Grant Morrison Still Doesn’t Mince Words About Alan Moore’s ‘Watchmen’

Comic book icons and notable wizards Grant Morrison and Alan Moore have a famously cantankerous attitude towards each other, although Morrison does seem to have a respect tempered with criticism for the Watchmen co-creator / mall Santa / Rasputin impersonator. He doesn’t hide how he really feels, however. About anything.

IDW Publishing interviewed Morrison for the next volume of their 200-page quarterly comics magazine, Full Bleed Vol. 3: Heavy Rotation, which just launched its funding drive on Kickstarter. The full interview won’t be available until February, but io9 scored a long excerpt filled with fodder for another three decades of feuding between the two comics titans.

“I’ve read Watchmen many times,” Morrison said. “The reasons that I hated it when I was 25 are still there, but now I kinda like it because I’m older and I like the structure and I’m quite in awe of the absoluteness of it. But for all the same reasons, I hated it.” He goes on to list exactly what he hated about it, because of course.

“The fact that none of the characters were allowed to be smarter than the author, that really drove me nuts. The world’s smartest man is an idiot. He makes a plan all his life that is undone by the end of the book in an instant. The psychiatrist sits with Rorschach for five minutes and Rorschach tells a super banal story of how he became a vigilante and the psychiatrist cracks. If you’re a criminal psychiatrist who deals with men in prison, you’ve heard a million of these stories. […] Watchmen, you can’t turn the page without him saying ‘Look at me, look at me, look at me.’ Okay, we get it, man. You got thrown out of school at 16 for dealing acid, you’re clever.”

He went on to talk about how his public dislike of Watchmen was what originally set off their “feud” — which he says isn’t a feud because “a feud would actually need to involve people’s interest. I read his stuff, he reads my stuff — he pretends he doesn’t, but he does.”

Much like what happens when you put bread in an officially-licensed Watchmen toaster, that’s a burn.

It wasn’t entirely harsh, however:

“It was the archetypal struggle, and it wasn’t fair, ‘cause I love his work. Well, there’s a lot of it I don’t like, but of course, he’s great. We grew up in a very similar time even though I’m a little bit younger than him. It’s the same influences from ‘60s TV and ‘70s TV and the books we read, sci-fi, all that stuff, same comics. And the fact that he got into magic… it’s two people who are so similar but so utterly different that there has to be a feud.”

You can read the full excerpt over at io9.