s Vertigo Comics? Jesus, the guy just blew up his entire universe to get some new readers. What do you think he’d do to be able to tell the press that the guy who wrote Watchmen was returning to write more books? You think Joe Quesada wouldn’t give you as big a royalty rate as you wanted in exchange for writing a Dr. Strange book? He’d probably change the masthead to “Created by Steve Ditko. Saved by Alan Moore.”

Look, Alan – I know that you’ve potentially got a gripe that DC sold Watchmen buttons – before the book was a hit, mind you – and didn’t cough up enough money to you. And I know that Marvel didn’t put “Copyright by Alan Moore” on the indicia for Captain Marvel when they reprinted it in America. These are legitimate slights, but ones that were inflicted on you before your middle name was “Fucking”. But frankly? Look: I’ve said before that I don’t watch Mad Men, but there’s one quote from that show that perfectly applies to this situation:

Peggy Olson: And you never say thank you.

Don Draper: That’s what the money is for!

You can sit there in England and complain that you were mistreated and how you saved comics and how you deserve more. But what do you want? An apology? A parade? A handjob? If it’s a handjob, just say so! Jim Lee’s probably already spitting into his palm!

You have a problem with a couple of corporations. They are probably willing to make it up to you with money in exchange for more good work. They are corporations, that’s what they do. Take it. It’ll let you give us the comics that we want, and we won’t have to listen to you complain about the lack of respect you received for a book that was released twenty-six years ago. Everybody wins.

Ahh, enough about this. There’s gotta be boobs on this Internet someplace.