Alan Moore was already the grumpy old man of the comics industry, but whatever shit the acclaimed writer had remaining, he has officially lost. Here's how his latest tirade begins: ""I hate superheroes. I think they're abominations." It goes downhill from there.
Moore was talking to The Guardian when he went on his latest rant about the industry he helped make (and helped make him) so sucsessful. After stating that he hadn't read a superhero comic since he created Watchmen — which is kind of wacky when you remember how many superhero comics he wrote after he created Watchmen, including Batman: The Killing Joke, Tom Strong, Promethea, and many many others — Moore continued:
They [superheroes] don't mean what they used to mean. They were originally in the hands of writers who would actively expand the imagination of their nine-to-13-year-old audience. That was completely what they were meant to do and they were doing it excellently.
These days, superhero comics think the audience is certainly not nine to 13, it's nothing to do with them. It's an audience largely of 30-, 40-, 50-, 60-year old men, usually men. Someone came up with the term graphic novel. These readers latched on to it; they were simply interested in a way that could validate their continued love of Green Lantern or Spider-Man without appearing in some way emotionally subnormal.
This is a significant rump of the superhero-addicted, mainstream-addicted audience. I don't think the superhero stands for anything good. I think it's a rather alarming sign if we've got audiences of adults going to see the Avengers movie and delighting in concepts and characters meant to entertain the 12-year-old boys of the 1950s.
While I wouldn't disagree that the target audience for superhero comics has aged up significantly, I also don't think Moore wrote Watchmen for 9-to-13-year-old boys either. Anyways, it's not exactly news how grumpy and bitter Moore has gotten, but it is sad how Moore has gone from hating DC to hating the whole comics industry to basically hating all of us for deigning to read them in the first place.
[Via IGN]