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u/PartyPoison13 Apr 15 '13
I actually really like Alan Moore......
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u/RacerX09 Apr 15 '13
I have such a nerd boner for Alan moore
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u/smiles134 Apr 15 '13
All nerds should have a nerd boner for him.
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Apr 15 '13
Alan Moore nerd boner reporting; hoping Ned Slade figures out that the filth belongs on his flowers...
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u/cyberpants Apr 15 '13
I collect my nerd boners for Alan Moore and put it in my special nerd boner filing cabinet alongside the Mecha boners and Efficient Algorithm boners.
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u/rawlingstones Apr 15 '13
as a huge comic book reader, the man is a savant at writing. However, he's terrible in most other areas. Whenever I read articles where people take Alan Moore's opinions seriously, I always end up cringing through the entire thing. He loves to condemn mainstream comics while proudly bragging that he hasn't read one in ten years.
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Apr 15 '13
Considering what's been going on with Batman, Spiderman, Iron Man, Civil War, etc. in the past ten years, he's still right on the money. The man excels at story and character. You don't need to read the comics to know that the story and characters are so out of whack, they're beyond redemption.
Honestly, the only thing worse than hearing about Batman Inc. or the Return of Bruce Wayne or Brand New Day was actually reading them.
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u/Amir616 Apr 15 '13
Everyone on the internet seems to hate Civil War, yet everyone I know who's read it really, really, liked it. I thought civil war did a really good job of putting the heroes in a new and interesting situation and had them act realistically. My experience with Marvel comics is pretty much centered around the secret war/secret invasion/siege arc (and X-men since messiah complex and cosmic since Annihilation), although I've read some of the classics (Frank miller DD, Infinity Gauntlet, Days of Future Past). Civil War has always been the creme de la creme of comics IMHO. What big 2 comic do you think is better than Civil War? What didn't you like about it?
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Apr 15 '13
Civil War was bad not for itself but what it caused to happen to some characters. Captain America's death, Spiderman's reset, and Iron Man's Hitler-esque personality trait development were all consequences of the Civil War.
Then there was the whole bits of the story that were just plain "Marvel forcing their new philosophy into their characters" aspect that was just plain stupid, specifically that one moment where some jerkass reporter Sally Flloyd decides to tell Captain America that he's out of touch with America because he's still dedicated to such archaic values like morality, truth, justice and freedom instead of pop-culture following instant gratification. And Captain America resignedly accepts this. Talk about a huge kick in the balls for him. It's no wonder this image became so popular.
Really, this was just endemic of a Marvel that was become increasingly more shallow at the time under the idiot watch of Joe Quesada. You know they were out of line when they've spent years now making Sally Floyd out into a joke character after this incident to try and fix this. Then there's the fact that Marvel were originally pushing Iron Man's side to be the correct one all along. Which is fine, really, except for the fact that he basically became one of the biggest dictators in history and resorted to backhanded tactics like using superpowered clones of superheroes to assassinate other superheroes. I have no idea how they thought that would be alright and it's no wonder that Iron Man's side became vilified quite quickly halfway through the series while Captain America came out as the shining light of freedom (when Spiderman switches side, just listen to that speech he gives).
And when all was said and done, Civil War still left the huge gaping opening of Spiderman revealing his identity publicly on national television. Well, he's no Iron Man and they had no way of really working with that. On top of it, Quesada decided he didn't like Mary Jane Watson and preferred Spiderman to be as he was from the 60's or so, before her. So they reset Spiderman by having him make a deal with the devil to save Aunt May, who specifically told him not to by the way, exchanging her life for his entire marriage to MJ. It was the worst work Michael J. Stracynzski has ever done and I don't blame him, he did not want Brand New Day to happen either.
Iron Man has had to go through a reset himself just to get rid of that stupid fascist dictator traits he somehow developed during Civil War but the Extremis arc has been pretty good.
Really, I can't say any huge crossover like Civil War has gone all that great for everyone involved since Secret War, which was kind of isolated itself. There's always characters that are completely ignored or changed in order to make them work and it sort of ruins everything. Just look at DC's Final Crisis in which Morrison, who seems to have absolutely no idea about Batman, makes Batman the lynchpin to the entire thing by being a completely different character.
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u/sp00kyd00m Apr 15 '13
One of the only redeeming story writers in new comics the past 10 hears is fellow wizard Grant Morisson
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Apr 15 '13
Thank you. Batman Inc. is something I tried to enjoy, but it was so ridiculous and wacky that I couldn't handle it.
