Alan Moore has long gone on record about despising adaptations of his comics, but now he’s stated he no longer wishes to receive those royalties, instead asking they go to Black Lives Matter.
Prolific British writer Alan Moore is perhaps best known for his work on Watchmen and Swamp Thing. He’s long been viewed as an outlier in the comic book industry, already distancing himself from major publications at the height of his fame.
Moore has become an even more reclusive figure than before now, having retired from comics in 2019. Even prior to that, though, his work was few and far between after public disputes with publishers.
DC Comics is perhaps chief among those. He has long feuded over how they handled his comics work, especially in the realm of adaptations, and now has taken an extra step in distancing himself from the work.
Alan Moore asked DC to send royalties to Black Lives Matter
In an interview with UK news publication The Telegraph, Moore revealed he no longer wished to receive money from DC for his work.
“I no longer wish it to even be shared with them,” Moore explained, “I don’t really feel, with the recent films, that they have stood by what I assumed were their original principles. So I asked for DC Comics to send all of the money from any future TV series or films to Black Lives Matter.”
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Moore refusing to receive royalty checks shouldn’t be a surprise to fans. He has a long documented history of disputing the adaptations of his works. Much of that began with disputes over royalties for Watchmen and censorship of V for Vendetta, a situation that led to Moore leaving DC.
The decision to send his royalties to Black Lives Matter isn’t a surprising one, either. Moore has always been a very progressive writer. Politically, though, he’s most often identified as an Anarchist.
“As far I’m concerned, the two poles of politics were not Left Wing or Right Wing,” Moore explained during a 2009 interview. “In fact they’re just two ways of ordering an industrial society and we’re fast moving beyond the industrial societies of the 19th and 20th centuries. It seemed to me the two more absolute extremes were anarchy and fascism.”
Moore stopped writing for larger publishers altogether in 1998, opting to write for smaller publishers and his own imprint, America’s Best Comics, through Jim Lee’s Wildstorm. Moore eventually left ABC when Wildstorm was acquired by DC Comics, who began interfering with his work.
Today, Moore remains distanced from his most popular works. He has had his credit removed from projects like Watchmen and V For Vendetta. He also reaffirmed in a 2022 interview with The Guardian that he was “definitely done with comics” despite admitting he would always love the medium.
Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and other works are available to read via the DC Universe Infinite subscription service. For more Alan Moore and comic book news, be sure to follow all our coverage.
