Alan Moore announces he is retiring from comics (again)
I don’t really buy that Alan Moore is retiring from comics, but if he is? The Grand Shaman-Wizard of the Sequential Art World has earned his vacation. Say what you will about the dude – brilliant, blow hard, reject the binary and dub him brilliant blow hard — motherfucker is seminal. We’re all still surfing the ripples of Watchmen for better or worse (for worse).
Alan Moore is a delightfully crotchety comic-book writer with many other varied talents — wizard, energy drink and video-game magnate, mall Santa,killer of clowns, Rasputin impersonator, et cetera. But we may be seeing less of his work — work like Watchemen, V for Vendetta, The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, Jerusalem, From Hell, and the one where Alice fromAlice’s Adventures in Wonderland throws wild lesbian sex parties (we’re not kidding) — very soon, as he tells The Guardian he’s retiring from comics. Well, he’s retiring from comics after finishing his current work, including Cinema Purgatorio and one more League of Extraordinary Gentlemen book.
“Although I may do the odd little comics piece at some point in the future, I am pretty much done with comics.” The decision came, Moore explained, when he realised he felt too comfortable in the medium. “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. “So, the things that interest me at the moment are the things I don’t know if I can do, like films, where I haven’t got a clue what I am doing, or giant literary novels. Things I wasn’t sure I’d even have the stamina to finish.”