Alan Moore disowns HBO’s ‘embarrassing’ Watchmen series

Alan Moore has hit out at the HBO adaptation of Watchmen, describing it as “embarrassing” to him.

The 2019 series, created by Lost’s Damon Lindelof, loosely adapted and sequelised Moore’s seminal comic book.

According to Moore, the series showrunner sent him a letter when HBO’s Watchmen was in development.

The letter supposedly began: “Dear Mr Moore, I am one of the bastards currently destroying Watchmen.”

“That wasn’t the best opener,” Moore said, in a new interview with GQ. “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 Bros 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.’”

Moore and Dave Gibbons’s original Watchmen was published as a 12-part series between September 1986 and October 1987.

A subversion of conventional superhero narratives, the politically charged comic is widely considered one of the best ever written.

Prior to HBO’s serialised adaptation, Watchmen was adapted into a middlingly received blockbuster film by Zack Snyder in 2009.

Earlier this month, Moore criticised “infantile” adult fans of superhero movies, claiming that the “urge towards simpler realities” can “very often be a precursor to fascism”.