Alan Moore is "definitely done" with comics.
The 'Watchmen' author will always "love and adore" the medium but has no interest in writing more graphic novels because he isn't interested in the politics of the industry, having famously fallen out with DC Comics, amongst others, over the rights to his creations.
He told The Guardian newspaper: “I’m definitely done with comics. I haven’t written one for getting on for five years. I will always love and adore the comics medium but the comics industry and all of the stuff attached to it just became unbearable.”
Alan is also concerned about the way the superhero genre has overwhelmed comic book culture.
He said: “Hundreds of thousands of adults [are] lining up to see characters and situations that had been created to entertain the 12-year-old boys – and it was always boys – of 50 years ago.
"I didn’t really think that superheroes were adult fare. I think that this was a misunderstanding born of what happened in the 1980s – to which I must put my hand up to a considerable share of the blame, though it was not intentional – when things like 'Watchmen' were first appearing.
"There were an awful lot of headlines saying ‘Comics Have Grown Up’. I tend to think that, no, comics hadn’t grown up. There were a few titles that were more adult than people were used to.
"But the majority of comics titles were pretty much the same as they’d ever been. It wasn’t comics growing up. I think it was more comics meeting the emotional age of the audience coming the other way.”
The 68-year-old writer thinks the shift could lead to something more dangerous.
He said: “I said round about 2011 that I thought that it had serious and worrying implications for the future if millions of adults were queueing up to see 'Batman' movies. Because that kind of infantilisation – that urge towards simpler times, simpler realities – that can very often be a precursor to fascism.”
While he's give up writing comics, Alan has embraced writing short stories instead.
He said: “I’m really enjoying just writing prose fiction. Because, in some ways, to me, that seems the purest medium. You’ve got 26 characters, and a peppering of punctuation. With that, you can describe the entire conceivable universe.”
