‘Do we need any more shitty films in this world? We have quite enough already. Whereas the $100 million could sort out the civil unrest in Haiti. And the books are always superior, anyway.’

Alan Moore, Total Film

There is an urban legend in Northampton – a tale the details of which change a little depending on who tells it – that Johnny Depp once showed up unannounced at Alan Moore’s house, but no one was in. The movie star sat patiently on the doorstep for three hours, signing autographs, before Moore eventually returned home carrying his shopping, and the two of them went for beers at the White Elephant.

This is only the most literal example of Hollywood beating a path to Alan Moore’s door. Depp was the lead actor in the movie version of From Hell, the first of four adaptations of Moore’s work to reach the screen in the first decade of the twenty-first century. From Hell (2001) was followed by The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (also known as LXG, 2003), V for Vendetta (2006) and Watchmen (2009). Moore was not involved in the production of these adaptations. He says he has never seen any of the movies, a claim corroborated by all his friends and family. Latterly, he has refused to take any money from the projects, and has arranged for his share of the revenue to be sent to the artists of the original comics instead. Yet he was not always so hostile to movie versions of his work. His attitude has evolved almost exactly in parallel with his approach to the comics industry: initial excitement has given way to indifference, eventually hardening into suspicion and now open antipathy.

When Moore was starting his career in comics in the early eighties, the prospect of a cinema version of a British comic book character was a pipe dream. A few TV cartoons were based on children’s comics and newspaper strips, such as Fred Bassett and Bananaman, and there had been talk of a Dan Dare film for many years, although it never materialised. David Lloyd says that he and Moore put some effort into getting V for Vendetta on to television: ‘The only thing that me and Alan thought about that might make us rich was if we could sell it as a TV series or a movie, and we were actively involved in trying to do that.’ Both he and Moore sent out a variety of proposals, but ‘There was never any possibility of it happening … We never had any approaches.’

In America, the situation was a little rosier: there was a long roll call of Saturday morning cartoons based on comics, while the Superman movies had been a success and there were TV shows like Wonder Woman and The Incredible Hulk, which tended to be camp and colourful. But the Superman franchise stumbled with a noticeably cheaper third movie (1983) and a disastrous Supergirl spin-off (1984), and though a handful of filmmakers and producers knew the comics readership was getting older and the storytelling more sophisticated, they found it impossible to convince the studios. It did not help that a major movie based on a ‘grown-up’ comic, Howard the Duck (1986), proved a huge flop which critics almost unanimously declared to be one of the worst movies of all time. Other films, while not officially based on comic books, took their cues from the more sophisticated examples of the medium, but even here the results were mixed – Robocop (1987), unmistakably influenced by Judge Dredd, was a big success, despite an R-rating that – in theory at least – barred children and teenagers from seeing it, but He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1987), a covert homage to Jack Kirby’s Fourth World comics, lost a lot of money.

The Watchmen movie had been optioned in August 1986 by Lawrence Gordon, producer of 48 Hrs, Brewster’s Millions and Jumpin’ Jack Flash. Within the next few years, Gordon would go on to produce the Predator and Die Hard movies and Field of Dreams, as well as comic book adaptations The Rocketeer, Timecop and Hellboy. Moore was reportedly offered the chance to script the Watchmen movie; the offer may have been made face to face when he met producer Joel Silver, who remembers, ‘I had lunch with Alan and Dave Gibbons at the time and he was an odd guy. But he was very intrigued and interested in the process. He was game to be involved.’ But Moore declined the opportunity, citing a heavy workload, and instead Sam Hamm was assigned to the job, having delivered his script for a big-budget Batman movie in October 1986. He impressed Moore when they met: ‘His reason for doing Watchmen was that if someone’s going to fuck it up he’d rather it was someone who cared about it. He said, “I realise I’m defeated before I’ve started so I’ve got to take a Samurai attitude to it: that I’m already dead, so I’ll discharge myself with honour.” I couldn’t ask for a better attitude.’

Hamm’s main task was to condense twelve issues of the comic into a feature-length story, which he achieved mainly by ditching all hints of the Minutemen, the earlier generation of superheroes. This means the disappearance of the suggestion in the comic that Nite Owl is following in the footsteps of an earlier crimefighter by the same name; more significantly, the removal of an entire backstory involving the Comedian and Silk Spectre’s mother (there is nothing in the script to say that the Comedian is any older than his team-mates). In the new story, all the superheroes were formerly part of a team called the Watchmen, which was forced to disband in 1976 after they accidentally blew up the Statue of Liberty while thwarting a terrorist attack. There are some nice touches: for example we catch sight of a war memorial commemorating those ‘who gave their lives to achieve victory in Vietnam. Below it are the names of the American dead. There are almost four hundred of them’. And the script is keen to emphasise the slight differences between our world and that of the film, with details like self-lighting cigarettes. In part, this is because the changed ending depends on it: in this version, Ozymandias plans to save the world from nuclear holocaust by changing history to prevent the creation of Dr Manhattan (whose presence, as in the comic, has affected the course of the Cold War). At the end, he succeeds and the surviving Watchmen find themselves in our world, looking distinctly out of place in their superhero costumes.

Terry Gilliam was appointed to direct, and the movie went into pre-production. Rumours began to fly that Robin Williams was keen to play Rorschach, Jamie Lee Curtis would be the Silk Spectre, Richard Gere Nite Owl, and that Arnold Schwarzenegger was happy to shave his head and be painted bright blue to play Dr Manhattan. Moore was even able to see the sunny side of that last rumour, reminding fans that Dr Manhattan had originally been Jon Ostermann, the son of a German immigrant. Gilliam, though, was not happy with Sam Hamm’s script. It missed very few of the story beats from the present-day sequences of the comic, but failed to get under the skin of the characters: ‘He had made some very clever jumps, but killed it. He made it into a movie, but what did you end up with? You ended up with these characters, but they were only shadows of the characters in an adventure. And I didn’t think the book was about that.’

Gilliam set about a rewrite, sitting down ‘with Charles McKeown, my writing partner on Baron Munchausen and Brazil, to squeeze out a script. Time passed. Frustration increased. How do you condense this monster book into a 2 to 2 1/2-hour film? What goes? What stays? Therein lies the problem. I talked to Alan Moore. He didn’t know how to do it … I suggested perhaps a five-part miniseries would be better. I still believe that.’ A second draft was completed, credited to Gilliam, Warren Skaaren and Hamm (but not McKeown). It’s essentially a redraft of Hamm’s script, with certain elements, including Rorschach’s voiceover, restored from the comic. Gilliam was still unhappy to lose so much material from the original, but in the event, that was not the main problem. As he explained: ‘Joel Silver said he had $40 million to do it, but he didn’t have $40 million, he had about $24.25 million, and we talked about the fact that I had just made Munchausen, which was a huge flop that had gone over budget, and he had just made Die Hard 2, which had gone way, way over and had been less successful than hoped. So the two fools were running around Hollywood trying to raise money for this thing that’s darker than anything.’ Long after the project collapsed, Gilliam continued to field questions about Watchmen, and he was approached to direct again in 1996, when a new version of the script had been written.

V for Vendetta was also optioned in the late eighties, with Joel Silver again set to produce. A dystopian science fiction story was a far more bankable prospect than a superhero movie at the time, and nothing in the original comic demanded a vast budget, so it would seem eminently more ‘filmable’ than Watchmen. Despite this, the project never really seemed to pick up momentum. One reason might be that the studios felt V for Vendetta was too parochially British. Moore remembers an early attempt to rectify this:

Now in the first screenplay that I got for V for Vendetta, because this anarchist dresses up in a Guy Fawkes costume, of course people in America have no idea who Guy Fawkes is, so they were going to change it to Paul Revere, and it wasn’t going to happen in London, ’cos that’s just gonna confuse Americans who can’t remember that there’s more than one country in the world, so perhaps it’s going to be set in New York. And that political stuff about fascism, that doesn’t really play, so we’ll have an America that’s been taken over by the commies. So you’ve got this true American dressed as Paul Revere fighting against the commie takeover. Eventually I think they realised that was a stupid idea.

Hilary Henkin, author of the screenplay for Road House (1989), and who would go on to receive an Oscar nomination for co-writing Wag the Dog (1997) with David Mamet, wrote a second V for Vendetta script around 1990. This shifted the action into a more generic science fictional landscape, so that Bishop Lilliman oversaw a newly manufactured state religion and the Fingermen (simply plain-clothes policemen in the comic) were half-goat mutants operating from a building in the shape of a giant finger. In this version, Evey is tortured by the government, her captivity isn’t faked by V, and at the end, she learns V was her father. Yet it’s not quite the travesty that those details suggest. It positions the story in the same sort of New Wave SF idiom as work by long-time influences on Moore like Michael Moorcock and William Burroughs, and is clearly informed by works like Harlan Ellison’s ‘“Repent Harlequin,” Said the Ticktockman’ and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, stories that Moore had always cited as influences on V. This version nonetheless baffled Moore: ‘As I said at the time, if you wanted to do a film about goat policemen, then why the fuck didn’t you just buy the option to Rupert Bear?’

