Oh, and the Watchmen characters are completely original. It initially started with a different group of heroes – the Archie one’s I believe – then it switched to Charltan characters, and then he decided to create his own.
The similarities between Watchmen characters and Charltan characters are much fewer than the differences – I dare say we’re it not for Rosarch embodying Ditko’s personal philosophies, people wouldn’t have picked it without being told.
Creating a knock-off character is an original character. Through-out the history of fiction this has held true, so it’s a weird mark to hold against Moore. I would argue they aren’t even really analogues – Nothing in Watchmen relied on knowledge of the originals, nor did it reference them in anyway. It defined their physical look, and The Questions creators views made Rorsarch, but other than that?

And as for why Moore doesn’t want DC to profit from Watchmen? The people he worked with at DC told him if he signed the contract he would own the characters, but that wasn’t true. He feels betrayed by them, and doesn’t like them.
How is that a hypocritical stance to take because he’s used characters that are in the public domain?

Seriously Tom, go read a blog or two – people who are much better with words have covered how Moore isn’t a hypocrite in the slightest.
Go read an interview with Moore – he’s explained it all from his POV, and how he’d much rather never have to talk about it again.

@Tenenrous – Morrison was told by production designers that The Invisbles was on people’s desks, and cited as a source of inspiration for them to draw on. Rant all you want about how shit he is, but that’s what happened.

More people have heard of Optimus Prime than Fyodor Karamazov. That doesn’t mean that some guy working at Hasbro in the 80′s is a better writer than Dostoyevsky.

“shamelessly swiped by The Matrix folks”

Uh… no. Morrison is a bitter hack who whines about people “stealing his ideas” because he doesn’t have the talent to create anything as successful as ‘The Matrix’. He’s frustrated that the Wachowskis were more successful in their first attempt than anything he’s done in his decades-long career. ‘The Invisibles’ wasn’t that original in the first place. It was basically a competent pastiche of Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius books. In fact, I think Morrison is even more hypocritical than Alan Moore in terms of whining about people using “his” ideas.

Actually it does.

B-list productions and publications such as those you listed are utterly trivial when compared to the truly iconic creations such as Superman, Batman, Spider-man, etc.

Show a person anywhere in the western world a picture of Jinx (hell, a full book of pictures from it and Goldfish) and he’ll look at you and shrug. Show them a picture of the Superman, Batman, Spider-man emblems (just the emblems mind you) and almost every single one will know who the character it represents is.

Those are icons, Jinx is a sad footnote overshadowed by Apache Chief from the Super Friends.

The people currently in charge of the characters in question have NEVER created a single piece of work which can even remotely compare to the world-wide appeal of the creations of Kirby, Lee, Kane, Siegel and Shuster et al. and for second stringers like these people to think that their wildly divergent, “re-envisioned” versions of such characters are somehow “improvements” of the base structures of the characters which made them legendary to begin with is simply narcissistic hubris upon their parts and nothing more.

“I hate to say it, but the rest of the world doesn’t give a shit. Otherwise, things would be a lot better.”

Seriously, how would the word be “better” if they cared more about big bad DC using prperties they own to make money.

1.) Alan Moore signed a contract. Fair or not, he signed a contract. From all accounts, DC has more than honored the contract.

2.) While the story is genius… and I love it… the characters aren’t even wholly original. They are analogues to the Charlton heroes.

I’m all for creator’s rights.

I just don’t understand the sympathy in this scenario.

I think that Morrison has done a number of worthwhile things outside of his super-hero work. Consider “We3″ or “The Invisibles” (shamelessly swiped by The Matrix folks) or “The Filth” or “18 Days”.

Likewise, Bendis did “Jinx”, “aka Goldfish”, “Torso” and “Fortune & Glory” even before “Powers”.

The argument that they don’t do anything of their own doesn’t hold up.

If these “superstars of the comics industry” actually had any talent of their own then they would actually be ~creating~ memorable characters of their own rather than tearing down and “re-inventing” the iconic creations of the people who came before them.

It’s the only way they’ll be remembered because they certainly haven’t done anything on their own to stand up to the legacies left them by the likes of Kirby, Lee, Kane, Siegel and Shuster.

I hate to say it, but the rest of the world doesn’t give a shit. Otherwise, things would be a lot better.

“And the rest of the world is sick of people who don’t understand, calling Moore a hypocrite.”

Please explain to me what I don’t understand? I really do want to learn.

Alan Moore uses other people’s characters (as I allude to in my above comment) like Captain Nemo, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Alice in Wonderland for HIS profit… but he doesn’t want DC to use characters that … hey… DC OWNS… for their own profit…

Seriously… how is that not hypocrisy? Profiting off of someone else’s characters and not wanting DC to use their own characters for profit…

Please educate me…

It’s hard to ignore the obviously snobby creator specific slams.

@Tom”So sick of Uncle Alan’s hypocrisy….”

And the rest of the world is sick of people who don’t understand, calling Moore a hypocrite.

As for JMS’s Babylon 5. I love it, but let’s face it, season one was dreadful. Season two was better. Only seasons three and four were good, but season five was worse that season one. Crusade and that Rangers movie from Syfy made even that look like Scorsese. He-man and captain Power is where JMS started.

finally, at least in the analogy alan moore is scorsese, and he must have gotten that right since no one’s even mentioned it.

He says, “Take writer Robert Kirkman … During a brief stint at Marvel—he now avoids the big houses—he rewrote old “X-Men” comics and zombified the Marvel heroes rather than doing something new. This made good sense: Why sign over the rights to original ideas when he could keep them for himself?”

He forgets (or doesn’t know) that Kirkman introduced original characters in both MARVEL TEAM-UP and ULTIMATE X-MEN, not to mention gave the Marvel Universe a brand-new Ant-man that’s been featured as recently as three months ago.

Or maybe it’s much like some burnt out British comic book writer penning further adventures of characters created by literary greats like Robert Louis Stevenson, Jules Verne, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson…

So sick of Uncle Alan’s hypocrisy….

It’s unfortunate, though, that he does make those comments about JMS, Bendis, Morrison, etc. It really undermines his credibility.

That being said, the AvX covers taking up the whole page are pretty annoying.

And I don’t have any strong feelings about JMS one way or the other, but that Uwe Boll comparison is bonkers.

Finally: “clumsily drawn?” I wish he’d given us some idea what book he means here. Walt Simonson? Romita Jr.?

I have a theory that this reviewer just got dumped by his girlfriend and his girlfriend was a superhero comic book.