If you know anything about Alan Moore, you’ll know he can sometimes be a bit grumpy. The legendary comic book author fires off hot takes on the regular and is even critical of his work at times.
That’s where the latest story with Moore comes from, as he continues to distance himself from Watchmen, the iconic graphic novel released in 1987. In a new interview with GQ, Alan Moore revealed that he disowned the HBO Watchmen adaptation and told the creators never to contact him.
Firstly, Moore says he did not watch HBO’s Watchmen or anything based on his work, telling GQ, “I would be the last person to want to sit through any adaptations of my work. From what I’ve heard of them, it would be enormously punishing. It would be torturous and for no very good reason.”
For Moore, this issue with the Watchmen series starts with a letter from showrunner Damon Lindelof. According to Moore, Lindelof sent him a letter during the HBO show’s development and wrote, “Dear Mr. Moore, I am one of the bastards currently destroying Watchmen.”
“That wasn’t the best opener,” Moore said. “It went on through a lot of what seemed to me to be neurotic rambling. ‘Can you at least tell us how to pronounce “Ozymandias”? I got back with a very abrupt and probably hostile reply telling him that I’d thought that Warner Bros. were aware that they, nor any of their employees, shouldn’t contact me again for any reason.”
He continues with his feelings, but it seems like the issue is less about the show itself than how pop culture handles anything related to Watchmen.
“I explained that I had disowned the work in question, and partly that was because the film industry and the comics industry seemed to have created things that had nothing to do with my work but which would be associated with it in the public mind. I said, ‘Look, this is embarrassing to me. I don’t want anything to do with you or your show. Please don’t bother me again.'”
Moore offered a bit of shade about Watchmen‘s acclaim and eventual Emmys love. The series was nominated for 26 Primetime Emmy Awards and won 11, including outstanding limited series.
“When I saw the television industry awards that the Watchmen television show had apparently won, I thought, ‘Oh, god, perhaps a large part of the public, this is what they think Watchmen was?’ They think that it was a dark, gritty, dystopian superhero franchise that was something to do with white supremacism,” Moore said.
“Did they not understand Watchmen? Watchmen was nearly 40 years ago and was relatively simple in comparison with a lot of my later work. What are the chances that they broadly understood anything since? This tends to make me feel less than fond of those works. They mean a bit less in my heart.”
For anyone shocked by Moore’s feelings, you must not have tuned into anything he’s said since 1987. The creator has long spoken about his issues with misinterpretations of his works and usually comes off as a grumpy older man. With his legendary career and everyone still trying to adapt his work, it seems like he may have earned that curmudgeon status.
