Alan Moore says that if you buy BEFORE WATCHMEN, please don't buy anything else he writes, ever, because he can't bear the thought of his audience including the likes of you.


I have to say that if you are a reader that just wanted your favorite characters on tap forever, and never cared about the creators, then actually you're probably not the kind of reader that I was looking for.

I have a huge respect for my audience. On the occasions when I meet them, they seem, I like to think, to be intelligent and scrupulous people.

If people do want to go out and buy these Watchmen prequels, they would be doing me an enormous favor if they would just stop buying my other books. When I think of my audience, I like to have good thoughts and think about how lucky I am to have one that is as intelligent as mine and as moral as mine. The kind of readers who are prepared to turn a blind eye when the people who create their favorite reading material, their favorite characters, are marginalized or put to the wall -- that's not the kind of readers I want.

So, even if it means a huge drop in sales upon my other work, I would prefer it that way. I mean, there's no way I can police this, of course. But I would hope that you wouldn't want to buy a book knowing that its author actually had complete contempt for you. So I'm hoping that will be enough.

The New Frontiersmen -- ugh, you can't even exaggerate to make a joke about DC.

1. LOEG and Lost Girls?

2. Alan, you ain't an author. You're a comic book writer.

3. I'm pretty sure Dave Gibbons is fine with me, so I guess it all evens out.

Mike

Moore's an author of comics and a novel. Hunh?

It's more likely that Gibbons is fine with making a decent living.

Such a delicate flower.

Sorry Alan, but my morality equates both "BEFORE WATCHMEN", "LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN" and "LOST GIRLS". And I view splitting hairs to differentiate between them as mere sophistry.

1. He's talking about his comic work here.

2. I don't think self-interest is any worse than childish petulance.

Mike

I'm not buying BEFORE WATCHMEN but not because Moore says not to. It's because I don't want the original story ruined by the prequels. I already have an idea of what the Minutemen era was like, and what Rorshach was like before he snapped. Moore and Gibbons showed us just enough to let our imaginations fill in the blanks.

Was LOEG or Lost Girls based on spitting in the face of the guy behind the originary material? That's not a question of sophistry.

At the same time, one could reasonably question the degree to which Moore's work at DC was rooted in the same business practices that he's now decrying in regards to his own treatment.

Anyway, as an aesthetic principle, but not necessarily a moral one, I don't see much of a difference in the use of someone else's characters in BW and what Moore's done. In practice, though, the quality will surely be different.

1. So what? He's still an author of comics.

2. I wouldn't base justification of whether or not to buy this shit on either.

1. Those guys are dead and even if they were alive, who knows if they'd have the same attitude toward their work?

2. DC isn't "spitting" in Moore's face, no matter how much and whines and cries about it.

Mike