Posted in: Recent Updates | Tagged: Alan Moore, green lantern

Alan Moore Talks Blackest Night

Published Mon, 21 Sep 2009 06:00:40 -0500

Last updated Sat, 17 Dec 2022 15:14:12 -0600

Kurt Amacker has continued his interview with Alan Moore at Mania. While recapping his opinions, over how he negatively influenced his superhero genre as a whole, he also specifically jumps on Blackest Night.

I was noticing that DC seems to have based one of its latest crossovers in Green Lantern based on a couple of eight-page stories that I did 25 or 30 years ago. I would have thought that would seem kind of desperate and humiliating, When I have said in interviews that it doesn't look like the American comic book industry has had an idea of its own in the past 20 or 30 years, I was just being mean. I didn't expect the companies concerned to more or less say, "Yeah, he's right. Let's see if we can find another one of his stories from 30 years ago to turn into some spectacular saga."

And the rest of the interview is spattered with similar mal mots…

I increasingly get a sense of the comics industry going through my trashcan like raccoons in the dead of the night… That's a good image, isn't it? They weren't even particularly good ideas.

We are seeing the death of comics publishing as we know it.

Pick up those ideas and do something new with them. Make them shine again. But, I think that it's been a long time since the comics industry had any talent that was capable of doing that.

I tend to see the people who run the comics industry as being largely like some variety of tapeworm or some other parasite. But, they're not very good at it. Any self-respecting tapeworm or parasite never kills the host.

I very seriously doubt whether the comics industry as we know it is going to be here in even five years' time.

I think the lights are going out all over the comics industry. A lot of this is the fault of the publishers, a lot of it is the fault of the artists and writers, and I think, as you say, some of it is the fault of the readers.

there was something poignant about that that was almost saying perhaps superheroes would have been best left in those three decades—the '40s to the '60s—where they made sense and where they were most at home.

The third part is much awaited – in which Alan Moore will question the validity of atomic bonds, everyone will go "he's a bit angry but he's probably got a point" and the universe will dissolve as a result of the new paradigm..

It is probably worth pointing out that this was actually a story prophesying the future of the Green Lanterns, which is now coming to pass, so, you know…