Long before HBO mounted a single-season adaptation of Alan Moore’s “Watchmen,” Moore had distanced himself from his groundbreaking comic after it was widely misinterpreted and even embraced by the far right and white supremacists.
As Moore told GQ, he hadn’t even learned that a “Watchmen” TV adaptation was in the works from former “Lost” producer Damon Lindelof (whom he does not mention by name) until he received a surprise package. “I received a bulky parcel, through Federal Express, that arrived here in my sedate little living room. It turned out to contain a powder blue barbecue apron with a hydrogen symbol on the front,” he told GQ, referring to the symbol that his creation Dr. Manhattan sports on his forehead.
He was not encouraged by the gift, or by the opening line of the letter: “I think it opened with, ‘Dear Mr. Moore, I am one of the bastards currently destroying ‘Watchmen.’ That wasn’t the best opener. It went on through a lot of, what seemed to me to be, neurotic rambling.”
Moore’s response was “a very abrupt and probably hostile reply” that Warner Bros., who owns the rights, had clearly neglected to tell Lindelof not to contact the writer for “any reason.”
“I said, ‘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 never watched the series, which starred Regina King as Detective Angela Abar, aka Sister Night, just as he skipped Zack Snyder’s 2009 movie. “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,” he told GQ.
When the show was nominated for 26 Emmys and won 11, Moore was appalled that not only had the show interpreted his comic as “a dark, gritty, dystopian superhero franchise that was something to do with white supremacism,” but that it was now winning awards.
“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?’” he said. “This tends to make me feel less than fond of those works. They mean a bit less in my heart.”
He explained that “Watchmen,” as well as his “Miracleman,” comics were critiques of the superhero genre. “They were trying to show that any attempt to realize these figures in any kind of realistic context will always be grotesque and nightmarish. But that doesn’t seem to be the message that people took from this. They seemed to think, uh, yeah, dark, depressing superheroes are, like, cool.”
