Comic books as an art form have faced a lifetime of mostly scorn from people who see it as low art, if art at all, and claptrap for kids. This perception changed in the late 20th Century in no small part to the work of writer Alan Moore on titles like Swamp Thing, Watchmen, and The Killing Joke. He injected maturity, political worldview, and pure comics spectacle in his stories, proving that this visual medium is capable of delivering an engaging artistic experience for adults. Unfortunately, the now novelist and screenwriter, thinks that was a huge mistake. In an interview, he said that he thinks the idea of adults lining up to see “Batman movies” is terrifying, suggesting that they are infantilized and yearning for better days, thus primed to succumb to fascism.
Moore is obviously referencing the rise of authoritarianism, nationalism, and xenophobia in Europe and the United States. To even ask if he’s correct is as arrogant as interrogating the notion from Martin Scorsese about Marvel (and others’) movies and their relation to cinema. Still, as someone who is both keenly aware of the modern comic book culture and documented the rise of these proto-fascists during the 2016 election, Moore’s analysis doesn’t pass the gut check. Moore’s relationships with comic books has been strange since his heyday in the late 20th Century. He’s always hated adaptations of his work, yet something is different now. He never let the failed movie franchise attempts sour his time working on his other books, like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. That movie ‘s adaptation was the worst of all of them.
Alan Moore Continues To Rail Against Comic Books, Despite Writing Classics In The Medium
Those who know this story especially aren’t surprised to hear him decry a pop culture that looks back with nostalgia rather than forward with curiosity. Today he has written a novel, there was a film awhile back. I know he had a diversion into erotica with women characters from children’s literature in comics. I personally didn’t investigate those books further. The point is that Moore has long moved on from the cape and tights fare that make up the output of the two mega publishers, DC and Marvel, as well as a fair portion of Image, Dark Horse, and other indie publishers. Moore also famously hates adaptations of his work, and the work of others. So if he’s seen any modern superhero movie, even by accident, I’d be surprised. Like (treasure of cinema, god director, and from all accounts genuinely nice man) Martin Scorsese, rather than actually critiquing these films, Moore criticizes his idea of what these movies are.
Here’s what I think is the key bit of what Moore said to The Guardian:
“To my mind, this embracing of what were unambiguously children’s characters at their mid-20th century inception seems to indicate a retreat from the admittedly overwhelming complexities of modern existence. It looks to me very much like a significant section of the public, having given up on attempting to understand the reality they are actually living in, have instead reasoned that they might at least be able to comprehend the sprawling, meaningless, but at-least-still-finite ‘universes’ presented by DC or Marvel Comics. I would also observe that it is, potentially, culturally catastrophic to have the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times.
Much of what Moore says here is worth considering, especially in the age of “comfort shows” and “bullet-point journalism.” However, rather than the comics characters stuck at their mid-20th inception, it’s the idea of “culture” where Moore gets hung up. I would bet my original copy of The Killing Joke (gingerly read so as not to bend the spine) that Alan Moore isn’t a big user of internet or social media. The kids who grew up in the early 21st Century with only adventures in space, superheroes, or myriad fast, furious impossible missions on their movie screens didn’t get to see the kind of film Moore saw growing up. He came of age at a time when you could see Robert DeNiro in a Brian DePalma movie the same year you saw Cary Grant in a movie by Charles Stewart, the director of The Ziegfeld Follies. Today folks have greater access to more dynamic types of media than ever before. They don’t have to take a train to a seedy part of town to see some weird short film by a director in a movie theater in some basement. They can watch 10 in a day on YouTube. The entry-level budget to make a movie is the cost of a smartphone, maybe some headphones, and enough data to upload the finished product.
The Movie Business Is Struggling After A Decade Of Record-Breaking Excess And Continued Corporate Greed
Arguably what is keeping the movie theater business going in these post-COVID times are the big dumb franchises. Comics characters are recognizable across generations. These films have a wide appeal, especially to the audience just in it for the ride and the popcorn. Some families, like my own, make seeing these goofy movies an ongoing ritual. Parents and kids going to the movies is as old as movies, but something about having these characters I loved growing up as the thing in my kid’s childhood era felt like a gift. And the storytellers who make these films often get much more right than they get wrong. In terms of any moral or message sold to the viewer, the films don’t get into the kind of things Moore is best known for. Rather they stick to the simple messages that the source material tried to impart on their readers. Things like: Being different isn’t bad. Mercy isn’t weakness. Power doesn’t make you remarkable, willingness to help does. There are myriad paths to fascism, some still well-worn to this day. No movie has ever sent anyone down that path that wasn’t already headed in that direction anyway.
Yet, as anyone who’s dealt with toxic fandom knows, if there are infantile bootlickers among the comics faithful, they’re not the ones lining up to see the films on opening day. Those who understand Rorschach is not a hero in Watchmen, knows Alan Moore was being specific when he cited “adults queuing up for Batman movies” in the same quote mentioning fascism. That character was Moore’s indictment of Batman, though Moore likely respected Rorschach a little more than Bats because Bruce Wayne is also rich. Yet, when Moore talks about infantilization and a desire for “simpler times,” he is adequately describing what primes a constituency to latch on to a strongman. Yet, one needs only scroll Twitter, YouTube, or any place people talk about these films to see that those currently aligned with a strongman dictator type aren’t fond of the vast majority of comic book output.