One movie based on Alan Moore’s work was released in the late eighties: Return of the Swamp Thing (1989). Subject to the deal struck before Moore began working on the character, the filmmakers had the rights to use characters and situations from any Swamp Thing comics, including Moore’s run on the book, without him or his artists being consulted, credited or compensated – a situation that naturally irked Moore, but which by that point was a long way down the list of his grievances against DC Comics. So, the film’s title sequence was a montage of comic book panels and covers, many from Moore’s run, Swamp Thing had some of the powers Moore granted him, like the ability to grow new bodies and control plant life, and the story featured the romance between the protagonist and Abby introduced by Moore; producer Michael Uslan told an interviewer, ‘that, to me, is a wonderful Beauty and the Beast/Phantom of the Opera love story’. There’s even a short sequence where, like Swamp Thing #34, Abby eats a tuber from Swamp Thing’s body and the couple are able to make love – the episode, depicted in the comic with pages of LSD-trip imagery set to poetry, becomes in the movie a soft-focus dream sequence in which, for the duration, Swamp Thing has a human body. At the end of the movie Swamp Thing and Abby walk off into the bayou together, the scene fading to an image reminiscent of the cover to Moore’s final issue.

The project was not aiming to be a horror film: the poster promised ‘a cross between Little Shop of Horrors and The Incredible Hulk with a light spritz of Hairspray’, while Uslan admitted at the time, ‘This is a general audience Swamp Thing … we cannot do a movie that’s on the plane of philosophy of the Alan Moore comic. We cannot reach the kind of audience we need to reach by going into a line-by-line adaptation of the kind of work they’ve produced so well in the comics.’

Moore was surprised to read this: ‘I thought, well, that is an astounding admission. What do you mean “it’s only a movie”? Isn’t it supposed to be “it’s only a comic”? This is the field that gave us Citizen Kane and Battleship Potemkin and all the rest of it, you’re telling me you can’t reach the same philosophical depth as I can in a copy of Swamp Thing?’

Even as Uslan was being interviewed, work was concluding on another movie he was producing. Batman, scripted by Sam Hamm and directed by Tim Burton, proved to be a dark, complex comic book adaptation that audiences flocked to in the summer of 1989. The year after that, the indie comic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles became a bona fide phenomenon. Studios were now very open to the idea of making ‘comic book movies’ and a raft of titles based on comics, old and new, began to appear. Superhero movies, though, remained a highly unpredictable prospect. Dick Tracy (1990), lavish, stylised and starring Warren Beatty, was hyped, but underperformed. The Rocketeer (1991) and Spawn (1997) barely proved profitable. Tank Girl (1995), Judge Dredd (1995), Barb Wire (1996) and Steel (1997) all made back only a fraction of their production budgets. On the other hand, Batman Returns (1992) did well, and its critically derided sequel Batman Forever (1995) actually did better. Two of the biggest movies of the nineties, Men in Black (1997) and The Mask (1994), were also based on obscure comic books.

As the options for Watchmen and V for Vendetta expired, they were renewed, and Moore and his co-creators received a fresh round of payments. In February 1994 Don Murphy, co-producer of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994), written by Quentin Tarantino, optioned From Hell on the strength of the first Tundra issue. As the graphic novel hadn’t been finished, Moore wrote a 5,000-word synopsis of the remaining chapters. Murphy was a fan of Moore’s work, while Moore described Murphy as ‘a nice bloke who phones me up and asks if I’ve got any more projects that could be turned into films, any laundry lists that I might have forgotten about.’ Murphy met Moore about half a dozen times. They discussed Fashion Beast, as well as ideas for an original movie featuring Nic Cage as a magician. Murphy optioned The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, in Kevin O’Neill’s words ‘before I’d finished drawing the first issue’ – before it even had a publisher, in fact – saying he’d bought the rights when ‘it was only a three-page idea sheet. It was amazing.’ Murphy was also a fan of Moore himself: ‘He is a big personality and very smart and charismatic. I really thought he was a great person – a genuine genius and eccentric. I discussed the deals with him, got him an ICM agent for League, made sure he was well represented.’ The optioning of his work was lucrative for Moore: Murphy claims Moore was paid ‘$800,000 for From Hell, $1 million for League’. Eddie Campbell was able to use his From Hell option money to quit his day job as a metal fabricator and set himself up as a publisher.

Throughout the nineties, various rumours and tentative announcements of Watchmen and From Hell movies would surface from time to time, but all the projects remained in the early stages of pre-production. The experience allowed Moore to spot a pattern: ‘I was under the illusion that the way that films worked was that you got a lot of option money and then after a couple of years they decided that they weren’t going to make the film, which was a perfect result.’ Around 1998 even Big Numbers was optioned by Picture Palace Productions. Producer Alex Usborne saw it as a twelve-part TV series along the lines of the BBC’s 1996 political saga Our Friends in the North. Moore was more enthusiastic about this prospect, seeing it as a good way to complete the Big Numbers project, but in the event nothing came of it.

In the late nineties studios finally managed to crack the nut of the superhero movie formula. The first picture to do so featured a C-list Marvel character, Blade (1998) in a fast-moving, mid-budget film that did far better than anyone expected. It encouraged the development of other projects based on much more prominent Marvel characters, X-Men (2000) and Spider-Man (2002), which between them made well over $1 billion at the box office and became lucrative franchises. The trend was too much for Barry Norman, the most prominent British film reviewer, who announced his retirement in April 2001 explaining that he wasn’t enjoying his job anymore because ‘the film industry has changed and I find it slightly depressing that almost all the big movies coming out of Hollywood next year are based on comic books.’ The next ten years or so would do nothing to change Norman’s decision. Indeed, alongside dozens of superhero movies, there were many that were less obviously adapted from comics, including A History of Violence, Road to Perdition, Ghost World, 30 Days of Night, Art School Confidential and Whiteout.

Academic discussion of movie adaptation has evolved over time. In the introduction to his influential book Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation (2005), New York University professor Robert Stam warns, ‘The conventional language of adaptation criticism has often been profoundly moralistic, rich in terms that imply that the cinema has somehow done a disservice to literature. Terms like “infidelity”, “betrayal”, “deformation”, “violation”, ‘bastardisation”, “vulgarisation” and “desecration” proliferate in adaptation discourse, each word carrying its specific charge of opprobrium.’ He suggests that we should be wary about simply listing what’s been added or subtracted from the book, or talking in terms of what’s been ‘lost’ in translation between media. This is a shame, for while the directors and stars tend to laud Moore in the press pack and DVD extras, the decisions they make have usually moved their film away from the source material, almost always making the movie version less successful artistically than the original comic.

From Hell serves as a textbook example of how the Hollywood system takes a long, difficult book and turns it into an action thriller that’s designed to play well in multiplexes. The most fundamental change is that while the comics version shows us that Jack the Ripper is William Gull within the first few pages, the movie version reveals it only as a twist towards the end, and the main character is Johnny Depp’s detective, Abberline. Producer Don Murphy explained, ‘There’s just no way you’re going to convince a studio that Jack is the main character. Y’know it would be very fascinating, it would be very interesting to watch Jack, but that’s not a popular commercial film and there was never, ever a discussion. Right after I became friendly with Alan Moore and hung out with him and talked to him, it was like you understand that this is immediately going into Abberline’s story, it’s really going to be about the guy who we as an audience – we’re going to have Johnny Depp in the film – we’re going to follow and although Jack should be prominent, Jack should be a major character, it’s not Jack’s story, it’s Abberline’s story. And that’s the major departure.’

Moore and Campbell had, of course, deliberately chosen to avoid the conventions of the murder mystery genre, and of all previous Ripper fiction’s portrayal of the murderer as a top-hatted silhouette. Eddie Campbell says of being told that the movie would be a whodunit, ‘they put it to me almost as though it was a good idea. I remember they said, “Eddie, look, we’ve got this great idea.” They said, “Look, you don’t know who the Ripper is until right at the end!”. That was the first thing we kicked out, because Alan absolutely detested the idea of turning murder into a parlour game.’

A number of critics felt that the movie was a ‘Disneyfied’ version of the original. As Iain Sinclair noted in his Guardian review, ‘From Hell returns to source, as a penny-dreadful, a shocker; a distortion of place and time. An industrial product crafted to stand alongside the wave of predatory development that maligns history and treats the past as the final colony in the American world empire.’ The project had started at Miramax – a division of Disney – who had clearly wanted a more family-friendly movie about the serial murder of prostitutes. The directors, the Hughes Brothers, read the comic only after they had read the first version of the script, and when they had done so came up with a new draft that tried to recapture at least some of the original’s spirit.

