Alan Moore Month

By Billy Peck

Alan Moore might be the most prolific writer in comics, yesterday and today.

The easy thing to go to is Watchmen and how important it is to the comic world. We all know as fans, that most of our lives and most of the time that comics have been around, that they're heavily considered for children or people of less intellect. Grown adults that can't get outside of their childlike minds. Alan Moore made such a well written, thought provoking tale that not only gave us awesome stories about it's main characters but secondary characters such as the Mintuemen and more specifically Hollis Mason's Under the Hood autobiography, where within the pages of the comic, we got actual chapters from his book... We also got to see pages from a comic within the comic, Tales of the Black Freighter. There's so much more to it that you'll be able to hear in our fan commentary coming later in the month. What I will leave you with in regards to Watchmen is that with all the things he did with it, it was put in Time's List of 100 Best Novels, as one of the best English language novels published since 1923. Not comics. Novels!

We focused a lot on the movies based on his works but there's some out there that haven't had films made. Most importantly is probably Killing Joke where we learn what is consider the official origin to the Joker. It also put some serious violence into the lore that involves Barbara Gordon, which changes her story for her entire future.

Alan Moore has worked with Swamp Thing, Superman, helped create John Constantine, wrote stories based on characters and real life events with League of Extraordinary Gentleman and From Hell, puts social commentary in his writing with V for Vendetta and of course Watchmen.

As we said. We put focus on the movies based off his stories, which you can listen to LoEG now in our podcast section.

While talking about Alan Moore's hatred for film adaptations, we actually came to a realization that, although we love Alan Moore, it is a bit hypocritical. In League, he's pulling characters out of other people's literature. Swamp Thing wasn't his character and yet he changed his story. He gave an origin to a character who was never really supposed to have one, in The Joker. All of which we and most fans are okay with because he writes it so well. So why the instant negativity to film adaptations?

Anyway, we love his work and came to enjoy most of the movies based on it. We see the differences. The quality of filmmaking certainly varies. By the end of September, we hope you joined us and had a good time celebrating Alan Moore month cause we had a great time making it happen.

Don't forget to vote in our Poll for best Alan Moore stories.