English comic book writer Alan Moore said he was quitting the comic book industry and warned of “infantile” adult fascination with super heroes in a recent interview with the Guardian.
The Watchmen writer, who is currently promoting his first short story collection Illuminations, released on Tuesday, expressed dissatisfaction with the comic business and culture, noting a several decade-long change with audiences shifting from younger boys to grown men.
“I’m definitely done with comics,” said Moore in the interview. “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 commented on the culture’s envelopment with the super hero genre: “Hundreds of thousands of adults [are] 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 didn’t really think that superheroes were adult fare.”
‘Watchmen’ Creator Alan Moore Says Adults Who Enjoy Super Hero Media Are Engaging In A “Kind Of Infantilisation That Can Very Often Be A Precursor To Fascism” https://t.co/QoMCRuY7jo
— Bounding Into Comics (@BoundingComics) October 11, 2022
“I think that this was a misunderstanding born of what happened in the 1980s – to which I must put my hand up to a considerable share of the blame, though it was not intentional – when things like Watchmen were first appearing,” said the author. “There were an awful lot of headlines saying ‘Comics Have Grown Up.’ I tend to think that, no, comics hadn’t grown up. 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.”
The author noted prior to 2016 most most blockbuster films centered around super heroes.
“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 continued. “Because that kind of infantilisation – that urge towards simpler times, simpler realities – that can very often be a precursor to fascism.”
Moore also touched on the fact that V for Vendetta‘s titular character, simply named V, donning a Guy Fawkes mask had become revered by political culture: “I can’t endorse everything that people who take that mask as an icon might do in the future, of course. But I’m heartened to see that it has been adopted by protest movements so widely across the world.”
“Because we do need protest movements now,” the writer concluded. “Probably more than we’ve ever done before.”
Hacker activist group “Anonymous” famously adopted the Guy Fawkes mask popularized by Moore’s graphic novel as a quasi-mascot for the leaderless organization.