From She-Hulk: Attorney at Law all the way back to Captain Marvel, comic book fare is often labeled as “too woke” for the types who want the world to look how it did when they are children. Those who love the MCU and other comic book films for the “right reasons,” also probably draw upon a connection to childhood. However, it’s one that Alan Moore is perhaps too close to (read: still sore about) the business to see but has a parallel in his life. Moore is not fond of religion either, so the mythical deification of figures like Superman or Spider-Man probably bugs the shit out of him. He has said he is a follower of some fake deity that is itself a protest against belief. Moore just knows too much about how stories are put together to fall for any of it. Joseph Campbell also understood a lot about stories and how they were told. Yet, he didn’t make his bones by writing stories about a sentient plant-person who loves to fuck. Instead he studied myths and religions across many cultures, scholarship most people know as “The Hero’s Journey.” But that’s not the relevant bit.
Alan Moore Is Almost The Anti-Joseph Campbell When It Comes To Understanding Why People Like Certain Stories
Campbell was also not religious, likely for the same reason as Moore. He just knew too much about how the gospel sausage was made. Yet, just because he didn’t follow a specific belief system doesn’t mean he didn’t believe some wild, unprovable thing that likely gave him comfort and informed his outlook on life. Essentially, Campbell believed that it was more than just humans being uncreative and parallel thinking themselves into similar mythology. He believed that there was both this deep need in people to hear these stories, and that these stories were spontaneous creations of the teller’s psyche drawn from a kind of universal collective human uberconsciousness. A shorter way to describe that is: The storytellers are prophets transmitting the Word of God.
Campbell was no dummy, though. He knew how that sounded. He spent a lot of time in interviews, specifically the incredible series he did with Bill Moyers, talking about how this wasn’t choirs of angels and demons but a kind of genetic moral tradition. What’s so great about comics is that they give us these stories, these gods, but have the decency to say up-front that it’s all fiction. Unlike the country that bears his name, the God who is supposed to be blessing it, and the people elected to steward it, Captain America will never let you down. None of these characters will. And, if they do? Chances are there are you can find a hundred stories about them that you haven’t yet watched or read. Though, it’s worth noting that Alan Moore would surely call this “rubbish” (or perhaps “nattering” preceded by a colorful adjective). That the MCU and DCU tell “modern” stories is not what he meant by “mid-20th century inception.” To him, all these characters are all stolen property.
As Moore feels about his characters from Watchmen, he believes the various costumed adventurers from Marvel and DC Comics aren’t really their property. He thinks the characters should be the property of those who created them. He thinks their stories should stop when their creators are done telling them. There is nothing more repugnant to him, I’d reckon, than a storyteller adapting some other creator’s work, especially if that creator isn’t actively involved (and getting paid for it). However, to most fans there is no one creator for characters like Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man. Even for diehard comics kids, depending on when you are buying your monthly issues, Superman could be a dude with blue lightning powers and Spider-Man could be a blond guy named Ben Reilly. That’s what makes them less individual creators’ intellectual property and a modern mythic archetype. Also, on the big screen, these characters can do for audiences of all ages what they do for kids in the comics. They can entertain them, while also sneaking in a story about how being selfless and compassionate makes the world a better place.
Alan Moore Isn’t Completely Wrong, But He’s Also Certainly Not Right
Again, Moore is not totally off-base here. Think about the content creators who unironically use the word “woke” as a pejorative. The outrage fandom side of the entertainment commentary business is employing the same media strategies as the right-wing political types. They create a kind of entitled bullshit whining human centipede where they just rotate complaints about forced diversity, Mary Sues, and how anyone who calls them out are the actually toxic people. They are clamoring for a return to some definitive version of a character that may or may not exist. What they often object to is when characters like Hawkman, a bird-person alien from an imaginary place, are played by Black actors like Aldis Hodge. They object to ‘the change in the comic book character,’ but not out of some devotion to the source material. In some cases, it’s not even conscious racism or sexism. It’s what Moore said. They want their funny books movies (and the rest of the world) to be “like it was” when they were kids. Whatever America the authoritarians dressed up as Republicans or conservatives, et al. want to get back to is probably the one that existed when they were somewhere from 12- to 15 years old.
For good or ill, art is a reflection of not just its creator but its time. The idea that comic book movies can make a fascist is as ridiculous as the idea that a first-person shooter could make a murderer. There may be folks predisposed to such a direction, and some media might even trigger something. But it’s never that media’s fault. However, the majority of comic book films are not what Alan Moore describes, which makes sense since he doesn’t watch them. Rather than some reverse-Lynchian nightmare looking back at idyllic Americana, modern storytellers use these archetypal figures to ply recognition and nostalgia from audiences, while also trying to tell them a story relevant to the world in which they live. The MCU gang even did a few movies about “Who watches the Watchmen?” Say what you will about the execution, but there is no denying that the Marvel Studios writers and directors are more than just a corporate toy factory pumping out new theme park rides. These movies are big money-earners, but that just means they are communal cinematic events. There are far worse ways to spend a couple of hours.
As for the great Alan Moore? Personally, I think the man who wrote that arc of Swamp Thing that still captures my imagination to this day can say anything he wants to about the medium. However, I think the critical analysis skills of anyone who thinks HBO’s 2019 Watchmen series is “embarrassing” are profoundly suspect. So, while I do think Alan Moore is onto something when he talks about how a yearning for a world that no longer exists can lead to trouble, he’s wrong about who the people are we need to worry about. In a way, he’s making the opposite mistake of people who think Rorschach is a hero. He’s making assumptions and conclusions based on a barely surface-level understanding of the demographic these films appeal to. The people lining up to see modern superhero movies are, like the people who lined up at the Globe Theater way back in the days of Billy Shakes, the ones smart enough to appreciate these stories for feeding that innate human urge for epic, mythic tales of heroes and villains.
