I don’t want anything to do with you or your show. ‘Can you at least tell us how to pronounce Ozymandias?’” Moore says he wrote back, “Look, this is embarrassing to me. It went on through a lot of what seemed to me to be neurotic rambling. Moore, I am one of the bastards currently destroying Watchmen.’ That wasn’t the best opener. Moore says there was a letter attached from the showrunner (meaning Lindelof): “I think it opened with, ‘Dear Mr. But at this point, Moore hadn’t heard the show “was a thing” yet. Just a typical cheeky promotional item and probably a nod to how good Yahya Abdul-Mateen II looked making waffles in that last ep. It turned out to contain a powder-blue barbecue apron with a hydrogen symbol on the front,” says Moore. Moore says that he received a very funny olive branch in the mail from Lindelof, although we’re not sure he views it that way: “I received a bulky parcel, through Federal Express, that arrived here in my sedate little living room. “When I saw the television industry awards that the Watchmen television show had apparently won, I thought, ‘Oh God, perhaps a large part of the public - this is what they think Watchmen was?’ They think that it was a dark, gritty, dystopian superhero franchise that was something to do with white supremacism.” Someone should probably tell Moore that the series is not a direct, by-the-book adaptation of his story, and that, yes, all that hell-city Rorschach monologuing is absolutely both gritty and dystopian. The Watchmen series went on to become a critical success, but in a recent GQ interview, Moore finds the discourse surrounding it confusing. Similarly, he wanted little to do with Damon Lindelof’s 2019 adaptation of the latter comic for HBO, prompting Lindelof to channel Moore’s spirit to say, “Fuck you, I’m doing it anyway!” He found the Wachowskis’ V for Vendetta an oversimplified Americanization and fought to have his name removed from Zack Snyder’s Watchmen film.

Moore conjures characters and worlds, lets them live lives of their own, and occasionally pops in to smite them with disapproval. Not that he’d like this comparison, but author Alan Moore often takes the proverbial “watchmaker God” approach to his creations. Does he know it’s Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Regina King?

Watchmen by alan moore