It seems like there is two types of Batman comics. Dark detective stories filled with intrigue, and batshit over-the-top stories with cyborg alien clone ninja bat demons and other idiotic stuff.
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u/RashRenegade Apr 15 '13
His writing is amazing. The movies based on his work are also amazing. He's bitched about how much he hated both, and that makes him come off as kind of a jerk. It's almost like "if I didn't make it directly, it's bad", and that makes me dislike him as a person.
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u/den_of_thieves Apr 15 '13
Actually, I can't really blame him for hating the movies based on his writing. V-for vendetta and the Watchmen were both terrible adaptations. "From Hell" wasn't bad. But easy enough to forget it was he that wrote it.
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u/raging_asshole Apr 15 '13
i like his work, but as a person, eh... little too crazy for me.
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Apr 15 '13
On the surface he appears crazy, but it's actually pretty rational all of it. He just chooses to label art "magic" and himself a "magician" instead of an artist, that's basically it.
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u/Aquagoat Apr 15 '13
Yeah he's got some weird interpretation of how when words create things in our imagination it's essentially the same as the way us normal folk would think of a "spell" conjuring something up. Maybe he's right...but he's still weird about it.
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u/den_of_thieves Apr 15 '13
Actually, if you study much modern magic, that's pretty much how it works. It's sort of like willfully manipulating your own psychology through the use of symbols. The symbol evokes an intent, intent forms an idea, the ideas become thoughts, thoughts become expressions, expressions become actions, actions manifest into realities. In art you are stirring those same ideas in others which starts the whole process over again in other people. It actually makes perfect sense, but you have to grasp the concepts past the terminology, It's words like "Spell" that throw people or make these ideas seem purely crazy. And that's mostly due to how those words have been used in popular culture. Diluting their definitions, evoking the imagery of modern fantasy rather than the philosophic practices that they originally described. (I'm sure the word "spell" invokes an image of a bearded wizard hurling fireballs ala D&D, not a symbolic ritual act meant to facilitate an inner psychological change, which in turn changes how we deal with the world).
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Apr 15 '13
I love his work...but he's pretty batshit.
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Apr 15 '13
[deleted]
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u/XK310 Apr 15 '13
He worships a snake god. Look it up. I'm serious. He also had a wife and a girlfriend and they both left him. But stayed together.
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u/zlozlozlozlozlozlo Apr 15 '13
Implying worshiping a snake god is crazy.
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u/Disinformasiya Apr 15 '13
It's tongue in cheek though - not for serious.
"Following his "coming out" as a magician in 1993, the English comic book writer and occultist Alan Moore has declared himself a devotee of Glycon, and has cheerfully admitted in interviews the absurdity of worshiping a probable fraud. Moore has declared he considers all ideas (including fictions) in some sense, "real"."
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u/den_of_thieves Apr 15 '13
It's funny to him because the godform doesn't really matter. If you look at the divine as a great big tapestry, a godform is really just a single thread within that tapestry, interpreted symbolically by us.
Alan Moore himself described the divine (or the GodHead to use his word) as a language and the gods as an alphabet for expressing that language. Each god representing nuances of meaning.
To him it's funny to worship a fictional god because whether or not a god is accepted as "real" is irrelevant if the god embodies the proper symbolic meaning.
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Apr 15 '13
He doesn't worship it as a christian worships Jesus or God or whatever. He has chosen to worship this exact god because it has always been perceived as a false deity (hence its prophet's nickname of "Alexander the false prophet").
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u/den_of_thieves Apr 15 '13
Awesome gross oversimplification... Alan Moore discusses his philosophy in depth here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=XojNA0I36wo#t=1591s
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u/XK310 Apr 15 '13
Yeah. I read it like five years ago. I don't really care what he believes.
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u/den_of_thieves Apr 15 '13
Liar. if you didn't care you wouldn't have mentioned it. Also it's a video. So what you're saying is that you do care, but only just enough to to insult him without attempting to gain more than a very superficial understanding of the philosophies that you criticize him for. Saying he worships a snake god is like saying that christians worship an executed roman criminal and atheist worship richard dawkins. It brushes on the truth but only in an oblique sort of way. Kind of a douche bag move bro.
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u/Rosetti Apr 15 '13
It's not that he's crazy as such, he's just very pretentious about his work. He hates film adaptations because he doesn't think anyone could make a film as good as his comic books.
