‘Watchmen,’ a TV hit for HBO, was ’embarrassing’ for the comic’s creator Alan Moore, who ‘didn’t have the guts to quit’
The new Batman movie is on hold while DC rewrites the franchise. In place of the dark, brooding, dour, old-fashioned detective, a new Batman is going to work for the modern era. In the comics. In a series of comic books created for a television show that ended with a jaw-dropping TV movie and went on to be a smash hit. DC made some minor changes to the script for this TV show, but Alan Moore was so incandescent with joy that he was only too happy to have his stories back in his comic book form. Moore was a rare, rare beast of a man: a comic book writer with a film career, and a TV show creator, who worked in TV, too.
But for all his achievements, he’s also one of the most tragic figures you’ll ever see. Alan Moore was a man who was very lucky, very good, and very sad at almost everything he ever got to do. He was a writer, and he wrote hundreds of stories for a bunch of DC superhero comics. He was a screenwriter for a couple of short films (at least one of which will probably live above the garage door), and then, in 1987, he decided that maybe he was done with the superhero comics: he went to work on his comic book project, Watchmen, with a story he wrote. And he had his heart set on it, to the point where he even hired a special effects artist, to make sure that the new superhero wasn’t going to be a dorky, dastardly, and creepy detective.
At the same time, he wanted the story to be set in the late ‘70s, as a new kind of hero. They needed one because there were no characters around by the time Alan Moore became a writer, but because there was a new comic book publisher