Four Color Comics

The film version of Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta opens today to weakly favorable reviews. One person who won’t be seeing the film is Alan Moore himself. He distanced himself from the project after reviewing an early draft of the screenplay.

The Beat has posted an extensive interview with Moore: part one, part two. He discusses, among other things, creators rights:

THE BEAT: Right now there’s this whole thing going on with Tokyopop publishing a lot of original manga by very young creators. Tokyopop is splitting the copyright with them and a lot of us old timers are saying well, that’s not the best thing and the creators are saying, we know what we’re doing, they will never betray us. It’s obvious that some day, there could be heartache. Now, you were a little bit older, back then.

MOORE: I was in my late twenties. Not much older.

THE BEAT: You were a little bit beyond where they are, but still, did you have any idea then [where this could go from] talking to your peers?

MOORE: Well, I was a very aware young man at that point. I’d been reading the fanzines, I knew that Jack Kirby had been screwed. I knew that Marvel Comics had screwed everybody and DC had screwed everybody since their inception. However, at the time when I was getting into the industry they were talking the language of progress, but sort of a mile a minute. There’s new, dynamic currents running in DC, and you know, all right I was 28, I was an anarchist. I was very politically cynical, but I was also working in a medium I loved. Perhaps I was too ready to believe what I was told. That might be true. Perhaps if I’d really searched my stomach I would have thought these people are almost certainly lying. But that would have meant dismissing out of hand a lot of people who, up until that point, appeared to be my friends. And hadn’t done anything.

Alan Moore is a fascinating man, and a true comics-writing legend. If you have any interest in his work, this interview is well worth reading.