10 times Alan Moore made the world better by complaining about pop culture

From Watchmen to V for Vendetta to Batman: The Killing Joke, Alan Moore is a titan in the world of comic books. Watchmen remains the only graphic novel to ever win a Hugo Award, and various studios have adapted his comics into blockbuster movies.

The thing is: Alan Moore himself doesn’t really like the direction comics are moving in, or the various big screen adaptations of his books. In fairness, he doesn’t like many things. Let’s take a look at 10 times the legendary writer had a good moan!

1. Superman has lost his meaning

Clark Kent, aka Superman, is one of the most beloved superheroes of all time. Whether you’re a fan or not, everyone has at least heard of him. However, what you might not know is, during his inception in the ’30s, Superman was very different from the version of him we see today. He didn’t fight against aliens or team up with other heroes in the Justice League against world-threatening enemies. Rather, he fought for social justice.

Initially, Superman beat up wifebeaters and threw landlords across the world. Where has that Superman gone? According to Alan Moore, his meaning has been lost over the years.

“The early Superman beat up strikebreakers, and threw a slum landlord over the horizon,” he told ScreenRant. “Obviously, that Superman didn’t last a long while. He was pretty soon taken from his creators and made a much more socially respectable middle-class and right-leaning character.”

We wrote more about Moore’s opinions on Superman here.

2. Moore says superheroes have become “sinister” and addictive.

Speaking to ScreenRant, Moore opined that superheroes had become addictive, which poses certain problems. “I have come to feel that superheroes are sinister for a number of reasons,” he said. “I don’t think that these people who are addicted to this stuff, they don’t seem to be satisfied with the hit that they’re getting, but that’s a common complaint among addicted people, y’know? … There’s a kind of diminishing returns, and particularly if the stuff itself isn’t as good as it used to be.”

He cites his own work, Watchmen, as a turning point for the industry, where the genre moved away from books for children to darker, grown-up storytelling. “It was once people had said ‘comics aren’t just for kids,’ they seemed to decide that that meant that comics aren’t for kids at all,” he said. He thinks that the genre is tailored, “purely for the addicted adults that formed their reader base back in the ‘60s, the ’70s, the ‘80s, the ‘90s.”

So there you have it: if you go to see a Marvel movie, you’re an addict. Seek help. Consult a librarian.