Alan Moore eviscerates DC (and Marvel in the bargain)

Alan Moore:

Well, yeah, we’ll see what they do.  I’m hoping that since I’m definitely not going to be signing these rights over to them, that they might just desist, and, I mean, all right, I can understand this, if Warners don’t have any properties that are worth anything, or at least not worth very much in comparison to someone like Marvel Comics, I can understand that they might get a bit desperate.  I mean, just recently, my latest royalty cheque was two months late, which I can only interpret in two ways: either everybody’s royalty cheque was two months late, which would indicate that DC are perhaps a bit short of money?  I don’t know if that’s true, but that’s certainly one way that you can construe it, or the other way is that only my royalty cheque was six weeks late, which again would look like this was some clumsy attempt to put financial pressure upon me to go for this multimillion pound WATCHMEN offer, which again would suggest a level of desperation and creative impoverishment regarding Warner Brothers.  I don’t know.  This is just my appraisal of these things, but it’s… I don’t know, again, a funny thing to do if they see these things as being as important as they seem to think they are.  At the end of the day, if they haven’t got any properties that are valuable enough, but they have got these ‘top-flight industry creators’ that are ready to produce these prequels and sequels to WATCHMEN, well this is probably a radical idea, but could they not get one of the ‘top-flight industry creators’ to come up with an idea of their own?  Why are DC Comics trying to exploit a comic book that I wrote 25 years ago if they have got anything?  Sure they ought to have had an equivalent idea since?  I could ask about why Marvel Comics are churning out or planning to bring out my ancient MARVELMAN stories, which are even older, if they had a viable idea of their own in the quarter-century since I wrote those works.  I mean, surely that would be a much easier solution than all of this clandestine stuff?  Just simply get some of your top-flight talent to put out a book that the wider public outside of the comics field find as interesting or as appealing as the stuff that I wrote 25 years ago.  It shouldn’t be too big an ask, should it?  I wouldn’t have thought so.  And it would solve an awful lot of problems.  They must have one creator, surely, in the entire American industry that could do equivalent work to something I did 25 years ago.  It would be insulting to think that there weren’t.  That’s just my suggestion for a way that DC could remove themselves from this thorny impasse, but we shall see.

Read the whole interview to see how DC may have used Alan Moore's oldest friend's dying brother as a hostage!