ONCE AGAIN-- ALAN MOORE, UNMOORED

Last month, thanks to the auspices of the British weekly THE OBSERVER, Alan Moore once again bestowed upon a panting public his thoughts on comic books and one particular comic book personality-- though he's been retired from the medium for close to seven years. The OBSERVER piece is just the usual potpourri of Moore's grievances and floggings for his latest non-comics book, with one exception.

Two-thirds of the way through the short interview, the questioner decides that, having encouraged Moore to offer his hot takes on politics and the comics industry, he simply must ask about Moore's opinion about Frank Miller. Surprise, surprise-- Moore's negative assessment has not changed since 2011, when the two creators expressed opposing opinions of the Occupy Wall Street movement. And then, over the next 15 years, Moore continued to pillory Miller, who became Moore's third favorite whipping-boy, right behind DC Comics and Margaret Thatcher.

Miller for his part has done little to keep up his part of the feud, barely if at all commenting upon Moore or his works. 

My own "feud" with Moore concerns not a defense of Miller but a condemnation of the meretricious nature of Moore's comments. In the interview Moore only says that Miller's one of the things about the comics industry he finds embarrassing, but he obviously still harbors the same knee-jerk opinions he proffered during the genesis of the feud, when he called Miller's work misogynistic, homophobic and fascist. 

Now, Moore MIGHT be able to articulate those opinions into real discourse. since he's done so passably well at times in full-fledged articles, or in debate, as seen his extended metaphysical argument with Dave Sim in the pages of CEREBUS #217. However, when Moore confines himself to lame brickbats, he sounds a good deal worse than a "grumpy old man," which is the most frequent characterization I've seen of him. Rather, he sounds like some triggered moron a la Joy Reid.

I don't think Alan Moore's a moron, but he sure seems to enjoy playing the triggered fool for the sake of sound bite interviews. If he has something substantive to say about Miller or anything else, superficial rants are not the way to express those thoughts. But if he's really just whipping out barbs because that's what potential readers expect, he's in no position to critique anyone else.