Campbell remembers, ‘there was an earlier version of this script, where [Abberline] escapes, he goes into Special Branch and he steals a file, or he looks at the file, gets the information he needs. Then he hears somebody coming along the corridor. And there’s no way he can get out that room and out the building without being caught. So he turns and he sees a window open, and it’s overlooking a railroad track. He quietly climbs out of the window onto the ledge, jumps onto a train that’s passing below, lands on the roof … At the time, we first read this 1995, 1996, I’m trying to picture our Abberline jumping onto a moving train. Our fat guy … So they’d obviously changed that by the time the movie got made. I didn’t like the original script. The script was certainly improved, I will say that.’

But the movie was released to lukewarm critical reception and box office. Some reviewers unfamiliar with the source material thought they had diagnosed the problem: ‘When I walked out of the movie theater after watching From Hell, I had one thing on my mind. What the Hell were they thinking? Only later when I discovered that the movie was based on a graphic novel did it sink in just where the movie was coming from. Because like a graphic novel, this movie is beautiful to look at, but has little substance.’ It’s an analysis that’s particularly galling to Alan Moore, who has championed the medium and constantly tried to come up with new ways of telling stories within it: ‘And I have gotten tired of lazy critics who, when they want to insult a film, they’ll say it has “comic book characters” or a “comic book plot” – using “comic book” as code for “illiterate” … I’m not going to claim all comic books are literate – there’s a lot of rubbish out there. But there have been some very literate comic books done over the past twenty years, some marvellous ones. And to actually read a comic, you do have to be able to read, which is not something you can say about watching a film. So as for which medium is literate, give me comics any day.’

The critical consensus was perhaps best summed up in a conversation between Eddie Campbell and interviewer Dirk Deppey for The Comics Journal:

DEPPEY:

I was of two minds about the film version of From Hell. I saw it with our news editor, Michael Dean. Driving back, we were discussing the film, and we basically came to the conclusion that it wasn’t in any way close to the quality of the book, but on the other hand, if you were somebody who had never read the book and had no interest in it, and you just went to it expecting a slasher film, then you probably got something a little more high-minded than you were expecting. Does that make any sense?

CAMPBELL:

Yeah, I would agree with that. And that’s what I was expecting. They did a fine job at that level.

Moore never saw From Hell and had no strong feelings one way or the other, either before the movie came out – when Uncut stated that ‘reports from Prague, where the Hughes Brothers (Menace II Society, Dead Presidents) are currently adapting his hugely acclaimed Jack the Ripper strip, From Hell, for the big screen, are met with complete indifference. Johnny Depp’s in it, you say? Nigel Hawthorne? Heather Graham? He doesn’t care. It’s not comics. “I’d be quite happy if they made Carry On Ripping. It’s not my book, it’s their film”’ – or subsequently. He did not exist in total isolation from the movie: he had read the scripts, and Iain Sinclair reported in his review for the Guardian that Moore ‘was staggered’ when he saw photos from the set. He researched the Hughes Brothers, and was delighted to learn that Heather Graham was in the movie, because she had played Annie in Twin Peaks, ‘so with me she merits a particular kind of sainthood’. So his comment that ‘I haven’t seen the From Hell movie yet. I might see it when it comes out on video’ clearly goes beyond mere neutral incuriosity. Don Murphy says, ‘He told me that from the day he optioned it. I thought that was odd but not that big a deal. He was invited to the set and the premiere. I can’t recall – he might have sent his daughter to a screening, but he had no interest. Eddie and his daughter came to the film premiere and had fun.’

Moore had known at an early stage that the movie would bear little resemblance to the comic, and this prompted him to keep his distance. At this stage, it wasn’t because he thought the film would make him angry. He wasn’t disowning the movie or being hostile, it was genuine disinterest: ‘As far as I know, the From Hell movie – while it really is nothing like my book, apart from a couple of scenes here and there – was probably a decent attempt at trying to film a book that is, when you think about it, pretty much unfilmable. I believe that they did probably as good a job as anybody could, the Hughes Brothers … which is to say, that they probably still shouldn’t have bothered, in that the end result would have so little resemblance to anything that I wrote that they might just as well have made their own Jack the Ripper film, with their own story.’

Unlike From Hell, the first volume of the comic The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a straightforward action-adventure. And for the movie, as with From Hell, virtually everything from the comics was ditched apart from the ‘high concept’, a few ideas and specific scenes, some design work and most of the character names. As Moore noted:

There was a time I would have said that if any of my books could work as films, it would have been that first volume of The League. It was pretty much structured so it could have been made straight into a film, and it would have been as powerful as it was in the original publication. But that is to overlook the proclivities of contemporary Hollywood, where I really simply don’t believe that any of my books could be benefited in any way by being turned into films. In fact, quite the opposite.

The script for LXG was written by James Dale Robinson, a writer well regarded for his Starman and Justice Society of America comics at DC. Sean Connery was cast in the lead role of Victorian adventurer Allan Quatermain – a coup, but one that meant there was little budget left for any other star names. The story was no longer an ensemble piece but was largely about Quatermain and, as with From Hell, paths deliberately not taken in the original comic became features of the movie; thus Mina Harker is a subordinate of Quatermain’s rather than being the nearest thing the team have to a leader (Harker, a character from Dracula who was bitten by the Count, is also explicitly shown to be a vampire in the movie, something the comic never quite rules out but remains deliberately coy about). And there were more concrete problems: Connery and director Stephen Norrington clashed repeatedly – to the point that reports appeared in the press suggesting they had almost come to blows, and some cast and crew members took steps to prevent the two from ever being alone together. By the time the movie had wrapped, both had vowed never to make a Hollywood film again. The standing sets in Prague were destroyed in severe floods.

LXG was released in July 2003 to terrible notices (‘Even if, per Wilde, all art is quite useless, it need not be quite as useless as this,’ said Ed Park in The Village Voice). A number of reviewers, such as Charles Taylor of the Salon, were careful to absolve Moore of blame:

After this movie and From Hell, Moore fans might start to take comfort that the movie version of his Watchmen has never come to fruition. His stories seem tailor-made for the movies, but his dark sensibility and the creepy pleasure he gets in playing with historical what-ifs don’t fit with the mindlessness most mainstream blockbusters exhibit right now. The irony of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is that it has the most literate pedigree of any action movie you’re likely to see this year or next – and it’s been made by people who seem to have no sense of how to tell a story.

The movie made over $100 million dollars more than it cost, and its release saw a spike in sales of the comic in May which put the book comfortably at the top of the graphic novel chart. But there was no appetite from the makers or the audience for a sequel. Alan Moore barely said anything about LXG, except to note the irony that in From Hell, they had changed the character of Abberline to make him ‘an absinthe-swilling, opium-den-frequenting dandy with a haircut that, in the Metropolitan Police force in 1888, would have gotten him beaten up by the other officers. On the other hand when I have got an opium-addicted character, in Allan Quatermain … Sean Connery didn’t want to play him as a drug-addled individual. So the main part of Quatermain’s character was thrown out the window on the whim of an actor.’

By September 2003, it seemed like LXG had been and gone. At the end of the month, though, writers Martin Poll and Larry Cohen sued Fox Entertainment Group, Twentieth-Century Fox and Fox Filmed Entertainment claiming that their script, Cast of Characters, had been stolen to make the film. Their lawsuit named Moore as party to this, and made some very specific allegations about his conduct. To head off the obvious defence that LXG was the adaptation of an existing comic book, it was claimed that ‘[President of Twentieth-Century Fox Film Group Tom] Rothman, or others at Fox under his direction, provided Moore with ideas from COC that are protected under state and federal law. Thus, Moore could write a graphic novel to provide a smokescreen behind which Fox could hide when plaintiffs inevitably saw COC being misappropriated as LXG.’

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was hardly the first story to take characters from Victorian fiction and team them up. Philip José Farmer’s fictional biography Tarzan Alive! (1972) was only the first of his books to play with the ‘Wold Newton Family’ concept that many of the heroes of popular fiction – Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond and countless others – were descendants of people who’d been present in a Yorkshire village the night a radioactive meteorite hit the ground nearby. There’s a whole subset of modern Holmes pastiches that pit him against his real life and fictional contemporaries, including Jack the Ripper, the Phantom of the Opera, Freud, H.G. Wells and the Martians from The War of the Worlds. It wasn’t even the first time Alan Moore had done it – he has said that ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen actually conceptually grew out of Lost Girls because we’d had so much fun doing three fictional characters in a sex context that I thought maybe this could work as an adventure book’. In fact he’d alluded to the concept earlier still, in the introduction to the first Swamp Thing collection (1987), where he’d explained superhero crossovers by analogy: ‘For those more familiar with conventional literature, try to imagine Dr Frankenstein kidnapping one of the protagonists of Little Women for his medical experiments, only to find himself subject to the scrutiny of a team-up between Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. I’m sure that both the charms and the overwhelming absurdities of this approach will become immediately apparent.’

