Alan Moore Sez — "Stealing is Good, Adapting is Evil, Stop Asking Me About the Goddamn Watchmen"

So, Alan Moore is upset that DC is reviving “his” characters (that are owned by someone else, and based on other people’s creations) in their upcoming Before Watchmen books.

“But wait!” you say “Doesn’t he do that all the time? Like how he revived classic adventure characters in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen? Or that weird fanfic he wrote where all the female characters from children’s books are subjected to graphic kinky sex?”

Yes! But that’s totally different! Here’s Moore to explain it to us beings of lesser intellect…

In literature, I would say that it’s different. I would say, and it might be splitting hairs, but I’m not adapting these characters. I’m not doing an adaptation of Dracula or King Solomon’s Mines. What I am doing is stealing them. There is a difference between doing an adaptation, which is evil, and actually stealing the characters, which, as long as everybody’s dead or you don’t mention the names, is perfectly alright by me. I’m not trying to be glib here, I genuinely do feel that in literature you’ve got a tradition that goes back to Jason and the Argonauts of combining literary characters.

So in other words, stop asking Alan Moore about Watchmen, because he’s old and crazy and doesn’t give a f–k. He has to know he’s a hypocrite, and he’s fine with that, so no amount of shouting, “you’re a hypocrite!” at him will accomplish anything. He’ll just give us more gobbledygook about how stealing is better than adapting and we’ll all feel embarrassed for bringing it up in the first place.

Oh, by the way, if you want to read actual Alan Moore comics in 2012 (as opposed to Darwyn Cooke and Brian Azzarello doing their best impressions) there will be two new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen books out his year. The graphic novel length Century: 2009 in June and the 48-page Nemo: Heart of Ice sometime before the end of the year.

via io9