How deep do you want to go? Marvelman? Captain Marvel? Superman? Hugo Danner? Gilgamesh?



The back character of the Joker was entirely Moore's invention, abandoned immediately thereafter.



Again, please cite the exact issues of Charlton comics that Watchmen makes reference to.



??? Moore's resolution of the Ripper mystery is largely taken from another book.

Moore didn't come up with those characters. That was a time period where he was writing whatever anyone would pay him to work on. He also took money from Todd McFarlane and Dave Sim around that time.

Can you have a conversation with someone without deafening yourself?

There are no opening credits. All the credits appear at the end. Kirby gets credited with Stan as creating the Avengers (they mean in terms of the overall team idea I guess.) Also, Joe Simon and Kirby get a credit for creating Cap.



Yeah, someone came to the misunderstanding that Kirby wasn't going to be credited at all, and put that to Stan Lee, who gave that fucking bizarre answer. Seriously, he doesn't know how Kirby would be credited?

Meanwhile, Lee continues to receive an utterly meaningless "Executive Producer" credit on every Marvel film.

By the way, David Brothers is right about the crassness of the official title, Marvel's The Avengers. It highlights the shamelessness of corporations in subsuming individual creativity - capitalism can be pretty darn anti-individualistic.

(It's a daft title in any rate, leading to a ridiculous title card, whereby Marvel presents itself producing itself making its movie.)

Thanks that's good to know.

That surprised me.

I would think the answer is obvious, and I understand Mr. Lee might need to be mindful of not pissing of Marvel's lawyers and be very careful how he words his responses to these things, but I would think Mr. Kirby's involvement would be obvious. And there should be a way to graciously say something, giving a tip of the hat as it were, without sounding evasive. I mean if all else fails play the old man card, "I'm not sure what you're talking about, but I remember working on that first issues of the Avengers comic with Jack Kirby... Good times." Maybe I'm being too hard on the guy, but it just seems like he won, he's got tons of money, all the notoriety, the media, sees him as the Walt Disney of comics, why not be a bit more gracious. And he does it sometimes. Maybe the lawyers at marvel have everybody crazy or maybe he's just not as quick on his feet as he used to be.

I totally agree with you here.

If Moore, as you pointed out, says he was wrong to work on all those corporate owned characters. And he did it at a time when common knowledge creators had been screwed, he was willingly part of the system that he knew exploited the works of others.

But now someone else is doing it him. Isn't that part of the price you need to pay in order to NOT be a hypocrite?

If you work for Marvel and/or DC and you DON'T get exploited, aren't you part of the exploitation? If you get to play with the company toys, as long as you leave a bit of your own sweat and blood creations behind, you've paid the karmic debt.

Allen is trying to make the argument that when Moore writes a story using characters created by other authors, even if those characters have been passed on through many authors, they somehow become unique, and anyone who uses the same characters after Moore, is just trying to exploit Moore's versions, not doing the same thing he did.

Allen claims that in the LOEG, "The novelty is simply in shoving them all into one goulash, not in continuing their stories or creating new canonical continuity. I've read very few of the original works, so I don't know how well Moore's story dovetails into them." His argument as best I can guess is that the sum of the parts creates a new whole, if that were the case why just use public domain characters? If the end result were truly a unique creation, how would copyright apply.

Moore didn't invent the idea of creating a shared universe with literary characters, nor did he create any of the lead characters, so how is Moore NOT exploiting these characters, but people making Watchmen prequels are exploiting Moore?

But it's all exploitation. How is Moore unique? All corporate owned comics and comics merchandise are exploiting the creative people who worked on them before. All of Marvels movies exploit Kirby to some extent, but the general public doesn't know his name, so according to allen it's different, like a Batman movie exploits Frank Miller, (especially one called The Dark Knight).

I don't need to. He was continuing Mick Anglo's MARVELMAN for Warrior Magazine. It's not like he created a completely new character inspired by those others. He was writing Mick Anglo's characters except with the twist of EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG!!!



Batman, The Joker, Barbara Gordon, Commisioner Gordon, the Red Hood Identity, the chase throught the chemical factor along witht the chemical bath were all created by someone else.



I didn't say it does or does not make exact references to any exact Charlton issues. I said Moore originally just wanted to play with Charlton characters and do his MO of adding adult themes to characters aimed at kids/teenagers.



Oh well, then that's not a good example of Moore being unique.

Yup.

Alan Moore keeps finding excuses for himself. He says that MOBY DICK never got a sequel, why should Watchmen? Let these self contained masterpieces stand on their own, dammit!

But if you're taking characters from self contained stories it's okay because you're not making DIRECT sequels.

But in the case of Jules Verne and other authors like him, then direect sequels are okay, as long as you don't title it THE NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM PART II.

Moore creates very narrow parameters of what is okay and what isn't in literature, and these parameters convienently fit with what he and his favorite writers have done.

I'll let you intellectual heavyweights decide the complicated morality issues involved in WATCHMEN 2.

Me, I'm going to avoid these comics simply because I thought WATCHMEN was a fine piece of work, and the story ended to my satisfaction in 1987, and I've no interest in seeing what Jim Lee or anyone else wants to add to the story at this late date.

If Warner Bros. announced CASABLANCA 2: PLAY IT AGAIN AGAIN, starring Seth Rogan and Lindsey Lohan, I would not dispute the studio's right to do so. But I wouldn't open my wallet for it, either.

If Alan Moore and DC had put out Minutemen, the original prequel to Watchmen, I so would have bought that.