(Spit)
As in-your-face, abusive, & damn-the-Comics-Code-we'll-flirt-with-obscenity-laws-instead as The Killing Joke was, it's actually mild compared to Alan Moore's Marvelman. And there's a proposal that Moore did that involved giving that treatment to the JLA and the Marvel Family--to the whole DC stable in fact. Granted, it was supposed to be an averted future, but it was still represented as a possible future.
And that's dangerous, because it presented deeply unsympathetic portrayals of the characters that would infect the memes of the characters. That sort of thing is very commercially dangerous, & a company like DC has an interest in stopping anything like that before it hits print.
Seriously. My own years of vehement dislike of Steve Trevor can be traced, in part, to reading an unsympathetic version of him in an Elseworlds before I was quite familiar with the real version.
Even parodies of characters can affect the way the character is seen. What do you want to bet that non-DC comics fans who like Amanda Conner see the JLA as more or less their parodies from "The Pro," now? And of course, there are those who insist that various Charlton Action Heroes should be written like the superficially similar characters Moore & Gibbons put in Watchmen.
(I know someone's going to be here to make that point about one of the characters. I even know which character. Yeah, go ahead. But I'd like to send Dick Giordano to your house to explain just why he had to veto publishing the early draft that became Watchmen with the Action Heroes. Maybe Pete Morisi should come with.)
I don't think it's a coincidence that Moore stopped writing for DC after the Marvel Family/JLA/Constantine pitch ("Twilight of the Gods"?) was rejected.
But now, unfortunately, Alan Moore is one of the great influences on English-language comics, alongside Neal Adams & Jack Kirby. And just like there have been those who think that because Neal Adams was cool, everything would be better Adamsified, there are those who think that everything is better with a little of Moore. Do they get his creativeness, his literary density, his sense of humor, his approach to irony, or his use of language? Nah, they go for the "rape my childhood" meme, because that's what sticks in the mind. And we get miles & reams of badly-written crap spewed out wherein Rahne Sinclair eats her father or the Earth-Prime Superboy implausibly kills everybody.
And that's why my Alan Moore tag reads, "alan (spit) moore."
ETA: Reading over this, I realize just how many obscure reference there are in it. I feel like I should footnote it massively. But this is the internet, you could google 'em. Hey, at least I realized I should put Moore's first name in the first sentence.
And that's dangerous, because it presented deeply unsympathetic portrayals of the characters that would infect the memes of the characters. That sort of thing is very commercially dangerous, & a company like DC has an interest in stopping anything like that before it hits print.
Seriously. My own years of vehement dislike of Steve Trevor can be traced, in part, to reading an unsympathetic version of him in an Elseworlds before I was quite familiar with the real version.
Even parodies of characters can affect the way the character is seen. What do you want to bet that non-DC comics fans who like Amanda Conner see the JLA as more or less their parodies from "The Pro," now? And of course, there are those who insist that various Charlton Action Heroes should be written like the superficially similar characters Moore & Gibbons put in Watchmen.
(I know someone's going to be here to make that point about one of the characters. I even know which character. Yeah, go ahead. But I'd like to send Dick Giordano to your house to explain just why he had to veto publishing the early draft that became Watchmen with the Action Heroes. Maybe Pete Morisi should come with.)
I don't think it's a coincidence that Moore stopped writing for DC after the Marvel Family/JLA/Constantine pitch ("Twilight of the Gods"?) was rejected.
But now, unfortunately, Alan Moore is one of the great influences on English-language comics, alongside Neal Adams & Jack Kirby. And just like there have been those who think that because Neal Adams was cool, everything would be better Adamsified, there are those who think that everything is better with a little of Moore. Do they get his creativeness, his literary density, his sense of humor, his approach to irony, or his use of language? Nah, they go for the "rape my childhood" meme, because that's what sticks in the mind. And we get miles & reams of badly-written crap spewed out wherein Rahne Sinclair eats her father or the Earth-Prime Superboy implausibly kills everybody.
And that's why my Alan Moore tag reads, "alan (spit) moore."
ETA: Reading over this, I realize just how many obscure reference there are in it. I feel like I should footnote it massively. But this is the internet, you could google 'em. Hey, at least I realized I should put Moore's first name in the first sentence.