Alan Moore Bails Out of Comics

Moore, especially from his insider’s view, sees the writing on the wall. And the writing is getting bigger:

“I think I have done enough for comics. I’ve done all that I can. I think if I were to continue to work in comics, inevitably the ideas would suffer, inevitably you’d start to see me retread old ground and I think both you and I probably deserve something better than that,” he said.

The part I bolded there is his diplomatic way of saying comics are becoming a boring thought-police-fest, which they really are becoming, and he needs to jump ship—fast;—preemptively before he gets hounded out or, worse, get any future stories rewritten sanitized for safe space purposes. An odd twist to be sure, since Moore is no conservative himself.

The signal fires have been lit for quite some time. Moore is a scary-looking industry outsider who wrote characters with vaguely not-liberal views—characters that sometimes didn’t get their social justice comeuppance in the plot (though his feud with Frank Miller had Moore actually accusing him of not being enough a liberal). Never mind that he is nearly peerless in the genre. Actual quality of writing doesn’t matter with some people, as long as the right message remains intact.