Posted in: Comics, Marvel Comics | Tagged: Alan Moore, ant man, marvel, tom brevoort

When Alan Moore Was Interested In Writing Ant-Man

Tom Brevoort talks about the time Alan Moore might have written Marvel's Ant-Man comic book, but they were worried it might not have sold.

Published Tue, 14 Feb 2023 10:57:10 -0600

by Rich Johnston

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A couple of years ago, Bleeding Cool reported on Marvel Executive Editor and Senior VP Tom Brevoort posting the original script to Alan Moore's contribution to the Heroes benefit book, published by Marvel Comics in 2002 in the wake of 9/11. Drawn by Dave Gibbons, it put the events of 9/11 into historical context, with other nations around the globe who had comparable assaiults, since the first aerial bombardment of Guernica by the Spanich government during that country's civil war, as well as the bombings of Hiroshimi and Nagaski, London's Blitz and Germany's Dresden bombings.

This weekend, on his Substack, Tom Brevoort posted it again, with a new coda. "I did later make an attempt to convince Alan to write FANTASTIC FOUR, unsuccessfully—he did have an interest in doing ANT-MAN, though I was never quite certain whether we could sell it in sufficient quantities to make it worth pursuing, and it never came together in any event. But I bet his Ant-Man would have been mind-blowing."

An Alan Moore-written Ant Man not selling in sufficient quantities? It must have been a different time. Of course, Ant-Man wasn't an MCU star then, but Alan Moore did work with Edgar Wright on The Show films, who had been preparing to direct the Ant Man movie and whose script with Joe Cornish still provided that basis of that first film after they quit, so there could have been crossover of interest there.

These days, Alan Moore doesn't want anything to do with superheroes, even if reporters keep asking him about them, and his daughter Leah Moore has written eloquently about the issue. As she says, "Can you imagine if he hadn't been f-cked over? If instead of being Grumpy Alan Moore Shouting From His Cave he had spent the past 40 years putting out book after book for DC and the rest? Creating vast worlds full of the superheroes he loves? Enjoying comics? It's a damn shame." And it wasn't that long ago, it seems, that he might have been willing to return to Marvel for something small…

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