Both The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Cast of Characters, then, are part of an enduring literary tradition. Any lawsuit had to be about specifics, not just the idea of literary mash-up. On the face of it, some of the changes made from the comic for the movie version, such as the addition of Dorian Gray and Tom Sawyer, did bring it closer to Cast of Characters. So had the makers of the LXG movie started with Moore and O’Neill’s comic and then incorporated some ideas from an earlier pitch for a similar story, Cast of Characters? Don Murphy’s answer is categorical: ‘I knew it existed as a script because several persons had said “Oh, League is like that.” But I never read it. Still haven’t.’

Then there’s the question of whether Alan Moore might be complicit in such a scheme. Anyone familiar with Moore would, to put it mildly, find it difficult to imagine he would be a Hollywood movie studio’s first choice as a tame stooge. It’s unclear, though, whether the plaintiffs did know anything about Moore or the comics field. While the document was keen to stress their credentials as ‘well-known and respected figures in the film industry’, it didn’t mention Moore’s stature in the comics world. There was no mention that he was a UK resident who didn’t even have a passport or an internet connection. It didn’t refer to Kevin O’Neill, co-creator of the series, or note that The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was creator-owned and so it had cost Fox a substantial amount of money to acquire the rights. Besides, it is a matter of record that Moore had first mentioned The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in an interview carried out on 8 July 1996, nearly two full years before June 1998 when the lawsuit alleged he had been briefed to write it. Don Murphy says ‘the claims were beyond insane. They had Moore conspiring with the then head of the studio, who was somebody Alan never met or would even talk to.’

The case proceeded anyway, and Moore was called as a witness. In the words of the New York Times, ‘Mr Moore found the accusations deeply insulting, and the ten hours of testimony he was compelled to give, via video link, even more so. “If I had raped and murdered a schoolbus full of retarded children after selling them heroin,” he said, “I doubt that I would have been cross-examined for ten hours.” When the case was settled out of court, Mr Moore took it as an especially bitter blow, believing that he had been denied the chance to exonerate himself.’ But Fox’s lawyers decided to settle the case on 29 December 2003, before it went to trial. As Don Murphy explains,

the lawsuit was settled for a pittance because the studio insurance company didn’t want to pay for a trial. That’s it … I took the whole thing personally. The movie had taken $200m worldwide but because we opened against Pirates of the Caribbean the US total was lacklustre. Then these clowns come along and sue … somehow it got settled. That was crap. Alan’s reaction I never understood. My Scottish wife says that Brits aren’t used to lawsuits. Fair enough. But the litigants were alleging malfeasance on his part and his signed contracts provided he be available to testify that he had not stolen the ideas. He did that and did that brilliantly – and then went nuts on everyone, cursing Hollywood and swearing off it forever. I became the latest in the long list of friends banished forever. It’s a shame really, but nothing that can be done about it.

Moore blamed Murphy, having learned during the deposition that Murphy had sent a prank email to the plaintiffs saying that Moore had been given the ideas by someone at the studio. Murphy admits that ‘in a fit of pique I sent an anonymous email – it said basically “No, it wasn’t the head of the studio, it was the guy who got the coffee”. It turned out they went crazy trying to figure out who sent this, it was the only evidence they had which meant they had nothing.’ But Moore didn’t see the funny side. His encounters with legal affairs – the ‘Marvelman’ title, the Watchmen contract and now this – reinforced his belief that legal decisions had very little to do with right and wrong, and everything to do with corporate shenanigans. He had made a conscious choice to keep out of the way of the movie versions of his work, but found himself dragged into court anyway. He couldn’t just ignore them, after all. ‘I’ve decided that I don’t want anything more to do with films at all … I thought if I’m going to react, I may as well overreact, y’know. So, I said, right, that’s it, no more Hollywood films. And if they do make films of my work, then I want my name taken off of them and I want all the money given to the artists. I thought, God, that sounds principled and almost heroic!’

Then, the next Monday, he received a phone call from DC’s Karen Berger:

She said, ‘Yeah, we’re going to be sending you a huge amount of money before the end of the year because they’re making this film of your Constantine character with Keanu Reeves.’ And I said, ‘Right, OK. Well, take my name off of it and distribute my money amongst the other artists.’ I thought, well, that was difficult, but I did it and I feel pretty good about myself. Then I saw David Gibbons who I had done Watchmen with and he was saying, ‘Oh Alan, guess what, they’re making the Watchmen film.’ And I said, with tears streaming down my face, ‘Take my name off of it David. (sniffles). You have all the money.’ Then I got a cheque for the V for Vendetta film. It was just, this was within three days!

Moore had no control over these projects, all of which were based on his DC Comics work, and they came at a time when his relationship with the company was breaking down over, as he saw it, editorial interference in the ABC line. So he found it easy to elide the problems he was having with Hollywood and those with the comics industry, particularly as DC and Warner Bros, the studio behind all three movies, were both part of the Time Warner multimedia empire.

There had been a period of détente between DC and Alan Moore. From 1999, DC had published the America’s Best Comics line while keeping out of Moore’s way, as agreed, and both parties seemed determined to get their non-relationship to work. Relations had in fact thawed to the point that in the summer of 2000, DC announced at San Diego Comic-Con that they would be celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of Watchmen (the following year) by publishing Absolute Watchmen, a $100 slipcased hardcover edition for which the original story would be recoloured and a second volume included containing the full scripts and other behind-the-scenes material. There would also be a range of Watchmen action figures, with four prototypes displayed at the convention. This was all being done with Moore’s blessing, and a new documentary he recorded with Dave Gibbons was shown by DC at conventions that summer.

At the same time, though, DC stepped in to block the publication of two ABC titles. The first was The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen #5 (June 2000), which reproduced a genuine Victorian advertisement for a ‘MARVEL whirling spray syringe, the new injection and suction vaginal syringe’.

DC publisher Paul Levitz felt that this was an insult to DC’s arch-rivals, Marvel, so the original print run was pulped and a new edition, containing an identical advert except with the brand name altered to AMAZE, appeared within weeks. The same month, Levitz also blocked a Cobweb strip, due to be published in Tomorrow Stories #8, that recounted a true story involving L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, and his involvement with occultism. Moore told Newsarama:

the DC lawyers seem to be very sane, practical people. As a creator, I’ve heard for a long time what lawyers are like, but actually speaking to Lillian Laserson, she was practical, sane, responsible, professional and logical. We went through it for an hour, talking about this six-page story, and the reference book that I’d taken most of the story from, how it’s all in the public domain and is all over the Internet, and it’s been in two or three magazines and a book. This is stuff that there’s no possible threat of litigation, which I think Lillian pretty much agreed with, and then Paul Levitz apparently said, even so, he didn’t want it to go out, which I think was the case all along. I think Lillian was a bit perplexed as to why an hour of her and my time had been wasted …

This was exactly the sort of editorial interference that had always rankled with Moore, but his contracts gave him little room for manoeuvre except to spit feathers. With his opinion of Levitz now little better than his attitude towards Dez Skinn when Warrior had been on its last legs, Moore disowned the Watchmen anniversary project, saying ‘there’s just been a lot of stuff recently where I’ve been trying to cooperate with DC and be friendly, but this has not been reciprocated’. Editor Scott Dunbier was able to smooth the waters and Moore continued to produce regular scripts for the ABC range.

On 17 September 2002, Top Shelf, publisher of the US editions of From Hell, The Birth Caul and Snakes and Ladders, announced a slate of new and reprinted work by Alan Moore. They would be publishing Lost Girls in 2004 (in the event, it took two years longer than anticipated), and were also to publish new editions of Voice of the Fire and The Mirror of Love. With the Cobweb story that Paul Levitz had blocked being included in an anthology, Top Shelf Asks the Big Questions, Moore had found a publisher happy to work with him, one who would put out even his most difficult material.

Even before the second volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen had been completed (the final issue was published in November 2003), it was known that Moore and O’Neill planned a third six-issue miniseries, with each issue focusing on a different League prior to the 1898 version. Moore wanted a break before starting work on Book Three, but was aware that Kevin O’Neill was keen to continue. So they devised a stopgap, a sourcebook which a Wildstorm press release on 28 December 2004 said was ‘due in late 2005’ and was to be called The Dark Dossier – though this was news to Moore, who notes that ‘right from the first outline it was called The Black Dossier. Me and Kevin were a bit surprised when DC kept referring to it as The Dark Dossier. We didn’t know whether they were having one of their periodic anxiety attacks about the use of the word “black”. We put them right.’

