I actually drew this picture a week ago and was planning on writing a bit about why I looked up to Alan Moore and how he gets a bad rep for what I see as artistic integrity. Then, yesterday happened, and my short paragraph turned into an essay.
Since DC Comics announced the prequels to Alan Moore’s Watchmen yesterday, people have been arguing about whether they should be made. Moore himself said, “I don’t want money. I want this not to happen.” Unfortunately he has no legal right to stop them as DC owns the intellectual property to Watchmen and all its related characters. Many people have been calling Moore crazy, full of himself, and stubborn for his disapproval of movies being made of his work and the handling of characters and stories he created (as well as his worshiping of a two-thousand year old snake god proven to actually be a hand puppet, but that’s a different subject.) Now, I do not know Alan Moore, and I certainly could not claim to understand how he thinks, but it seems to me that many people, including DC executives and the creators working on Before Watchmen, have misinterpreted his aversion to others using his creations.
First, I’d like to address Moore saying, “As far as I know, there weren't that many prequels or sequels to Moby-Dick.” While this may seem boastful, the fact is that most people view Watchmen as the greatest graphic novel of all time, so he is comparing it to what many view as the greatest novel of all time. The point is not That Watchmen is as good as Moby-Dick; it’s that they are both the pinnacle of their medium and reflect the how the rest of that medium is treated. Novels are treated as works of art, and graphic novels are treated as intellectual property. Because comic books started as serials meant to be continued indefinitely, that has become the prevailing attitude towards the entire art form. Moore’s point and part of what he was trying to prove with Watchmen was that graphic novels and even superhero comics could rise above the never ending soap opera they exist in.
Moore is not saying that he such a great writer that no one else is good enough to do his work justice. He is saying that the work is complete and should be left alone. He does not want his characters to exist outside of the book because they are parts of the story, not the other way around. I’m sure that Moore, like most writers, had the entire lives of all the characters in Watchmen planned out. He only included what was necessary to tell the story and make it the best it could be. This way of writing does not seem odd at all to novel writers, but for graphic novels, the norm is to make character and continue to write stories for him indefinitely with no story arch in mind. It is arguable whether this is inherently worse, but in my opinion, it is, and either way, Moore wanted Watchmen to be self contained.
J. Michael Straczynski responded to Moore by pointing out how Moore uses public domain characters in his works The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Lost Girls, so he should not complain about people using his characters. This is ridiculous. Moore does not simply tell parts of the stories he borrows from t hat weren’t in the original. He uses established characters to tell a completely different story. Lost Girls is not a sequel to Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and Peter Pan just like Wicked is not a prequel to The Wizard of Oz and Grendel is not a prequel to Beowulf. They are deconstructions, explorations, and reimaginings of the original works. On the other hand, Before Watchmen is explicitly stated to be a series of prequels.
It's really a shame how completely a master like Moore's wishes are being ignored, and how a truly great work of art is being treated like nothing but a means to create profitable characters.
