Alan Moore hasn’t seen HBO’s Watchmen series, but he knows he would hate it.
There are two things most comic book fans know about Alan Moore: He is a masterful writer and he hates ever adaptation of his work ever made. That being said, the fact he is not fond of anything to do with HBO’s Watchmen is not that surprising, but is interesting nonetheless.
Speaking with GQ in a new interview, Moore said that Damon Lindelof, showrunner of the series, sent him a letter that opened with, “Dear Mr. Moore, I am one of the bastards currently destroying Watchmen.”
“That wasn’t the best opener,” said Moore. “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’?” I got back with a very abrupt and probably hostile reply telling him that I’d thought that Warner Brothers were aware that they, nor any of their employees, shouldn’t contact me again for any reason. I explained that I 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. 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.””
The fact the series went on to win awards seems to have made the situation worse. “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,” said Moore. “Did they not understand Watchmen? Watchmen was nearly 40 years ago and was relatively simple in comparison with a lot of my later work. What are the chances that they broadly understood anything since? This tends to make me feel less than fond of those works. They mean a bit less in my heart.”
If you haven’t seen the Watchmen series, and still want to check it out despite Moore’s misgivings, all episodes are available on HBO Max.
