The always entertaining Alan Moore

Let’s ease back into this blogging thing with a little of the old linkblogging.

You will recall my nerd-like nigh worship of Alan Moore. Well, the big story in comic book world yesterday was that Moore has finally had enough of one of his publishers, and is pulling all future projects from them–primarily over some problems with the movie adapation of my personal favourite of Moore’s works: V for Vendetta.

(I could insert here a long diatribe about how I don’t want this movie to be made because it will somehow impact on my ability to enjoy the book because they will doubtless completely miss the point of the work, as they did with Moore’s other works adapted to film. Or about how I want to be able to use visual iconography from the book to identify myself with a subset of people that is much smaller than the set of people who will recognize it after the movie, or whatever. However, I’m still on the sick side, so no ranting yet.)

The article goes into some depth on Moore’s history of problems with DC, and the kind of sad history of movie adaptations of Moore’s works.

Quite a bit of the history was known to me, but one piece I hadn’t previously heard was about Moore being sued over a claim that the Leauge of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie (“based” on Moore’s work of the same name) was stolen from an unproduced script:

This led to Moore giving a ten-hour deposition – he believes he’d have suffered less if he’d “sodomised and murdered a busload of children after giving them heroin.”

Quite a way with words.

Another bit that shocked me was this:

“The same with the option money on ‘V For Vendetta.’ I think it was about eight grand. It went to David Lloyd. Now, I wasn’t doing this because I could afford it, I was short of change actually, but I just wanted it done. Give it to Dave, take my name off the film.”

Joel Silver is making a major motion picture adaptation of Moore’s works and the option cheque is $8K??!? Wow is that wrong. The only explanation I can think of is that when DC (part of Warner Brothers) republished V in North America they somehow got the rights to the work, and they are just giving Moore some tiny token royalty. What a screw job.

The article is worth a read for anyone interested in Moore, or in movie adaptations of comics.