This entire thing is about creative integrity and ownership. The fact that Moore has to share both with other people, most of whom seem to have different views or at least levels of concern on these issues, is at least somewhat relevent.

Mike

I wish Alan Moore would stop talking. It gets so uncomfortable when I'm trying to enjoy some delightful corporate art, and that jerk starts twisting things around until the whole idea feels empty and grotesque.

He's such a meanie!

We know what Moore's opinion is, though. Let's face it: a big, important reason for people being interested in BW is the continuation of Moore's story. That's really not the case with LOEG or Lost Girls, both of which were mostly of interest because Moore was writing them. (I do grant that there are some fans of the individual creators behind BW who'll be buying them for that reason alone. But the commercial impetus for the series is for people to buy the whole lot, because it's a continuation of Moore's story.)

Eh, I was not at all impressed with the first issue of Minutemen and it won't take much else to get me to bail on the whole project, "corporate art" or not.

Mike

Ah, your point was that he's a co-author?

No, it's that calling him the "author" of WATCHMEN or other comic work is like calling Joss Whedon the "author" of The Avengers. It's not absolutely incorrect technically, but is an inappropriate use of the term and all the suppositions that go with it.

Who was the author of Watchmen, then?

Of course Moore is the big reason to check it out, but using well known characters is what helps pull people in as well. Would people have taken an interest in Lost Girls if it hadn't involved Wendy from Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, etc?

That's a fair question, Gerald. It's not one we can test with stats. My guess is that most people are buying those Moore appropriations for him, not Carroll, Baum or whomever, whereas Moore's shadow is the reason people are mainly interested in BW, not its actual creators. It was a marketing idea, not some individual creative impulse. People were asked to work on it. The idea being, as with most corporate superheroes, to continue the adventures of these characters, not provide a forum for the creative expression of artists.

I'm willing to bet that if the characters from Watchmen were used how the existing characters were used in Lost Girls... as a metaphor to drive the remixed characters he was constructing, rather than a straight up cynical exploitation of the original stories... Moore wouldn't have minded.

I'm actually willing to bet a great deal on this because he didn't object when that exact thing already happened.