‘Watchmen’ Creator Alan Moore on Adults Loving Superhero Movies: “That kind of infantilization – that urge towards simpler times, simpler realities – that can very often be a precursor to fascism.” (Variety)

Updated 2 years ago

Alex Ross Justice Web

The older you get, the more you appreciate that deconstructing comics is more interesting and fun than actually playing straight with them as if you were an 8-year-old.
SURPRISE!
I love Alan Moore. I have a lot of his work on this site. So I have mixed feelings about his remarks. As a lifelong comics reader I am more than elated that Hollywood has made my passion into a gargantuan industry. I am equally happy that the franchises are smart, witty, and entertaining. They have come a long way since the Batman TV series. I still think Superman and Superman 2 were the best.
I have mixed feelings. But in the end, I have only watched the first Iron Man and the new Wonder Woman but only because my brother played it at a family gathering. I feel no compulsion to get out the latest Thor, or anything. But at least I know they are good.
Now HBO’s Watchmen and The Boys…. that stuff is must-watch.
It’s all in the writing and the willingness to not be everything to everyone, which sadly isnit very profitable.

My friend Yoseph from Israel interviewed him, and had these remarks.
“Right. There is a bit of a “protesteth too much” that is a part of Alan Moore’s growth and self-development/discovery work, related to his general punk rejectionism, including a rejection of rejectionism that ultimately led him back towards classicism in the context of magic and Qabbalah… I think it’s part of his hope of overcoming the small gods and idols that so defined his career accomplishments and breakthroughs, the hope of speaking from, and towards, something bigger and “realer” than the commercial heroes, while still as big and as wide as the folk icons. It’s telling how much his penultimate comic book work was League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, in the end, fundamentally a walk in everyone else’s playground, the effort at a full digestion of the entire wider cosmology of the multiverse before and without the owned characters TMed by Disney and Warner like Egypt and Babylon.”

“Watchmen” creator Alan Moore’s hatred for superhero movies is well known, as he once called them a “blight” to cinema and “also to culture to a degree,” but he dragged them even more during a recent interview with The Guardian. Moore described adults’ continued love of superhero movies an “infantilization” that can act as “a precursor to fascism.”

“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,” Moore said. “Because that kind of infantilization – that urge towards simpler times, simpler realities – that can very often be a precursor to fascism.”

I wish America
American Values.jpg

Moore expressed worry with the notion that “hundreds of thousands of adults” are now “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,” Moore said. “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’.”

Moore continued, “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… I will always love and adore the comics medium but the comics industry and all of the stuff attached to it just became unbearable.”

In an Oct. 2020 interview, Moore revealed that he had not seen a superhero movie since Tim Burton’s original “Batman” in 1989. He added, “I don’t watch any of them. All of these characters have been stolen from their original creators, all of them…


if you try to make them for the adult world then I think it becomes kind of grotesque.”

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