Moore grew more and more enthusiastic about the project, describing it in May 2005 as ‘not my best comic ever, not the best comic ever, but the best thing ever. Better than the Roman civilisation, penicillin. The human brain? Yes and the human nervous system. Better than creation. Better than the Big Bang. It’s quite good … It will be nothing anyone expects, but everything everyone secretly wanted.’ The book showed all the signs of Moore enjoying himself, getting a little carried away and ultimately more than a little self-indulgent – as well as a 3D section, sections on different paper stocks and a mini comic, he also recorded two songs to appear on a vinyl record that came with the book. What had begun as a straightforward, rather dry guide to the history of the League became a massive exercise in literary mash-up. Among many other things, Jeeves faced off against Cthulhu, there was a porno comic written in George Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’ and a pastiche Shakespeare play which saw Prospero form the original League. As the book became more ambitious, it also became clear it would take a little longer to produce.

The Black Dossier did not appear in 2006, but the movie of V for Vendetta did. It’s fair to say fans of Moore’s work had low expectations. A press release stating that Evey ‘begins to develop feelings for V’ and a trailer that emphasised slow-motion knife fights, explosions and the fact that the film was from the makers of The Matrix did little to change that. By now it was widely reported that Moore wanted nothing to do with cinema adaptations of his work and had asked for his name to be removed from any future projects. When the movie was finally released, though, a number of critics wondered if he had been too hasty. Joe Lozito wasn’t the only reviewer who felt: ‘it’s no wonder Mr Moore would be a bit wary. But he needn’t have removed his name from director James McTeigue’s refreshingly faithful but maddeningly uneven adaptation. While it contains none of the brilliance or immediacy of the source material, for any fan of Mr Moore’s original, there are moments of pure bliss.’

Moore reports that Karen Berger had said something similar to him, that ‘maybe I’d want to reconsider taking my name off this, because actually it was very faithful to the book’. But he was highly sceptical and made it clear he would not reverse his position. When Lana Wachowski, one half of the writer/producer team, telephoned him, he reiterated his standard line: he wasn’t interested in being involved, but that didn’t mean he wished the producers ill.

However, at a press conference on 4 March 2005 – transcribed in a press release the same day – producer Joel Silver was asked about Moore’s involvement and stated that Moore was ‘very excited about what Larry had to say and Larry sent the script, so we hope to see him sometime before we’re in the UK [to start filming]. We’d just like him to know what we’re doing and to be involved in what we’re trying to do together.’ Exactly why Silver said this is unclear. The pair had met back when V for Vendetta was first optioned, and Moore had been excited at the time – but nearly twenty years had passed.

It’s been suggested that Silver heard an account of the phone conversation with Wachowski that was a little more optimistic than was warranted. The fact that director James McTeigue could tell an interviewer, ‘I don’t know whether [Moore] really doesn’t want it made. I mean, obviously, the rights are out there for the film to be made so at some point he wants the film to be made,’ might suggest that some of the key people making the movie hadn’t been made entirely au fait with the situation. Whatever the case, when Moore found out about the press release, he was furious. He called Scott Dunbier and informed him that unless a retraction was issued, he would pull all future League of Extraordinary Gentlemen projects from DC. To avoid loss of face, Moore would be happy for the retraction to blame ‘a misunderstanding’, although he considered it to be ‘a flat, knowing lie’. After five or six weeks, when no such retraction had appeared, Moore made public his antipathy towards the film. In a May 2005 interview for the online comics gossip column Lying in the Gutters, he revealed he had seen the shooting script:

It was imbecilic; it had plot holes you couldn’t have got away with in Whizzer and Chips in the nineteen sixties. Plot holes no one had noticed … They don’t know what British people have for breakfast, they couldn’t be bothered. ‘Eggy in a basket’ apparently. Now the US have ‘eggs in a basket’, which is fried bread with a fried egg in a hole in the middle. I guess they thought we must eat that as well, and thought ‘eggy in a basket’ was a quaint and Olde Worlde version. And they decided that the British postal service is called FedCo. They’ll have thought something like, ‘well, what’s a British version of FedEx … how about FedCo?’ A friend of mine had to point out to them that the Fed, in FedEx comes from ‘Federal Express.’ America is a federal republic, Britain is not.

While Alan Moore takes great pride in building up his fictional worlds from meticulously thought-through telling details, and so any carelessness in that area must have irked him, getting angry at ‘FedCo’ does seem like an overreaction – for the record, the final version of the film replaced the name with the British Freight Company (and it is never spoken, it only appears on some prop boxes). Moore’s confession, in a later interview, that around the same time he had dumped his entire consignment of contributor’s copies of a new edition of V for Vendetta in a skip because he had spotted a spelling error on the back cover added to the impression that he was spoiling for a fight but was struggling a little to find ammunition.

In fact, the movie version is recognisably V for Vendetta, one touchstone being that the Valerie sequence, in which Evey reads a letter from a lesbian inmate of Larkhill concentration camp, is retained almost word for word. (So faithfully, in fact, that we’re told Valerie sat the Eleven Plus exam – fine in the comic, where she was born in 1957, but in the movie she was born in 1985, long after the exam had been abolished.) Originally appearing in Warrior #24, Book Two, Chapter Eleven of V for Vendetta remains a highlight of Moore’s writing, as well as a tour de force from David Lloyd, who’s said: ‘I’m often in this position where I’m defending the movie. I do support the movie, very strongly, despite some flaws. But the Wachowskis were big fans. They thought they needed to add their own creative input, that’s just one of those things. They were fans of it, there was no question of them losing [the Valerie material]. They were committed to it. I don’t think there was any question that was the core of it.’

When Moore says, ‘If that book had ever been understood by the people publishing it in the first place, then they would not have told me that the scripts for the movie were true to my book. It wasn’t. It hadn’t got anything to do with my book,’ he’s not talking about FedCo, or disputing that the movie retains important material like the Valerie sequence. So what is Moore’s real objection?

Despite the teaser poster’s tagline that it’s ‘an uncompromised vision of the future’, V for Vendetta is unmistakably a product of the Hollywood studio system and has been reshaped by that. The London setting is retained – although the movie was mostly shot in Berlin – and the supporting cast are almost all from the UK, but concessions, large and small, have been made to an American audience. To explain what a ‘Guy Fawkes mask’ is, the movie opens with a flashback to Fawkes’ capture and execution. As with Sean Connery’s presence in LXG, the casting of Natalie Portman as Evey has clearly led to rewrites. While the screenplay’s first draft retained a sixteen year old so desperate she plans to prostitute herself, Evey in the finished movie is a runner at a television company who wants a promotion and faces the hardship of going to dinner with Stephen Fry.

The movie was being made because the studio wanted the Wachowskis’ next project, and the Wachowskis wanted to make V for Vendetta. Even though they weren’t directing, the posters and captions of the trailers made it clear this was a film ‘by the creators of The Matrix trilogy’. Those films had been notable for their ‘bullet time’ slow-motion effects, and there are similar sequences in V for Vendetta involving V’s knives. V throws multiple knives at once and they fly through the air to their targets in slow motion, trailing CG swirls of air, while we see their victims’ faces reflected in the blades. In the comic, too, V has knives: we see him with at least three on his belt in the very first reveal of his costume in Book One, Chapter One – although he doesn’t use them that night, when he rescues Evey. It’s Book Two, Chapter Three, before we see one in V’s hand, and the second and final time he uses one is when he stabs Finch’s shoulder in Book Three, Chapter Seven. In the official script book, a comment by director James McTeigue encapsulates how the movie foregrounds and fetishises the weapons: ‘The knives around his belt are like glistening teeth, roundabout where a cowboy’s guns would be’. In the movie, violence is cool.

There’s more going on, though, than adding a little Hollywood gloss to the original material. The political message of the book has also been Americanised, and it’s this that’s at the root of Moore’s objection. Put simply, V for Vendetta was an early example of Moore’s personal, political work, and the makers of the movie changed the politics.

