Moore or Less?

Six films involving Watchmen scribe Alan Moore

By Matt Prigge
Add Comment Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Mar. 3, 2009

 

Swamp Thing (1982): Though his relations with cinema would eventually prove pugilistic, the exceedingly brilliant British comic book-ist Alan Moore has a shitty movie to thank for his career. Wes Craven’s 1982 take on Len Wein and Bernie Wrightston’s veggie-man superhero resuscitated the mid-’70s comic. As its sales waned again in 1984, DC Comics allowed the relatively unknown Moore to reinvent him. And that he did, using his 45-issue run to deepen both the comic and the medium in general, thus paving the way for the seismic shift of 1986’s Watchmen.

From Hell (2001): Arguably Moore’s finest hour is his monstrously dense, consciously “speculative” account of Jack the Ripper and the society that birthed him. It’s an odd choice for his first movie adaptation, and sure enough, it was the kind of mutilation the Ripper would’ve enjoyed.

 

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003): While the filmic desecration of Moore’s kicky comic about an all-star team of Victorian-era literary characters was tanking in theaters, Moore himself was releasing the comics’ second volume: a War of the Worlds riff more thrilling and kinetic than anything in the movie. From here on out he forbid his name to appear on film adaptations and rejected all royalties associated with them.

 

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