Comic Book Legend Alan Moore Refuses To 'Punish' Himself By Watching Any Of His Adaptations, Especially 'Watchmen'

Watchmen creator Alan Moore is going on record slamming HBO’s adaptation of his Watchmen graphic novel.

The artist sat down with GQ magazine where he explicitly shared that he told the show’s showrunner, Damon Lindelof not to contact him. Moore didn’t say Lindelof by name but he was the one who served in that role for the show.

According to Moore, the showrunner, whoever it was, sent him a snarky email regarding the 40-year-old graphic novel before the filming began. “Dear Mr. Moore, I am one of the bastards currently destroying ‘Watchmen.’” Is how he opened the letter.

Moore said this didn’t instill any confidence in him. “That wasn’t the best opener,” he admits.

Apparently, the letter was lengthy and a little disrespectful. “It went on through a lot of, what seemed to me to be, neurotic rambling. ‘Can you at least tell us how to pronounce “Ozymandias”?” Asked the letter.

Moore admits he was curt with his response, “I got back with a very abrupt and probably hostile reply telling him that I’d thought that Warner Bros. were aware that they, nor any of their employees, shouldn’t contact me again for any reason.”

He explained in the letter he sent back to them that he had “disowned the work in question, and partly that was because the film industry and the comics industry seemed to have created things that had nothing to do with my work, but which would be associated with it in the public mind.”

Moore who has worked in other favorites like Batman: The Killing Joker and V For Vendetta didn’t mince words in his response.

“‘Look, this is embarrassing to me. I don’t want anything to do with you or your show. Please don’t bother me again.’”

Moore had harsh words for possibly one of his most popular works, Watchmen; he went on to say that he was shocked that the show won any Emmys at all. The 2019 series took its own route with Moore’s work. One that he doesn’t necessarily agree with.

“When I saw the television industry awards that the ‘Watchmen’ television show had apparently won, I thought, ‘Oh, god, perhaps a large part of the public, this is what they think “Watchmen” was?’ They think that it was a dark, gritty, dystopian superhero franchise that was something to do with white supremacism.”

This begged him to wonder, “Did they not understand ‘Watchmen’?” The artist was annoyed that they turned it into way more than it was. “Watchmen was nearly 40 years ago and was relatively simple in comparison with a lot of my later work,” he insists, going on to question if they even understood anything that he has done since then seeing as they struggle to grasp what he deemed “simple”.

When GQ inquired if Moore had watched Watchmen after it was so successful or even any of the adaptations of his works, the creator said:

“I would be the last person to want to sit through any adaptations of my work. From what I’ve heard of them, it would be enormously punishing. It would be torturous, and for no very good reason.”