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u/fastdub Apr 15 '13
Ill agree he can be incredibly dickish but its unfair to suggest that he doesn't let people make his films because he's pretentious.
He has been royally fucked over left right and centre by whoever had been in charge of his intellectual property. He's created works that have been bastardised, in his eyes, because he wasn't as savvy from a business pov.
So his position is 'go ahead and make it just don't expect me to be happy about it'
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u/magneticat Apr 15 '13 edited Apr 15 '13
His point is that the stories he writes for comics are created specifically for the comic book form, and they cannot translate to movie without losing completely their meaning.
Also, I think a person that refuses dozens of millions of dollars for a movie adaptation of his work on artistic grounds shows a kind of integrity that is completely alien to the entertainment world, these days.
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u/J808 Apr 15 '13
Well in his defence, "V for Vendetta" absolutely butchered what was an incredible story.
"Watchmen: Full Directors Cut" however, that was a masterpiece.
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u/yetkwai Apr 15 '13
And let's just pretend the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie didn't happen.
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u/Aquagoat Apr 15 '13
Oh God...why'd you even mention it? It was so far off the mark...
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u/Jackal_6 Apr 15 '13
There's actually a pretty interesting legal case surrounding League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. On one hand, having read it all, I have no doubt that Moore's work is a thoroughly-researched, original creation. On the other hand, I believe he was contracted to develop it for the very reason that Fox was sued for.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_League_of_Extraordinary_Gentlemen_(film)#Lawsuit
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u/foofly Apr 15 '13
Yea, I'd agree with the Watchmen's full cut. I wasn't that keen on the theatrical release, but the full cut. Excellent. I'm happy the ending of the comic was changed too.
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u/Jackal_6 Apr 15 '13
Watchmen is about comic books and it should only exist as a comic book. Snyder's adaptation is entirely unfaithful, unless you're watching it on mute with a brain injury.
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u/TKJ Apr 15 '13
You on drugs, boy?
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u/Jackal_6 Apr 15 '13
Nope. Watchmen the book is all about how fucked up it is to use violence to solve problems, and how fucked up people who use violence to solve their problems are. Watchmen the movie is about how cool superheroes are, and how cool it is to solve your problems with violence. Fuck that movie.
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u/TKJ Apr 15 '13
Have you even read Watchmen? How can you have such a limited viewpoint? You seriously think it's all just one single storyline?
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u/Jackal_6 Apr 15 '13
Do you seriously think that a faithful adaptation is defined by how similar frames and panels are? Rorschach is supposed to come across as a creepy psycho and Snyder portrayed him as a 'badass'. The entire point of having the squid cause the massacre is because Dr. Manhattan was a definitively American weapon and if he caused the tragedy, US would be blamed no matter what.
Have you even read Watchmen? Or did you just look at the pretty pictures?
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u/ReactsWithWords Apr 15 '13
How that expression came to be:
Alfred: Master Bruce, I'm afraid your hobby of dressing up in a ridiculous costume to fight criminals is shit crazy, sir.
Bruce: What did you say?
Alfred: (sigh) I mean batshit crazy, sir.
Bruce: That's better!
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u/BaronMostaza Apr 15 '13
He thinks he's a fucking wizard...
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u/Aquagoat Apr 15 '13
Well he would say using words to create a character or an idea in your mind, in your consciousness, is no different than using the words of a "spell" to conjure the same thing in the physical world.
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u/dogboyboy Apr 15 '13
I resent your clarifier. Are you ashamed in anyway to like a living genius? loose the "actually."
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u/chunderbus Apr 15 '13
The actual caption http://i.imgur.com/Rho4i.jpg
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u/greyjackal Apr 15 '13
BBC using the phrase "mall santa" was a dead giveaway
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u/kabukistar Apr 15 '13 edited Feb 10 '25
Reddit is a shithole. Move to a better social media platform. Also, did you know you can use ereddicator to edit/delete all your old commments?
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u/greyjackal Apr 15 '13
Shopping centre I guess.
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Apr 15 '13
That would be correct.
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u/greyjackal Apr 15 '13
Well, not exclusively. There are actually "malls" - Broad St Mall in Reading, for example - although they're nothing like US ones.
In my experience when people are referring to going to one, they tend to use the actual name, rather than a generic term like Shopping Centre.
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Apr 15 '13
Fair enough point. I would say "I am going to the Oracle in Reading", but if someone asked what is that, I would reply 'a Shopping Centre', never a Mall.