The comic V for Vendetta is a political work in two distinct, even contradictory, senses. First, it is a product of its times. Moore has said, ‘When I wrote V, politics were taking a serious turn for the worse over here. We’d had Margaret Thatcher in for two or three years, we’d had anti-Thatcher riots, we’d got the National Front and the right wing making serious advances.’ Some critics, particularly Americans, see the book in broader strokes. James R. Keller, in V for Vendetta as Cultural Pastiche: A Critical Study of the Graphic Novel and Film – which despite its subtitle is mainly concerned with the movie – asserts that the AIDS panics of the eighties ‘serve as the backstory of Moore and Lloyd’s graphic novel’ and Chapter Nine of his book, ‘“V for Virus: The Spectacle of the AIDS Avenger and the Biomedical Military Trope”, examines VfV’s not so subtle allusions to the AIDS panic of the 1980s, the period in which Moore and Lloyd conceived and composed their viral avenger’. In fact, V for Vendetta began publication in 1982, before the term AIDS had been coined, when the condition was barely known outside medical journals (there had only been seven reported cases in the UK by the end of the year). That was to change rapidly – by 1983 the British tabloids and US right-wing Christians were talking about ‘the gay plague’, by 1987 the UK government had launched massive public health campaigns and there were 1,200 cases in the UK, and by 1988, when Moore finished the series, the Conservative government was eliding medical and moral health as a pretext to introduce Clause 28. Many existing elements of the story had clear resonance with the real-life demonisation of homosexuals, and the AIDS crisis certainly came to inform Moore’s work, but V for Vendetta simply couldn’t have initially been conceived ‘as a response’ to something that hadn’t yet happened.

V for Vendetta is a ‘response to Thatcherism’, but Thatcherism changed radically between 1981 and 1988. When Moore started writing the strip, Margaret Thatcher was leader of a divided government that was singularly failing to end a deep recession. The backstory Moore developed was premised on the idea that the Conservatives would lose the next election … in real life, they won by a landslide. The political left fractured, the Falklands War had been won, the recession had ended. Thatcher had steered the country to the right, and she hadn’t needed anything as outré as nuclear war – she had done it by selling off council houses, thereby transforming council tenants into homeowners who were suddenly very concerned with mortgage rates and property prices.

When he was writing V for Vendetta, Moore was not assessing this situation twenty years on, from a different country. He had grown up in council houses. Having entered exactly the type of ‘unconventional lifestyle’ that was under attack, he was directly affected by gay rights issues. As he finished V for Vendetta, he was also assembling the anti-Clause 28 benefit comic AARGH!. In many ways, V for Vendetta is a parochial story, or at least is a nuanced, personal response to a specific period of British political life. When an academic watches the movie and describes V as ‘the artistic embodiment of the AIDS avenger’ or the director sums up Clause 28 as ‘a law that banned any homosexual expression – art, music, anything that was deemed homosexual’, it oversimplifies the British political landscape to the point of being an active misrepresentation.

Of course, any retelling of the tale twenty years on would seek to recontextualise it, to address modern concerns. The V for Vendetta movie tries, but loses a lot in translation. As Moore says: ‘Now, in the film, you’ve got a sinister group of right-wing figures – not fascists, but you know that they’re bad guys – and what they have done is manufactured a bio-terror weapon in secret, so that they can fake a massive terrorist incident to get everybody on their side, so that they can pursue their right-wing agenda. It’s a thwarted and frustrated and perhaps largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values [standing up] against a state run by neo-conservatives – which is not what V for Vendetta was about.’

The movie’s account of the rise of the right-wing regime boils down to a slight rebranding of the ‘Truther’ conspiracy theory that accuses President Bush’s government of instigating the 9/11 attacks as part of a grand plan to increase the power of the state, at home and abroad, under the pretext of protecting its citizens from future terrorist attacks. Moore is fond of grand narratives, and not fond of American right-wingers. So, does that mean he buys into ‘Trutherism’? As a reader of Fortean Times, Moore is familiar with countless conspiracy theories: From Hell is based around one; Brought to Light dramatised countless CIA plots and cover-ups, drawing attention to the people and organisations connecting them; Watchmen revolves around a plot to fake an attack on New York that will cause mass slaughter. Moore’s conclusion: ‘The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy or the grey aliens or the twelve-foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control. The truth is more frightening, nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.’ Moore has been asked specifically about 9/11 and has written two pieces on the subject for benefit comic books. He has consistently stressed that he sees 9/11 as tragic but unexceptional:

The thing is that the public, in the rest of the world, we have kind of got the idea by now. Ever since Guernica, probably almost everywhere else in the world, apart from America, have been relatively used to being bombed. And yes it is upsetting. Of course it is. But at the end of the day, without wishing to appear brutal, on September the eleventh 2001 you lost a couple of buildings and a few thousand people. There’s other people who’ve had it far worse, and sometimes at the hands of America.

For Moore, the Truther analogy doesn’t work because it’s not unthinkable that such atrocities might occur.

As he laid out his objections to the movie, Moore even managed to slip in a sly reference to its very first draft, from the late eighties: ‘It’s been turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country … perhaps it would have been better for everybody if the Wachowski Brothers had done something set in America, and instead of a hero who dresses up as Guy Fawkes, they could have had him dressed as Paul Revere.’

V for Vendetta, though, had never simply been Moore’s projection of where British politics might head after 1982. The second sense in which it is ‘political’ is that, for him, it explores a more universal struggle: ‘V for Vendetta was specifically about things like fascism and anarchy … Those words, “fascism” and “anarchy”, occur nowhere in the film.’ The comic was about his personal politics, far more than he had planned when he began creating it with David Lloyd. Moore has long believed we face a relatively simple binary choice, as individuals, to be either self-determining or controlled by others. V for Vendetta dramatises this, but it also problematises it. At heart, there’s quite a simple scheme to the comic: the character we’re meant to identify as the ‘hero’ (the one who espouses what we know to be Moore’s personal politics, and who is the apparent protagonist of the story) is a masked killer who is at the very least traumatised, and possibly insane; his opponents are fascists, but they are also ordinary people with jobs and families – they’re policemen, broadcasters, civil servants. V is fighting fascists, but Moore never lets us forget that he’s also leaving a trail of widows and orphans. The film all but ignores this, with McTeigue saying V has a ‘bipolar nature, he has this great idea for altruistic social change, but on the other hand, he’s murdering the people he thinks have done wrong by him’. While Alan Moore called the first chapter of the comic ‘The Villain’, McTeigue was happy to refer to V as ‘a superhero’.

Moore started V for Vendetta in 1981 as a young writer fresh from the dole queue trying to prove himself. He completed it in 1988 as a wealthy celebrity in a polyamorous relationship who was assembling a benefit comic by roping in his showbiz pals. The Alan Moore of the twenty-first century is an older man, one who has increasingly drawn the distinction between the comics medium, ‘a grand tradition rooted in its healthy scepticism with regard to rulers, gods or institutions; a genuine artform of the people, unrestricted by prevailing notions of acceptability’, and the comics mainstream, ‘a critically-accepted and occasionally lucrative component of the entertainment industry’. He’s an author who’s used his work to challenge the imposition of US corporate values on the world. A Hollywood movie is, by definition, incapable of dissent: it is a product of American cultural imperialism.

A number of reviewers familiar with the source material picked up on the movie’s lack of depth:

This movie simply doesn’t add much to the gallery of dystopian art – where Moore’s book already hangs quite prominently – aside from an embittered topicality that will look rather dusty in a decade or so. It’s capably acted – Stephen Rea sags expressively as the inspector on V’s trail; Portman carries off Evey’s arc from naïf to radical with aplomb. But the film shouts when it should sing. Bombastically insecure, it treats the audience like V treats Evey, preaching condescendingly and instructing us to watch the fireworks. But, as it has been translated and condensed for multiplex consumption, it really has no deeper meaning beyond the fireworks.

The ‘political’ message of the movie version of V for Vendetta is equally undemanding: totalitarianism is bad, rounding people up and sending them to death camps is bad, government censorship of the media is bad; romantic individualism is good, self-determination is good. These are not provocative or challenging positions, and it’s not surprising that some of the movie’s most vocal supporters were right-wingers: supporters of libertarian Republican Senator Ron Paul, and the Tea Party, an offshoot of the Republican Party, saw the movie as championing their own political stance of small government and Ayn Rand-style selfishness.

The movie of V for Vendetta has attracted a cult following among young political activists, and there were commentators who saw a story that focused on a terrorist opposing a right-wing government as ‘edgy’ in the George W. Bush years. But some of the material audiences responded to was purely from the movie, not Moore and Lloyd. The line ‘People should not be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people’ is often quoted on social media, credited to Alan Moore. But it’s not in the original comic. First appearing on the movie’s teaser poster, issued over the Fourth of July weekend in 2005, it’s an adaptation of a well-known Thomas Jefferson quote – although fittingly, a fake one. And the long alliterative monologue that V uses to announce himself to Evey – also oft-quoted online – is entirely the work of the movie:

Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, it is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished, as the once vital voice of the verisimilitude now venerates what once they vilified. However, this valourous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it’s my very good honour to meet you and you may call me V.

