In an interview with Geoff Butcher of the L.A. Times Alan Moore commented on the legal dispute over screen rights to the Watchmen movie by remarking gleefully, “Will the film even be coming out? There are these legal problems now, which I find wonderfully ironic. Perhaps it's been cursed from afar, from England. And I can tell you that I will also be spitting venom all over it for months to come."

Moore, whose antipathy towards Hollywood is well-documented, accused Tinseltown of “spoonfeeding” audiences “regurgitated worms,” and he decried the effect that celluloid success was having on the comics industry where  "There are three or four companies now that exist for the sole purpose of creating not comics, but storyboards for films. It may be true that the only reason the comic book industry now exists is for this purpose, to create characters for movies, board games and other types of merchandise. Comics are just a sort of pumpkin patch growing franchises that might be profitable for the ailing movie industry."

 

Moore, who maintains that Watchmen is unfilmable and claims never to have seen a movie adaptation of any of his works, did have kind words for one film, a 2003 documentary by Dez Vilentz, The Mindscape of Alan Moore ($29.95), which is due for release on DVD from Shadowsnake films on September 30th (see “Alan Moore DVD in September”).  Independent retailers may well find that they will have much less competition from the mass market on this compilation of revealing (and always interesting) conversations with Alan Moore than they will on the cinematic adaptations of his comics.

Moore, who told the L.A. Times that he “got into comics because I thought it was a good and useful medium that had not been explored to its fullest potential,” said that he was currently working on new installments of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which will by published by Top Shelf and Knockabout (see “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol.3”), and a massive, 750,000 word prose novel Jerusalem.