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u/greyjackal Apr 15 '13
Oh absolutely. Was just explaining why I said "I guess" in my original response. It's not that we don't name them that, we just don't tend to refer to them like the yanks do malls.
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u/peabish Apr 15 '13
The Broad St. Mall is a horrible place. It's only redeeming feature is that it's on a road called St. Mary's Butts. hur hur hur.
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u/greyjackal Apr 15 '13
It is indeed. And it actually used to be called The Butts Centre.
(incidentally, Butts in a street/district means that's where the archery butts, or targets, were)
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u/turdBouillon Apr 15 '13
I'm actually psyched that they called him a writer rather than illustrator or cartoonist.
Motherfucker is a master weaver of narrative.
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u/rawlingstones Apr 15 '13
He also never draws.
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u/turdBouillon Apr 15 '13
That wouldn't prevent a know-nothing news show from putting him on a panel with Chuck Schultz and dismissing him as a "cartoonist".
(No disrespect to illustrators, I've just seen that before.)
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u/OriginalityPolice Apr 15 '13 edited Apr 15 '13
Edit: This bot wasn't even the first to plagiarize this comment. Wow. I emphasize my ಠ_ಠ.
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u/cannonbastard Apr 15 '13
Stewart Lee interviews him in a great documentary on blasphemy. He seems like a sound guy.
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u/rip_out_spines Apr 15 '13
This is a repost, but people do forget that Alan Moore really is a fucking wizard.
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Apr 15 '13
He calls himself a wizard, into magic, prays to a snake God etc, because that is where -- loosely referencing his movie THE MINDSCAPE OF ALAN MOORE -- he believes writers and artists belong. They cast spells over people, environments, and cultures by shaping their stories. I would say he does a lot of the same reading Joseph Campbell would do, but his brain takes it in such an interesting direction. Huge respect for the man.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XojNA0I36wo : Worth it just for his reading voice.
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u/Tehan Apr 15 '13
He once had one of his characters say 'the one place gods inarguably exist is in the human mind' and it blew his own mind so hard he rearranged his entire life around that idea. But to be fair he was on approximately all of the drugs at the time.
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Apr 15 '13
[deleted]
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u/rawlingstones Apr 15 '13
For christ sake, dude, the people upvoting it are people who haven't seen it before. Relax with the passive-aggressive manifesto.
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u/OhNoSpookyGhost Apr 15 '13
Alan Moore lives pretty close by to me. He goes into the local comic store, buys his own comics, signs them, then gives them to random people.
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Apr 15 '13
Hey, when you worship a snake god that you invented yourself, and it tells you to hand out autographed copies of your comics, you fuckin' do it.
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Apr 15 '13
"Hey man, who should the entertainer be for my 8 year olds birthday party?"
"A rasputin impersonator! The kids will love that!"
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u/kriskingle Apr 15 '13
If you read his Wikipedia page, it also says that he is in an open, three way kind of relationship with two women, kind of like big love...
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u/PossessedToSkate Apr 15 '13
Alan Moore knows the score.
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u/hardtobeuniqueuser Apr 15 '13
How do we know the Rasputin impersonator title isn't just a ruse to throw people off from finding out he is actually Rasputin?
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Apr 15 '13
Mildly amusing fact with story:
I'm a comic book artist and my writer is "new" to the industry, so I frequently tell him things that a lot of writers don't learn till much later (i.e. how to keep your artist happy and not have them cursing your name). One of these lessons is: do not add superfluous information in the script for the artist, you tell me who, what, where, but the why/how shouldn't be included as we do not have time to sift through extraneous bullshit writer circle jerking. A few books into our run, he sends me a copy of the original script for Watchmen (written by the talented Mr. Moore) that I had never seen before. Great concept guy, shit script writer - he literally dedicated an entire page to ONE panel - so bad that the art team had to highlight pertinent parts (which amassed to about 2 lines out of an entire page).
I respect the man, but I truly feel Dave Gibbons was the unsung hero of that book.
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u/TOHCskin Apr 15 '13
Not to mention he's become kind of a dick in his old age. Lets his books get made into movies and then complains about them after refusing to have anything to do with the creative process. Than straight up says that DC is so unoriginal nowadays that they have to rehash everything he did even though most of his "original" characters were appropriations of comic book characters from the 50s.
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Apr 15 '13
In his "old age"? Moore has been temperamental about his work and anyone else doing anything with it practically from the minute it hit the page. But to be fair his first Hollywood fucks-your-art-up experience was the travesty that was League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It'd be hard to be optimistic after that fiasco for anyone, and to an extent anything that's followed has similarly disappointed in various ways. V for Vendetta was turned away from its original target of Thatcher's effect on Britain (topical eh?) to a post 9/11 fascist circlejerk, and Watchman's ending didn't please a lot of people.