It’s the story’s ending that changed the most in the film. At the end of the comic, the fascist regime is toppled, but nothing has emerged to replace it. V has anointed Evey as his successor, knowing he is too violent to be the architect of a peaceful future, but Evey’s first act is to destroy 10 Downing Street. While the comic opens up knowing ambiguities, however, the movie often appears simply incoherent. At its climax, the tyrant Sutler (disliking the name of the fascist leader in the comic, ‘Adam Susan’, the Wachowskis simply conflated ‘Susan’ and ‘Hitler’) is toppled, an occurrence that takes little more than the threat of a large public demonstration, but there’s no hint of what happens next. It might simply be the restoration of parliamentary democracy … in which case the destruction of the Houses of Parliament at the end is something of a mixed message. Evey delivers her last line in a voiceover: ‘No one will ever forget that night and what it meant to this country. But I will never forget the man and what he meant to me’, which suggests the makers intend it to mean we’re watching a happy ending.

Giving V for Vendetta the ‘Hollywood treatment’ did the material a disservice. Moore had come to see Hollywood movies as inevitably compromised: ‘I’ve developed a theory that there’s an inverse relationship between money and imagination.’ He found some suggestions baffling: ‘We had one particularly dense Hollywood producer say, “You don’t even have to do the book, just stick your name on this idea and I’ll make the film and you’ll get a lot of money – it’s … The League Of Extraordinary Animals! It’ll be like Puss In Boots!” And I just said, “No, no, no. Never mention this to me again”.’ He did not feel ‘honoured’ that people wanted to adapt his comics for the cinema:

The idea that there is something prestigious about having your work made into a film, that is something which infuriates me because it seems to be something that everybody else in the industry absolutely believes. Which to me sells out the entire reason why I worked all those years in comics, which was to advance the medium. All of the people that I was talking to during those years, they told me that that was what they wanted, too. It turned out, however, that at the first hint that their work could be made into a film, their attitude changed. It would seem that having a film made of your work is what validates it, that before that it was just a comic but now it’s a movie.

It was clear by now that no movie would be given Alan Moore’s approval, but was it possible to create a film truly ‘faithful’ to one of his books? There was a further barrier. An ‘Alan Moore comic’ is nothing of the sort: it’s a collaboration. The first three major movies based on his work did little or nothing to emulate the art of the comic beyond restaging the occasional iconic panel. As he said of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen:

If you continue to, say, ‘remain faithful to my story or my dialogue’ – I mean, that is so unlikely as to be absolutely impossible, but say that that was to happen. What about Kevin’s artwork? Kevin’s artwork is so integral to the whole feel of The League that it couldn’t be done with anyone other than Kevin … Kevin has always had an absurdist, grotesque British undercurrent to his work … In a film, it’s not a Kevin O’Neill drawing. I don’t care how much CGI there is in it. It’s not a Kevin O’Neill drawing. When I am thinking about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, it’s Kevin’s drawings that I want to see, Kevin’s storytelling, or the storytelling that is the combination of both of our efforts. These are the things that are important to me about The League.

Ironically, though, Moore’s absence from the movies has pushed the artists into the spotlight. It’s they who appear on promotional materials, like DVD extras and video diaries on the movies’ websites, while Moore is barely mentioned. Eddie Campbell, Kevin O’Neill, David Lloyd and Dave Gibbons have all trodden a line where, while admitting to reservations with the finished result, they have been happy to go on set visits and to premieres, and to be quoted in press releases expressing delight at seeing their drawings brought to life. Kevin O’Neill got to share a whisky with Sean Connery while LXG was being filmed, and noted, laughingly: ‘People obviously ring up Alan all the time. They go to him first, but if they can’t get Alan, they end up talking to me … I did visit the movie set in Prague. They’ve spent a phenomenal amount of money, and there’s an incredible amount of craftsmanship going into it. All the cast members I met were fans of the book, and they all wanted to meet Alan, of course. Steve Norrington, the director, is a big fan of the book, and wants to do the best job possible.’

In 2009, over twenty years after it was first optioned, the Watchmen movie was released. When asked about it, Moore told the Los Angeles Times that he would be ‘spitting venom all over it for months to come’. But although he was interviewed a number of times in the run-up to its release, he barely mentioned it unless prompted, in which case he would offer the same basic answer: he and Terry Gilliam had agreed it wasn’t filmable decades ago, he didn’t even have a copy of the comic in his house because he resented the way he had been treated by DC. Yet the Watchmen movie was, as The Atlantic put it, ‘as devout and frame-by-frame a reworking as could be imagined’. Director Zack Snyder had thrown out all the innovations of the previous drafts, preferring a reverent adaptation. The story was streamlined, which changed the ending, but in the post-Lord of the Rings era, blockbuster movies were now allowed to run far longer, and could be reissued in immense extended DVD versions (Watchmen: The Ultimate Cut, the DVD release, is just over three and a half hours long, and even finds room for an animated version of the Tales of the Black Freighter pirate story). The Los Angeles Times called Watchmen ‘nothing less than the boldest popcorn movie ever made. Snyder somehow managed to get a major studio to make a movie with no stars, no “name” superheroes and a hard R-rating.’

The climate, though, was favourable for a ‘faithful’ Watchmen movie. Studio heads were now aware that superhero movies had the potential to earn back the hundreds of millions they often cost to make, and that ‘adult superhero’ was not a contradiction in terms. A new generation of filmmakers was emerging that consisted of proud comic fans. They had adopted Moore’s strategy of reinventing superheroes – and other fantasy properties with nostalgic appeal – along more grounded, cynical lines. Watchmen had been the obvious Ur-text for two big hits: the gloomy suspense movie Unbreakable (2000) and the colourful family film The Incredibles (2004). There had been a solid decade of mainstream superhero movies, so just as the comic was able to subvert the tropes of the genre, the movie had its own clichés to play with. Special effects technology had advanced to the point that Moore’s 1988 suggestion ‘for Dr Manhattan to be played by a computer graphic’ was now feasible. The graphic novel of Watchmen was on university reading lists, it could be found in any bookstore, and it’s noticeable that mainstream reviewers who hadn’t read the comic felt the need to justify their illiteracy. Fanboy culture was now utterly mainstream, comic book geeks could be seen swapping obscure references in the American sitcom The Big Bang Theory. When Moore visited the San Diego Comic-Con in 1985, he had found 5,000 fans gathered in one place an overwhelming number. By 2009 the same event hosted 126,000, and had mutated into a vast entertainment industry trade fair where studios sent their biggest stars to wow the early adopters.

In the summer of 2008, Warner Pictures released The Dark Knight, the second of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, which pitted the caped crusader against the Joker. Unmistakably influenced by the late eighties take on the character, it made over $1 billion at the box office internationally. The film also saw the beginning of a year-long publicity drive for the Watchmen movie, with a lengthy preview trailer running before every screening. The stars had aligned … and the Watchmen movie flopped.

Watchmen eventually eked out $107 million at the box office, less than the reported $130 million it cost to make. It proved to be a hard sell in foreign markets. With an R rating in the US (an 18 in the UK), it was never going to be as lucrative as The Dark Knight, but benchmarked against it, Watchmen was a disaster. Its $55 million opening weekend was a third of The Dark Knight’s total and it quickly fizzled out, making less in its fourth weekend than The Dark Knight did in its tenth.

It’s possible to hold an inquest. The main problem is that no Watchmen movie was ever going to have the same relative status as the original. The trailer declared Watchmen to be ‘the most acclaimed graphic novel of all time’; the movie was never going to be equally acclaimed. The central conceit of the comic had been that it would be unusual to see ‘realistic’ superheroes, but for twenty years moviegoers had seen little else. The film also failed to sell the premise that the superheroes were past their prime by casting actors who were noticeably younger than the middle-aged characters they were playing – Matthew Goode (Ozymandias) and Malin Akerman (Silk Spectre) were both under thirty. Zack Snyder is much more interested in creating moments of visual impact, or recreating them from the comic, than in the psychology of people who’d want to be superheroes, so while Patrick Wilson (Nite Owl) and Jackie Earle Haley (Rorschach) in particular are trying to get under the skin of their characters, the movie doesn’t leave them enough room.

A number of reviewers took issue with the pace, noting that ‘Snyder unwinds every bone-splintering blow with copious slo-mo combined with concussive shifts in frame rate. Truth is, he leans too hard on that slo-mo button’ and ‘we’re left with a movie that feels overlong and incomplete at the same time, a frustrating combination’. Terry Gilliam, who must have put more thought into how to make a Watchmen movie than just about anyone else, came to the same verdict:

There are great sequences in there, but the overall effect is kind of turgid in a certain way … in the comic book, or graphic novel … It’s like the Comedian’s coffin is going into the grave with the stars and stripes on top of it and reading it in the comic book it’s three panels: boom, boom and boom. On film hhhhhhhhhhmmmmm … The pace is wrong. I think Watchmen really bothered me, because I thought it should be better. It was all there. It looked right, but to me it was pace. It didn’t have pace. It needed a bit more quirkiness in there. Dr Manhattan was getting boring, frankly, and then Ozymandias by the end I thought ‘Oh, come on!’ They lost me by the end, frankly, but it was certainly looking better than what I was going to do!

