The New Adventures of Alan Moore

As anyone who follows comics knows, Alan Moore has a very contentious relationship with his publishers. His ties to DC Comics have been on-again, off-again (and they’re very much off-again at the present, as we’ll get to in a moment). For years he refused to give Marvel permission to reprint work he’d done for their UK branch twenty-some years ago, though in the past couple of years he’s relented. There’s even been rough patches with indies such as SpiderBaby Grafix and Tundra. (His relationship with Top Shelf seems blessed with long-term happiness, though, which I guess further attests to Chris Staros’s sterling reputation within the industry.)

About six months ago, we talked about a downturn in Moore’s relationship with DC--he cut all his ties to the company, intending to finish his current obligations and then move on. In a recent interview with Heidi MacDonald in Publishers Weekly’s Comics Week online newsletter, he upped the ante even further. He now wants his name taken off all material that he doesn’t own. That’s quite a provocative stance, and it would hit DC especially hard, as it continues to keep a lot of Moore’s work in print. There are the obvious examples of Watchmen, recently on Time magazine’s list of the 100 best novels since 1923, and V for Vendetta, soon to be a major motion picture starring Natalie Portman, but a quick look at DC’s Website reveals several more graphic novels currently in print, such as The Killing Joke, five Swamp Thing collections, a couple of WildC.A.T.S. collections, and a new edition of DC Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore. And that’s not even counting the America’s Best Comics line (for which the implications aren’t quite clear--creator ownership and control has always been a bit hazy). Rich Johnston (and Nate Lowry) offered an idea of how this all might play out.

In an art-driven medium, Moore was arguably the first writer, and is still one of a very few, whose name guaranteed sales. Taking his name off a work would rob it of a significant selling tool. Whether Moore intends it to be or not, this is a very clever move in the larger context of creator rights, a hot topic in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but not so significant now. Moore’s putting a spotlight on what creators contribute to comics and how they’re treated by the publishers. Surely writers and artists are treated better today than they were during the earliest days of comic books when Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster could sell all rights to Superman for a reported $130, but there’s still room for improvement.

Moore has long been unhappy with DC, and now he’s trying to do more than just cut all his ties. Is he disowning his work? Legally, he doesn’t own it anyway, and this is just an admission that he doesn’t own it in a moral sense, either. In his most recent interview, his main concern seemed to be V for Vendetta. That series was started in Warrior in the UK but was never completed--Moore and artist David Lloyd brought it to DC in the mid- to late '80s. Moore said the contract calls for the copyright to revert to Lloyd and him after the comic is out of print for 18 months, but it's never been out of print that long (if it's been out of print at all). I suspect that the two could probably negotiate their copyright back, but he'd be much harder pressed to regain control of its publishing until it reaches the out-of-print milestone. I imagine that this question is more about control than actual ownership--what substantially would he gain if the book's copyright page read "Copyright Alan Moore and David Lloyd" rather than "Copyright DC Comics"? DC would still continue to publish it as long as they wanted to.

So far, I haven’t seen any sort of official response from DC, although it’s certainly possible that there’s some wrangling going on behind the scenes. But DC ignores Moore and the situation at its own peril. The author has shown time and again that when he so chooses, he will not be ignored.