Kurt Amackerin (haastattelija) vastine teille kaikille jotka...no tehän osaatte lukea itsekin
"To all the haters who think I should've "grilled" Alan Moore in that interview and asked him harder questions:
1. He's the best living comic book writer around. That earns a measure of deference. He's also old enough to be my father, making my politeness all the more appropriate. I realize the notion of respecting and revering someone is rather alien to most of the internet, but if you really want to ask him loaded questions and call him nasty names, take the time to find him yourself. Or, would you really be so brave?
2. He's a friend. He's done nothing but support my work and open up to me over the years. If that makes me unfit to interview him, then who should do it? You? The angry forum poster? I disagree with him on several things, and I've told him as much--both about comics and other issues, in the interview and elsewhere. As he says in the piece, everyone has to make up their own minds. The interview was meant to give him a forum to express his full, uncensored thoughts about the Before Watchmen situation. If he'd wanted to run a statement, we would've run it, but he asked me to interview him. I voiced virtually all of the objections other people have had towards his dismissal of the books--I just said it without being disrespectful.
3. We had no notions of that piece being a hard-hitting dissection of Mr. Moore's beliefs. He's not the head of a cigarette company on 60 Minutes. It's not Frost vs. Nixon. It's comic books. And, I agree with a lot of his assertions. Again, if you want to run an interview where you can argue and nitpick with him, find him yourself. I'm fortunate in that I'm able to speak with him once in a while. I wanted everyone to get a sense of what it's like to have an actual chat with him, where he's allowed to explain himself and make allowances for disagreement, jokes, and references. And yes, he talked more than I did in the interview because it was about him. And, I assure you, he has that rare quality that one finds in a true gentleman and scholar--when he speaks, he makes you want to listen.
4. Watchmen is the best comic ever written, in my humble opinion. I love Maus. I love The Dark Knight Returns. I love Preacher, and Y: The Last Man, and 30 Days of Night, and Hellboy. I'm aware that there are many, many fantastic comics out there and I love reading them. Watchmen's grandiosity isn't some slight on everyone else's efforts. Citizen Kane is still probably the best film ever made, and it came out 75 years ago. I'm not bothered by saying that. We're all allowed to think that something is the best.
5. When Mr. Moore says "comics" in reference to the industry, he means Marvel and DC. I asked him this directly the other day after the interview came out--he DOES NOT mean independent or creator-owned comics. If he did, that would include my own books (which he has publicly praised) and his daughter's. I, personally, don't take as hard a line on creators working on established characters as he does. The economy is horrible and everyone needs to work. If writing Green Lantern helps you pay the light bill and feed your family, so be it. But, let's not kid ourselves (and this is from a guy with pretty much every Punisher book ever)--rehashing the same stories and characters for nearly a century isn't going to gain the medium much respectability. Nothing wrong with a guilty pleasure, but to make those characters new and exciting would require changes above and beyond what Marvel and DC would probably care for. Think I'm wrong? Look at what happened after Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men. Whenever a character is thoroughly redefined and made new (as in Moore's run on Swamp Thing) they are almost always returned to their established roots in time for the next movie adaptation. The templates for these characters were hammered out ages ago by Jack Kirby, Frank Miller, Chris Claremont, and their ilk. Almost everything that has come out after can't run too far away before it's reigned back in to keep the status quo.
That's all I've got."
