Comic book writer Alan Moore said he will donate royalties from future screen adaptations of his work to Black Lives Matter.
Moore is known for his work on comic book titles Watchmen, V For Vendetta, and Batman: The Killing Joke, all of which have live action or animated screen adaptations, among others. The comic book writer has notoriously expressed dissatisfaction with screen adaptations of his work.
The 40-year comic book veteran shared his decision to provide future screen adaptation royalties to Black Lives Matter in a Wednesday interview published by The Telegraph.
“I no longer wish it to even be shared with them. I don’t really feel, with the recent films, that they have stood by what I assumed were their original principles,” Moore told the outlet. “So I asked for DC Comics to send all of the money from any future TV series or films to Black Lives Matter.”
V For Vendetta and Watchmen creator Alan Moore will donate screen royalties from adaptations of his work to Black Lives Matter pic.twitter.com/LIyBS3U2vu
— Chris Bertman (@manofbert) September 14, 2023
Moore said he had become less active in public settings following his work’s popularity.
“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,” he said. “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.”
Last year in an interview with The Guardian, Moore criticized the comic book industry as “infantile” with adult fascination of superheroes. Moore elaborated on his remarks in his interview with The Telegraph by criticizing references to comic books as “graphic novels,” saying the terms sounded more “sophisticated” and therefore allowed sellers to charge more for comic books.
“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,” he said. “I didn’t mean my experiments with comics to be immediately taken up as something that the whole industry should do.”
“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,” he said.
Having retired from the comic book industry last year, Moore discussed working on a series of fantasy novels set in mid-20th century Britain, but also criticized the genre for being formulaic.
“Fantasy these days seems to have been boiled down to a kind of JRR Tolkein, George RR Martin world of warriors and dragons and, for some reason, dwarves,” he said. “The fantasy books that inspire me are things like Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, which is actually about the real world in some ways, the changing nature of British society.”
“Fantasy has no restrictions whatsoever, so it’s a bit lame to be constantly hitting the same note on the piano,” he added. “Let’s have fantastic visions that nobody has ever seen before – and lay off people of restricted height for a change.”
