Alan Moore Is Retiring From Comics

Alan Moore is a delightfully crotchety comic-book writer with many other varied talents — wizard, energy drink and video-game magnate, mall Santa, killer of clowns, Rasputin impersonator, et cetera. But we may be seeing less of his work — work like Watchemen, V for Vendetta, The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, Jerusalem, From Hell, and the one where Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland throws wild lesbian sex parties (we’re not kidding) — very soon, as he tells The Guardian he’s retiring from comics. Well, he’s retiring from comics after finishing his current work, including Cinema Purgatorio and one more League of Extraordinary Gentlemen book.

“Although I may do the odd little comics piece at some point in the future, I am pretty much done with comics.” The decision came, Moore explained, when he realised he felt too comfortable in the medium. “I think I have done enough for comics. I’ve done all that I can. I think if I were to continue to work in comics, inevitably the ideas would suffer, inevitably you’d start to see me retread old ground and I think both you and I probably deserve something better than that,” he said. “So, the things that interest me at the moment are the things I don’t know if I can do, like films, where I haven’t got a clue what I am doing, or giant literary novels. Things I wasn’t sure I’d even have the stamina to finish.”

We’ll have to remain a bit skeptical, as Alan Moore has been announcing his retirement for years now, saying in July of 2010, “I’m pretty much out of comics now. I really want nothing to do with it.” Then the following September he said, “I don’t want anything to do with the comics industry in future.” Six years later, he’s still making comics and saying he’s done making comics. Then again, this time he’s talking about other ventures (films and novels) he wants to challenge himself with, so he may succeed in pulling himself away from comics for awhile.

And you may be wondering, did the guy whose royalty checks from Warner allegedly arrive late and who reportedly turned down $2 million to endorse Before Watchmen still have a beef with Warner

“The superhero movies — characters that were invented by Jack Kirby in the 1960s or earlier — I have great love for those characters as they were to me when I was a 13-year-old boy. They were brilliantly designed and created characters. But they were for 50 years ago. I think this century needs, deserves, its own culture. It deserves artists that are actually going to attempt to say things that are relevant to the times we are actually living in. That’s a longwinded way of me saying I am really, really sick of Batman.”

Yup.