When Less is (Alan) Moore

When the Watchmen prequels were announced in February, despite the bad blood that’s coagulated between Alan Moore and DC Comics over the past two decades, the reaction was pretty muted overall. Moore gave one of his typically dismissive (and self-serving) comments about DC being “dependent on ideas that [he] had 25 years ago”, people from DC gave the expected spin, and the world kept turning. A couple months later, the simmering has given way to a boil as Before Watchmen has become the flashpoint for the debate over how comics creators are treated by the two major publishers. 

To be sure, this is a debate worth having, but I find myself increasingly annoyed at Moore’s prominence in the discussion. It’s amusing, albeit in a sad way, that the two most prominent stories of creator mistreatment of my youth are in a sense still with us even if the creators themselves are not. The ongoing legal dispute between DC Comics and the heirs of Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and the one between Marvel and the family of Jack Kirby aren’t just landmark intellectual property cases, they speak to how hard it is for major corporations to do the right thing when billions of dollars are at stake. I only wish that people didn’t insist on equating the treatment of Moore with the genuinely shabby treatment Siegel, Shuster and Kirby received. 

I want to sympathize with Alan Moore's position, but I have a hard time doing so, not in spite of the way DC treated the creators of Superman but rather because of the way DC treated them. Unlike Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Alan Moore was a successful and established comics professional when he started working for DC.  Rather than take the project he originated to an independent publisher where he could have been sure of full ownership, Moore signed a deal to do Watchmen with a major publisher and now acts like a spoiled crybaby whenever the large corporate entity (DC has been owned by Warner since the 1970s) adheres to the terms of that contract. Everyone takes Moore at face value when he says he was  swindled but has anyone considered that maybe he was just dumb?

My focus here is not on whether Moore’s contract with DC was fair or if they lived up the spirit of that contract (both of which seem be more of a grey area than the righteous care to admit) or whether Before Watchmen is "ethical" (I can't get past how pointless the endeavor is for long enough to render judgment). Intellectually I know I should want to take Moore's side, but it's hard to throw my support behind the mean-spirited crank who's spent most of the past 25 years being equal parts self-righteous and mendacious on this issue. In a 1987 issue of The Comics Journal, Moore described the situation with DC on Watchmen as follows.

"So basically they're not ours, but if DC is working with the characters in our interests then they might as well be. On the other hand, if the characters have outlived their natural life span and DC doesn't want to do anything with them, then after a year we've got them and we can do what we want with them, which I'm perfectly happy with."

I don't see that quote referenced in a lot of these "DC shafted Moore" pieces. That's probably because the man who said those words understood exactly what the terms of his deal meant. Moore probably hoped that Watchmen would be like the novel Superfolks, a cult success that would drift off the radar in a few years to be rediscovered a generation later at which point he (and Gibbons) would be able to reap the rewards. When it didn't work out that way, Moore conveniently decided DC had "swindled" him. At a time when the heirs of creators who truly were swindled are rightfully fighting Marvel and DC over these legacies, the issue of creators’ rights deserves a much better poster child than Alan Moore.