ξακόσιοι ξήκοντα ξι

I’m glad to see Alan Moore give his take on the Occupy movement (although apparently this is old news). I was wondering if he was going to be his usual curmudgeonly self about appropriation of his work, but I think he comes across as remarkably patient and sincere when he’s talking to the protesters, and he offers a really great analogy for the idea of protest/change. 

I don’t think I would care so much if I hadn’t felt so burned by Frank Miller’s hateful and ignorant blog post, which gets briefly mentioned in the story. Suddenly, reading his work just makes me feel bad (it turns out it was pretty bad all along, though, minus some beautiful artwork). The themes of violence and revolution in, say, The Dark Knight Returns, or, 300, become suddenly very less challenging and enjoyable when you read them with Frank’s ignorant garbage-heart in mind. The first link in this post has more on the political/philisophical dialectic between Alan Moore and Frank Miller, specifically. But, they don’t call it a dialectic; the article is considerably less pretentious than this post. 

Note: the people who made this report are clearly not well acquainted with comics, and, in addition to being generally condescending toward the medium (to be fair, I don’t think it was their intention), they don’t seem to understand how tasteless I think it is for them to after-effects Moore’s talking head into the panels of Watchmen + V for Vendetta. Hopefully Channel 4 will see this note and make the appropriate changes for my future pop-journalism experiences. 

Additional Alan Moore Related Note: Please, do not purchase copies of Watchmen. If you want to own it and currently don’t, purchase it secondhand or pirate it. When the book goes out of print, the copyright will revert to Alan Moore’s control, where it belongs. That was the deal he made with DC before they published the series, and it was, at the time, an achievement for creator-owned mainstream publishing (which was, at the time, not a thing). Unfortunately, the book was a mega-success, and will never go out of print (especially in the devastating wake of the film). Joke’s on Alan! But, seriously, if you are going to pirate any comic book this season, or, for that matter, petition to ban from stores any work of literature, make it Watchmen! 

momentofmoore:

Channel 4 News - V For Vendetta: The Man Behind The Mask

UK news profile/interview with Alan visiting the Occupy protesters in London.