Pretty sure Watchmen is still a (the?) top selling graphic novel, 25 years later. That said, you didn't mention Rich Johnson's caveat that Moore's comments were made in a self-deprecating, ironic tone that may not come across in printed form, that he was sort of mocking his quarter century old work still being mined as a sign of desperation on the part of Marvel/DC.

Have you read Scalped? It's both excellent, and completely original.

@1, that's a good point. If every artist working for DC or Marvel were to refuse to ever buy Moore's work he'd be hard pressed to notice.

Aaron is a hack, Scalped sucks.

Alan Moore is right, this is a cash grab nothing more. Nobody wants to see anything else set in the Watchmen Universe. And when the fuck is Moore's run on Miracleman finally going to be reprinted?

Why do they want to milk Watchmen more?

Because it's a lot easier to sell tickets to a popular name-brand than it is to sell tickets to something no one's ever heard of before.

Christ... the entire entertainment industry is nothing but sequels of sequels of sequels nowadays.

Count me as another one with Moore: the Watchmen movie tanked, and yet this is still somehow DC's only plan get to get people to buy comics again? Desperate and stupid.

Heh, apparently Jason Aaron also did some work on a recent Hellblazer story, and doesn't see the irony there.

The Watchmen pretty much already included it's own prequel.

Here's how to start The Watchmen sequel: Rorschach wakes up from a horrible nightmare where superheroes were actually costumed psychopaths and New York got destroyed. His mom calls him to breakfast, where his dad is reading the paper. Later that day he gets bit by a radioactive psychotherapist....

oops, disregard my last comment, just saw Aaron's column about Moore; he does at least recognize the irony of servicing a Moore-created brand

I'm constitutionally incapable of taking Scalped seriously, because I'm from South Dakota.

I'm not an artist. I can't draw and I can't write, and I'm not nearly as sophisticated a comic book reader as I'd like to be. I'm just an office worker, by trade.

But I know this much:

If you're writing or drawing for "Wolverine", then you're an office worker by trade, too.

@4 - Your opinion is yours. At least it's an original property in a new subject area.

@7 - I guess I don't see the irony. As mentioned, Moore's fantastic deconstruction of the superhero genre was done using the Charleston stable. His amazing run on Swamp Thing began with issue #20 of the second Swamp Thing ongoing. Miracleman was another existing property.

@6 Doctor Memory

I would hardly call a film with a 130mil budget getting a world wide gross of 185,258,983 to be a failure.

I'm an art student majoring in creating comics. Mainstream shit like Marvel and DC are weighing us all down. I can't wait until they and their fucking zombie superheroes release their stranglehold on the rest of us.

@11 - Everybody's got to pay the bills. Natalie Portman did Black Swan, but she's also in Ashton Kutcher's No Strings Attached.

For the record, while I think that additional Watchmen material is an idea without particular artistic merit, you're kidding yourselves if you think it won't sell.

If Moore genuinely believes that the current industry lacks even a "bottom flight" of writers, then Jason Aaron is right. Fuck that guy.

Alan Moore is a grumpy old curmudgeon, who hates companies like Marvel and DC who value commerce over art. Why is anybody surprised when he criticizes them? He hasn't exactly made a secret of his feelings about the industry.

@16, I guess the surprise comes at all these servicers of product lines biting the hand that feeds them, so publicly (not to mention over an interview from two years ago).

Truth hurts, doesn't it, Jason?

Here's the thing about Moore, he's got the goods. I don't care if you don't like his stuff (goodness knows I find some of his work unreadable), the guy can write and his depth of genre knowledge and Victoriana is terrifying in scope (when there's a cottage industry producing notes about the references in his work, there's some serious there there).

The reason Moore's work stands the test of time is that he's not afraid to take stories and characters to their conclusion. And then he refuses to hit the reset button or take the easy way out.

@13:

The general rule of thumb in the film industry is that a movie must make approximately 2 1/2 times its "negative cost" (the cost of taking the film from initial idea all the way through putting a single copy of the final edited movie onto film stock) in domestic box office in order to break even. This is because advertising/marketing, negative printing and distribution costs (generally the biggest line item expenses for film production), along with presenter costs (the cut the theatres themselves get for showing the film) are generally not included in the production budget itself.

Assuming "Watchmen" had a total negative cost of around $125 MM (which is the high end of the estimates of $100 - $125 MM I've seen), then it would have needed to have made at least $200 - $250 MM domestic gross before it would have been considered "profitable" according to the standard industry formula.

The fact it did considerably LESS than this AFTER factoring in foreign distribution (and for the moment, not counting ancillary sales, such as TV rights, DVD, streaming, etc., etc.), which is the number you cite, and there's little doubt as to why the film is considered a "bomb" by Hollywood standards.

Whatever comte. The industry as a whole is fucked anyway. The film entertained me. Visually beautiful and a wonderful adaptation of something that I thought was un-filmable. Made money off me twice even. I just feel throwing out bomb and "tanked at the box office" when something doesn't break all records of ticket sales is ridiculous. Those terms should be saved for films that actually perform like shit.