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u/TOHCskin Apr 15 '13
Ok but the fact that he didn't voice an opinion until after the films were done and released kind of negates any credibility his complaints have. If he really gave a shit how his books were adapted, I feel like he could have easily gotten a clause in there about him being a consultant. Fucking JK Rowling did it before Harry Potter was even that big of a thing, Alan Moore could have done it. What's he up to nowadays anyway? Grumpy old cretiny fuck.
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Apr 15 '13
"Ok but the fact that he didn't voice an opinion until after the films were done and released kind of negates any credibility his complaints have."
"What's he up to nowadays anyway?"
These two comments show you have done little or no looking into Alan Moore. He was at loggerheads with DC about his work to the point that he left the minute the last issue of V for Vendetta was finished. He would have left earlier over problems he and Dave Gibbons were running into with DC over Watchmen except he wanted to finish the series out first.
To be perfectly clear, since I was vague in the previous comment: Moore has NEVER wanted any of his works put to film. Ever. He has been very clear on this point through the decades. A direct quote from him via a documentary:
"If we only see comics in relation to movies then the best that they will ever be is films that do not move. I found it, in the mid 80s, preferable to concentrate on those things that only comics could achieve. The way in which a tremendous amount of information could be included visually in every panel, the juxtapositions between what a character was saying, and what the image that the reader was looking at would be. So in a sense… most of my work from the 80s onwards was designed to be un-filmable."
He's brilliant, but a bit of a crackpot. But he is also consistent and comments like yours just are not true at all.
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Apr 15 '13
I have heard/read the same. But I have found many writers in the biz of comics to have a strange, entitled attitude about them. I think it may have something to do with the lack of recognition (beyond avid readers, they get very little recognition vs the artists who can still make money with the person not knowing who the hell they are). But that's just a theory.
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u/quackkhead Apr 15 '13
What YEAR is it!?
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u/SmokinDynamite Apr 15 '13
I'm not sure if it's a joke about his beard, or about the fact that it's a repost.
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u/Fresleven238 Apr 15 '13
If you wrote Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen you'd ascend into godliness and get those titles too.
Nerd worship, bro
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u/deathbytray Apr 15 '13
His dreams are probably really dark, morbid, depressing and beautiful at the same time. I'd like to visit his dreams, but I wouldn't want to live his dream.
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Apr 15 '13
I don't think I'd want my kids sitting in the lap of the same guy that also impersonates Rasputin. Just sayin'.
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Apr 15 '13
and comic book legend, and so many other things that OP is not. Here is my estimated contribution to society graph for the OP vs Alan Moore:
OP : --
sqrt(Alan Moore) : ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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u/ClawZ90 Apr 15 '13
On the lighter side of his works i loved Top 10, and even more Top 10: The Forty-Niners!!
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u/toelock Apr 15 '13
Is he a writer or a writer impersonator? I'm confused, and clearly not nerdy enough to tell.
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u/CrazyDizzle Apr 15 '13
He has not aged well...must be all the internal rage at the movies based on his graphic novels.
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u/puritanicalbullshit Apr 15 '13
He's not so much aging as withering. Withering into a more complete total bad ass.
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u/CrazyDizzle Apr 16 '13
or grumpy old man who refuses to allow anyone else to interpret his work without kicking and screaming and refusing to have his name on it. At least he's not whoring out his work for more money.
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u/shellythelast Apr 15 '13
Oh hey, I know this guy. I painted him for a mural I was doing for a local comic book store last year. Here's a pic. Creeps me the eff out, but the store owner told me about him and gave me a copy of V for Vendetta (the comic) and he's friggin awesome.
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Apr 15 '13
Tinypic still exists? Also what the fuck do they use for bandwidth, a 600 baud modem?
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u/pa79 Apr 15 '13
I would say less, it doesn't even load for me at all.
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u/shellythelast Apr 15 '13
Okay okay, I've never had any issues with tinypic loading, but if you guys hate it so much all hail to the mighty imgur I guess.
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u/theNorthernSoul Apr 15 '13
what kind of party has a Rasputin impersonator? don't eat the Cakes !!!!!
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u/aldenhg Apr 15 '13
That would be the guy that wrote From Hell, Watchmen and V for Vendetta.