Over at Bleeding Cool, Adi Tantimedh has an extensive interview with Alan Moore in which Moore airs his current grievances with the comics industry, and tells his side of the story of DC Comics’ recent attempt to get his go-ahead to publish prequels and sequels to Watchmen created by by what was described to him as “top-flight talent,” or in any case to reconfigure the current rights situation. The short version is that he’s even more ticked off than he was before, which is saying something. As one might imagine, Mr. Moore is rather unsparing about the situation–and is particularly unhappy about how he feels his Watchmen collaborator Dave Gibbons has been “used as a messenger boy” to try to sway him.
A sample quote:
At the end of the day, if they haven’t got any properties that are valuable enough, but they have got these ‘top-flight industry creators’ that are ready to produce these prequels and sequels to WATCHMEN, well this is probably a radical idea, but could they not get one of the ‘top-flight industry creators’ to come up with an idea of their own? Why are DC Comics trying to exploit a comic book that I wrote 25 years ago if they have got anything? Sure they ought to have had an equivalent idea since? I could ask about why Marvel Comics are churning out or planning to bring out my ancient MARVELMAN stories, which are even older, if they had a viable idea of their own in the quarter-century since I wrote those works. I mean, surely that would be a much easier solution than all of this clandestine stuff? Just simply get some of your top-flight talent to put out a book that the wider public outside of the comics field find as interesting or as appealing as the stuff that I wrote 25 years ago.
Ouch. Go read the whole thing.