Alan Moore sees the pacing issue as one that affects cinema in general: ‘You are trapped in the running time of a film – you go in, you sit down, they’ve got two hours and you’re dragged through at their pace. With a comic you can stare at the page for as long as you want and check back to see if this line of dialogue really does echo something four pages earlier, whether this picture is really the same as that one, and wonder if there is some connection there.’

J. Michael Stracynski is the creator of early nineties science fiction soap opera Babylon 5, and was nominated for an Oscar and BAFTA for his screenplay of The Changeling. He’s written comics including Superman: Earth One and The Twelve. He also wrote a number of the Before Watchmen prequel comics published by DC in 2012, and declares himself to be a fan of Moore’s work; he once said, ‘Alan is the best of us. I’ve said repeatedly, online and at conventions, that on a scale from one to ten, Alan is a full-blown ten. I’ve not only said it, more importantly, I’ve always believed it.’ When asked why the Watchmen movie failed at the US box office, he answered:

On an emotional level the Watchmen book is fairly cool to the touch; it’s thoughtful, intellectual, with great characters, but nonetheless on the cool side. Film and television are hot mediums, in that they rely on passion and extreme emotions to reach across the darkness of a theatre to affect the audience. Granted that there are some of those moments in the book, they are not what makes for a successful film, and in being so literal in the director’s transferral of the story from print to screen, that coolness was preserved, and the film became emotionally distant.

Moore himself had dismissed the idea that Watchmen was cinematic: ‘It’s almost the exact opposite of cinematic … I didn’t design it to show off the similarities between cinema and comics, which are there, but, in my opinion are fairly unremarkable. It was designed to show off the things that comics could do that cinema and literature couldn’t.’ He now has an absolutist line on the concept of adaptation:

I think that adaptation is largely a waste of time in almost any circumstances. There probably are the odd things that would prove me wrong. But I think they’d be very much the exception. If a thing works well in one medium, in the medium that it has been designed to work in, then the only possible point for wanting to realise it on ‘multiple platforms’, as they say these days, is to make a lot of money out of it. There is no consideration for the integrity of the work, which is rather the only thing as far as I’m concerned.

But Moore may have diagnosed the real problem with the Watchmen movie before the comic had even been published. In 1985, in his essay On Writing for Comics, he discussed the ‘cinematic’ techniques of comics: ‘Cinema in comics means Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and maybe a couple of others, all of whom did their best work thirty years ago. Why is there no attempt to understand and adapt the work of contemporary pioneers like Nick Roeg or Altman or Coppola, if a true cinematic approach is what we are aiming for?’ He goes on to discuss Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract, and how it’s been designed to be seen several times. Stephen Bissette saw the influence straight away:

I’m a huge fan of Nicholas Roeg, the director who did Performance, Walkabout, The Man Who Fell To Earth. Brilliant seventies filmmaker. And Alan loved his work too. Alan’s first script that I drew was Swamp Thing #21, The Anatomy Lesson, and it was structured like a Roeg film. And I recognised it, and I immediately wrote to Alan, ‘This is fucking brilliant. I love this stuff where you tell a story from the middle out, and by fragmenting it, you reveal more about the narrative than you would have if you had presented it in a straightforward, linear fashion’.

The Watchmen movie does include a couple of nods to Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, but only in the set design, not the style of direction or editing. A ‘faithful’ adaptation of Watchmen would resemble the eighties arthouse cinema of Roeg or Greenaway, not the sort of popcorn action movie that the most successful superhero movies have been – and it’s hard to imagine such a film making more for the studio than Snyder’s version.

Although Moore has distanced himself from them, the movie adaptations of his work have inevitably affected his reputation. Movies have multi-million-dollar international advertising campaigns designed to raise awareness of the title and the iconography, they are routinely reviewed in newspapers and magazines, they enjoy an afterlife on DVD and casual viewers will bump into them when they are shown on television. The least successful movie will reach more people than even the most successful comic. That said, none of the movies based on Moore’s work was a blockbuster. They were all number one at the US box office in their week of release, except The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which opened the same weekend as the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie at #2. LXG went on to be the most lucrative of the four adaptations. V for Vendetta is the only one of the movies that can be argued to have had a lasting cultural impact.

Nevertheless, the films have served both to introduce Alan Moore’s work to a wider audience and to reframe it for the existing comics readership. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the movie industry’s appropriation of his work, generally against his wishes, has tended to empower Moore. While the internet harbours a broad spectrum of critical opinion on every subject, it’s hard to find many people who think any of the movie versions outshine the originals – the comparison has only reinforced the critical consensus that books like Watchmen, From Hell and V for Vendetta are ‘classics’. Moore had previously been seen as the master of taking existing concepts and reinterpreting them, to the point that one critic had suggested ‘Moore’s fiction is like yoghurt – he needs a bit of a starter to get his own batch going.’ The movies have increased the profile of Alan Moore’s own creations.

One demonstrable fact is that the Hollywood versions have led new readers to the comics that they’re based on. The best example was probably the earliest movie, From Hell. The comic was dogged with production and distribution problems. It took three and a half years for the story to reach the first murder, and ten years passed between the publication of the prologue and that of the epilogue. The issues put out by Kitchen Sink, the last of From Hell’s four original publishers, had print runs of only around 4,000 copies. Kitchen Sink went bankrupt in 1999, making it impossible to order back issues from the publisher. From Hell was expensive and difficult to collect, and a relatively obscure part of Moore’s body of work. Even the movie production team couldn’t find enough issues to go around and had to make photocopies. The first collection of From Hell in November 1999, self-published by Eddie Campbell, received fewer than 6,000 orders, and so was ‘made on the cheapest possible materials’. However, pre-publicity for the movie sparked interest from bookstores in the US and UK. By the time From Hell opened in theatres, the book had sold 110,000 copies and within a few years that total had doubled. From Hell was a book waiting to be rediscovered, but it was the catalyst of the movie that elevated it into the top flight of Moore’s oeuvre.

The same pattern was repeated with every movie: anticipation sent people to the source material, and although sales settled down after the movie’s release, they remained steady at a higher level than before. This applied even when Watchmen was adapted, despite the fact that the book had already sold in the millions and was Moore’s most acclaimed and discussed work. DC boasted that they had printed a million copies of the graphic novel to keep up with the demand generated by the trailer that went out in front of The Dark Knight.

Moore’s public denunciation of the movies – and rejection of the money – handed mainstream journalists a simple narrative about a maverick concerned only with his art raging against the corporate machine. It has led to the incongruity of dozens of newspaper stories and magazine profiles about how he is reclusive and not interested in celebrity. The articles find the idea of Moore the Magus irresistible, and tend to have titles like ‘The Wonderful Wizard of … Northampton’ and ‘Could it be Magic?’ One clear benefit to Moore is that such coverage has tended to contrast his more difficult, personal current work – such as Lost Girls, Unearthing or Jerusalem – with the slick Hollywood product based on his old comics, giving that new work a great deal more attention from British broadsheet newspapers than any DC superhero comic would get.

It also allows him to publicise issues local to Northampton – protesting the closure of St James’s Library or the council’s decision to sell off an ancient Egyptian statue. Moore gives an example of the ‘loud voice’ he now enjoys:

After a visit to the museum by some fundamentalist Christians, the evolution display had been completely covered up by the cowardly county council. So Norman [Adams, a local activist] phoned me up on the Saturday night and said: ‘Look, this has just come up. I’m gonna be organising a small protest group outside the museum tomorrow at one o’clock. Any chance of you coming down and saying a few words?’ I said sure, because that’s something I do feel strongly about. Anyway when I got down there, because Norman had announced that I would be coming, the council had been out overnight and had removed the cover. Not that it did a lot of good, because by the time it happened, it got reported that I’d spoken at this thing, and it got on the midweek news. I had Radio 4 programmes driving up to Northampton to interview me about it. So that’s the way that I can be most useful. I have been given this kind of unasked for clout, in terms of people who know my work. It’s not something that I’ve ever sought, but it is there, and if it’s needed in some way to help stem the tide of idiocy, then I can do that.

It also gives him a way to counter DC’s marketing efforts that’s so effective that it almost looks like symmetrical warfare. Moore was able, for example, to appear in newspapers in both the UK and US to criticise the publication of Before Watchmen, a 2012 spin-off series he didn’t write and Gibbons didn’t draw, and which Moore did not want DC to make. The prevalent story became one of Moore’s disappointment and the poor standing of writers and artists in the comics industry. Moore is unsympathetic to DC’s plight: ‘It’s so unfair when you think about it, isn’t it, that you’ve got a barely educated thug from the English Midlands picking upon this huge multinational corporation. You know, I ought to be ashamed of myself.’