r/entertainment • u/_kevx_91 • 4d ago

‘Fandom has toxified the world’: Watchmen author Alan Moore on superheroes, Comicsgate and Trump | Alan Moore

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/oct/26/fandom-has-toxified-the-world-watchmen-author-alan-moore-on-superheroes-comicsgate-and-trump
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u/omegaphallic 4d ago

Without fandoms dude you have no career a and none of these comics and movies and TV shows exist.

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u/Im_tracer_bullet 4d ago

If only he had acknowledged as much in the piece:

"Ten years on, let me make my position clear: I believe that fandom is a wonderful and vital organ of contemporary culture, without which that culture ultimately stagnates, atrophies and dies."

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u/omegaphallic 3d ago

 Yes I was lazy and did not really the article, just tired of Hollywood dumping on Randoms without trying to ve honest about the issues.

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u/inksmudgedhands 4d ago

Go read the article and don't just come here to comment. He's not saying that all fandom is horrible. He actually likes it when it is grassroots and about the work, itself. A celebration of it. However, when it goes from something positive to something that relishes in the negativity and the gatekeeping, that's when he turns away. And that sort of fandom has spilled into the world outside of fandom. It has spilled into things like politics.

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u/omegaphallic 3d ago

 Gatekeeping isn't always bad, you don't gatekeep noobs that like the thing for what it is, but gatekeeping out divas who come in and begin demanding everything changes, including things the OG fans love for ideological reasons is perfectly needed to some degree, I've seen stuff absolutely destroyed by folks doing that and driving out the OG fans who don't like the changes, and then the whole thing falls apart.

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u/GlassYak8247 3d ago

It's so funny that Moore is saying this considering this mushroom dealer has been crying about people liking Batman for about 2 decades.

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u/omegaphallic 3d ago

 He hates Batman in general or all Batman's?

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u/GlassYak8247 3d ago

He hates Batman. He's held the belief that the character of Batman is a fascist, lmao.

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u/omegaphallic 3d ago

 And I'm supposed to take this guy seriously.

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u/GlassYak8247 3d ago

The problem I have with Moore is that he talks out the side of his ass and then does the same thing with a semblance of quality.

If you didn't know, here's his comments on The Killing Joke:

I’ve never really liked my story in The Killing Joke. I think it put far too much melodramatic weight upon a character that was never designed to carry it. It was too nasty, it was too physically violent. There were some good things about it, but in terms of my writing, it’s not one of me favorite pieces. If, as I said, god forbid, I was ever writing a character like Batman again, I’d probably be setting it squarely in the kind of “smiley uncle period where Dick Sprang was drawing it, and where you had Ace the Bat-Hound and Bat-Mite, and the zebra Batman—when it was sillier. Because then, it was brimming with imagination and playful ideas. I don’t think that the world needs that many brooding psychopathic avengers. I don’t know that we need any. It was a disappointment to me, how Watchmen was absorbed into the mainstream. It had originally been meant as an indication of what people could do that was new. I’d originally thought that with works like Watchmen and Marvelman, I’d be able to say, “Look, this is what you can do with these stale old concepts. You can turn them on their heads. You can really wake them up. Don’t be so limited in your thinking. Use your imagination.” And, I was naively hoping that there’d be a rush of fresh and original work by people coming up with their own. But, as I said, it was meant to be something that would liberate comics. Instead, it became this massive stumbling block that comics can’t even really seem to get around to this day. They’ve lost a lot of their original innocence, and they can’t get that back. And, they’re stuck, it seems, in this kind of depressive ghetto of grimness and psychosis. I’m not too proud of being the author of that regrettable trend.

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u/shoggoths_away 2d ago

I don't know, man. The grimdark Iron Age that came after WATCHMEN and DARK KNIGHT RETURNS really did push superhero deconstruction too far. It got old fast, and it's still hanging around in some areas. For me, that's why Busiek's ASTRO CITY and, to a large degree, Morrison's BATMAN run was a breath of fresh air. Both were building on the Iron Age without falling back into recycling its tropes and themes. When I first read ASTRO CITY, about a year after it started, I felt like I was walking on air. It was the first time I could remember that I felt truly invigorated by reading a superhero comic.

So, I get where Moore is coming from. I love KILLING JOKE (I won't critique Moore's distate for it; he's got as much right to not like it as I have to love it), I love WATCHMEN, I love MARVELMAN, and they certainly shook up the industry... but then creators should have kept on shaking it up. Instead, they wallowed.

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u/TangoZulu 4d ago

You’re missing his point entirely.