Alan Moore no longer receives royalty cheques from DC Comics for films and television series based on his comic books and instead asked the company to give the money to Black Lives Matter.
Writer Alan Moore has given up royalties for adaptations of his DC Comics stories
The 69-year-old English author - who is responsible for creating iconic comics such as 'Watchmen', 'V for Vendetta', 'Batman: The Killing Joke' and 'From Hell' among others - is unhappy with the direction that DC has taken with the film adaptations of their characters and so has given up his payments to BLM, the organisation which was founded in 2013 and aims to highlight racism and inequality experienced by black people.
Black Lives Matter came to prominence during the 2020 protests that occurred in the wake of the death of George Floyd, who was killed whilst being arrested by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.
Speaking to The Daily Telegraph newspaper, Moore said: "I no longer wish it to even be shared with them. I don’t really feel, with the recent films, that they have stood by what I assumed were their original principles. So I asked for DC Comics to send all of the money from any future TV series or films to Black Lives Matter.”
Moore is not proud that his work acted as the catalyst for the "gentrification of comics that happened post-'Watchmen'" and he never envisioned that comics would become entertainment for adults as opposed to their original youthful audience.
He said: "Now they’re called ‘graphic novels’, which sounds sophisticated and you can charge a lot more for them. What appealed to me most about comics is no more, and these innocent and inventive and imaginative superhero characters from the Forties, Fifties, Sixties are being recycled to a modern audience as if they were adult fare.”
“I didn’t mean my experiments with comics to be immediately taken up as something that the whole industry should do. When I was doing things like 'Watchmen', I was not saying that dark psychopathic characters are really cool, but that does seem to be the message that the industry took for the next 20 years.”
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