Alan Moore has announced his pending retirement from writing comic books. The Watchmen author made the announcement at a press conference for his 1,000,000 page novel Jerusalem (via The Guardian), saying he has “about 250 pages of comics left” before he calls it quits.
“I think I have done enough for comics. I’ve done all that I can. I think if I were to continue to work in comics, inevitably the ideas would suffer, inevitably you’d start to see me retread old ground and I think both you and I probably deserve something better than that,” Moore explained.
He went on to say his final works would “probably be very enjoyable,” listing his remaining output.
“There are a couple of issues of an Avatar [Press] book that I am doing at the moment, part of the HP Lovecraft work I’ve been working on recently,” said Moore, referring to the current Providence with Jacen Burrows. “Me and [artist] Kevin [O’Neill] will be finishing Cinema Purgatorio and we’ve got about one more book, a final book of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to complete. After that, although I may do the odd little comics piece at some point in the future, I am pretty much done with comics.”
“So, the things that interest me at the moment are the things I don’t know if I can do, like films, where I haven’t got a clue what I am doing, or giant literary novels. Things I wasn’t sure I’d even have the stamina to finish,” Moore continued. “I know I am able to do anything anyone is capable of doing in the comic book medium. I don’t need to prove anything to myself or anyone else. Whereas these other fields are much more exciting to me. I will always revere comics as a medium. It is a wonderful medium.”
“I am sure there is probably a very good reason for the hundreds of thousands of adults who are flocking to see the latest adventures of Batman, but I for one am a little in the dark for what that reason is. The superhero movies – characters that were invented by Jack Kirby in the 1960s or earlier – I have great love for those characters as they were to me when I was a 13-year-old boy. They were brilliantly designed and created characters. But they were for 50 years ago.”
Moore has famously been critical of superhero comic books in recent years, and even more critical of the adaptation of his past superhero comic books to film, refusing payment, credit, or participation in any of the adaptations of his many works.
“I think this century needs, deserves, its own culture. It deserves artists that are actually going to attempt to say things that are relevant to the times we are actually living in. That’s a longwinded way of me saying I am really, really sick of Batman.”
Moore previously announced his retirement from “mainstream comics” in 2004 at age 50. Prior to that, he called the finale to his America’s Best Comics imprint his “retirement” from comic books.
