Legendary comic book writer Alan Moore has announced that he is retiring from the medium, with the creator of such classics as Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen revealing during a press conference for his new novel Jerusalem that he feels he’s accomplished all he can with comics and wants to explore other areas.
“There are a couple of issues of an Avatar [Press] book that I am doing at the moment, part of the HP Lovecraft work I’ve been working on recently,” said Moore (via The Guardian) “Me and Kevin will be finishing Cinema Purgatorio and we’ve got about one more book, a final book of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to complete. After that, although I may do the odd little comics piece at some point in the future, I am pretty much done with comics. I think I have done enough for comics. I’ve done all that I can. I think if I were to continue to work in comics, inevitably the ideas would suffer, inevitably you’d start to see me retread old ground and I think both you and I probably deserve something better than that.”
“The things that interest me at the moment are the things I don’t know if I can do, like films, where I haven’t got a clue what I am doing, or giant literary novels,” he continued. “Things I wasn’t sure I’d even have the stamina to finish … I know I am able to do anything anyone is capable of doing in the comic book medium. I don’t need to prove anything to myself or anyone else. Whereas these other fields are much more exciting to me. I will always revere comics as a medium. It is a wonderful medium.”
Moore’s Jerusalem, a mammoth 1280-page epic, is set for release tomorrow, September 13th.