Superhero comics writing is professional fanfic.

I find Moore's professed surprise that DC would want to mine a successful story for more revenue to be ridiculous. Don't jerk us around, pal.

Why are DC Comics trying to exploit a comic book that I wrote 25 years ago if they have got anything?

Because if there's money to be made off a property, they'll try to make it. Don't patronize everybody involved by suggesting that you think otherwise or are surprised to learn that, hey, after all these years adding two to two still produces four.

It makes a ton of sense to do some watchmen related extras around the movie (Ala the Tales of the Black Freighter side-movie-thing). Alan Moore also has a history of tantrums when his things are changed and adapted for movies, and instead of working with people he throws a fit. He solved this by being careful with who owns his work, but is still a little bitchy.

HE IS ALLOWED, Seriously CHERISH your ability to be annoyed with this great man while you can. One day he will die and comics will be sad.

At least his prima donna nature is alive and well in this young hyperbolic rascal.

@21:

It's not a matter of whether or not "Watchmen" broke any box office records, but rather that it didn't even come close to making what it cost to produce, advertise and distribute. In other words, Warner Bros., Paramount, Legendary & DC all LOST a ton of money on the film - roughly $140 MM - so it did, in point of fact "perform like shit", regardless of how much you may have personally enjoyed watching it.

@23:

Well, the reason WB et al want to try to squeeze more money out of "Watchmen" is pretty obvious, given the film's poor showing at the box office: they invested roughly $300 MM in it and lost about $115 MM, so they're looking for some way to make some of that back.

Okay, they lost somewhere between $115 MM & $140 MM, I should have been clearer on that point. But regardless, it's still a shit-ton of money...

This is typical of his extraordinary egotism and uncollegial assholery.

I don't see why people make such a big deal about Watchmen. It's good, but genius? Read The Iliad, and then tell me Watchmen is "genius."

Personally, I'd rate The Invisibles over everything Moore ever wrote.

Hate to say it, but Watchmen was not that fucking great.

Very good, but not great.

Other than its invention of a genre--Pirate comics (parallel to Barton Fink's invention of the Rassler Movie)--it's just another super-hero strip. What if there were real-world super heroes, what would they face? OK, then don't fucking have the usual Experiment Gone Awry makes one man into a Godlike Quantum Blue Guy, and don't have another Super Rich Guy in a Cape manage to fool the world into believing it's about to be invaded by aliens from another dimension. C'mon: have your cake and eat it too?

Just to be clear: Watchmen is good. But it's not a quantum leap above Jimmy Corrigan, 100 Bullets, American Splendor, Scalped, Dark Knight, Preacher, Maus, or lots of other comics (stand-alones or series) of the last 25 years.

Maybe if we're only comparing it to superhero books?

Meanwhile, Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy is still not Science Fiction.

@29, in the spirit of comics at their best, Watchmen was as much if not more about the image than the story, which Moore said he intended as an "autopsy of the superhero concept". It's a tour de force of semiotics and narrative illustration playing off of the written word. Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore gave an object lesson on what comics can do that no other storytelling medium can (with the awful movie adaptation as an ironically apt counterpoint). As a serial miniseries, it blew my mind every month while I was in my first year of art school (the same year Maus and Dark Knight released, by the way). In 1986, American comics seemed on the verge of finally breaking out of its commercial ghetto and becoming the major art form of the latter decades of the last century, then at least in the mainstream, the industry just sunk back into commercial swill again, for the most part (like Hollywood in the late 70s/very early 80s).

Sure, you have a point that Chris Ware and Grant Morrison and a few others (Pekar's American Splendor predated Watchmen) have done comparable work since, but remember that Moore was talking about DC Comics in particular in that interview. And again, he was sort of mocking himself, since he's released nothing (through DC at least) since 1986 to compare to the grandeur and ambition of Watchmen.

Moore gave up on DC, Marvel and Hollywood years ago and has moved on to other things, and good for him. Good for him also for having the integrity to put his money where his mouth is and insist his name not appear on adaptations and that his share of royalties from Hollywood instead go to the artists involved. Bomb or no, I'm sure the terrible Watchmen movie put a huge, deserved chunk of change in Dave Gibbons' pocket.

The most depressing thing to me about this argument is the grim, swampy fatalism of the mainstream market and its defenders. The automatic assumption that garbage makes money so let there be garbage and bless your little heart if you care about craft or story - that chaotic neutral condescension.
I don't need it spelled out to me that there's no money in good comics. The world is a twisted and evil place and it's not just Marvel and DC's fault but the entire history of the American reading public. I identify with Moore, flawed as he always has been and will be in at least his contempt for just outright, naked cynicism in what can be and should be an artistic medium.

I'm in the fuck Alan Moore camp. All he's done for a decade now is bitch about comic books and denigrate everything that isn't him. Dude's a douche, and has been for quite some time.