How many tears can Alan Moore’s beard soak up?

As the people who know me will attest, I am a HUGE comic book nerd! I loves me my funny books and I get very passionate talking about my favorite characters and when hearing about new projects in the industry!

When I heard they were going forward with a series of mini-series that would be a prequel to Watchmen  – titled boringly “Before Watchmen” – I was ho-hum. Then I saw some of the talent involved, Darwyn Cooke? Amanda Conner? Adam Hughes? Sign me up!

My problem isn’t with Watchmen at all.

Watchmen, while an excellent story, never really gelled with me. I understand that it’s about taking heroes and breaking them down. I get the concept, and I get why it has fans and my dislike for Alan Moore has nothing (well okay in a way it does)with his skill (?) as a writer, but rather it’s him as a person that ruins his work.

No my problem is with Alan Moore.

The man is an utter hypocrite.

You can start stoning me but it doesn’t change this fact.

All of his work was done as “For hire” in a lot of cases, and when it was adapted for film, he cried.

DC, to their credit, has tried exhaustively to reach out to him on several occasions with an olive branch, even offering monetary compensation, to which he’s snuffed and rebuked each time.

My main problem, however,  is that this is a man who, to the best of my (admittedly limited) knowledge has made his living off of writing other author’s characters and creating facsimiles of existing ones (in fact he very brazenly used James Bond in a round-about way like a fox to avoid copyright infringements), even going so far as to take some of literature’s most beloved young heroines (Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, Alice from Through The Looking-Glass and Wendy from Peter Pan) and featuring them in a pornographic story.

Well, no. That’s not the problem.

When he was trying to fight DC’s decision to move forward with “Before Watchmen” he had this to say…

“What I want is for this not to happen. As far as I know, there weren’t that many prequels or sequels to Moby Dick.”

Sorry Alan.

You’re argument is now null and void.

Wah-wah.

If you can do what you want with Verne, Wells, Baum and others, if you can turn little girls from some beloved stories into porn stars “for art”, I’m quite sure you can man-up and allow others the same courtesy YOU have taken with characters you didn’t create.

I hope your beard holds the gallons of tears this might cause.