
Superheroes a 'cultural catastrophe', says comics guru Alan Moore [2014] - DanBC
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/21/superheroes-cultural-catastrophe-alan-moore-comics-watchmen?CMP=share_btn_tw
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humanrebar
Moore says:

> I would also observe that it is, potentially, culturally catastrophic to
> have the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the
> cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to
> develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times.

And Tolkien said:

> There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and
> Finnish [mythology] (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save
> impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course there was and is all the Arthurian
> world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with
> the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt
> to be missing.

I see "comic book" universes as evolving into a modern mythology, complete
with monsters, heroes, and gods. So I would disagree with Moore about the
merits of comic book stories. They may be "squatting" on the cultural stage,
but maybe the same way that King Arthur and Ulysses do.

I expect, in a thousand years, when Superman and Wolverine are aged and in the
public domain, the parallels between them and Beowulf and (non-Marvel) Odin
will be even more clear.

~~~
samirillian
I feel like you're missing his whole point, which is the use of superheroes as
a kind of escapism from the complexities of life. Citing superficial
similarities to mythical figures is just a way of sidestepping his actual
arguments.

~~~
humanrebar
> Citing superficial similarities to mythical figures...

I think you missed why I quoted Tolkien. There's something compelling about a
common mythology for a culture. The modern cosmopolitan culture, American
especially, doesn't have an ethnic, racial, or language identity to fall back
on when exploring identity, struggle, the merits of sacrifice, moral issues,
etc. Mythological figures allow us to explore these themes in a less traumatic
way.

You can _call_ that "escapism", I guess, but I think The Dark Knight was one
of the few films that wrestled with the War on Terror in honest ways. It _had_
to be a mythological film (Batman v. Joker) because the same subject would
have gone over rather poorly in one way or another if it were an actual
terrorism/spy thriller or something.

Anyway, I think Tolkien wasn't exactly wrong to pine for an exploration of
culture, language, and identity through mythological archetypes. He, in
particular, wanted non-borrowed ones. We are sort of in the same boat since
nearly _all_ content is borrowed in a global market.

~~~
samirillian
I get the idea of having some sort of shared cultural touchstones. But there
are plenty of candidates for that role.

Not to belabor the point, but why the guys in tights and not, say, the
characters from the Abrahamic faiths? Well, you say, it's dangerous to mix
faith with fantasy. But that's exactly what the old myths did and what Tolkien
could do by implicitly associating his stories with Christianity, and exactly
what Batman will never be. So much for the structural similarities between the
Superman and Hercules.

But, again, this is all beside the point. The devil is in the details. There
might be nothing inherently wrong with making superheroes the source of a
shared cultural vocabulary about "spiritual" questions: what is right, what is
wrong, what is bravery, etc. But how has it actually unfolded, in the world,
right now? Again, Moore argues that, in the concrete, it has led to a kind of
infantilism.

You bring up the Dark Knight. I don't personally like what I took away as the
message of the Dark Knight, but I understand if you do. But can you name a
single other example with actual critical value? Or do the vast majority just
serve to make unhappy people, sleepwalking through life, continue unhappily
sleepwalking?

------
hguant
I don't see how this is news. Alan Moore has been decrying and hating on
superheroes for the entirety of his career, for largely the same reasons
throughout. This is great when it's communicated through his work - showing
what comics could be without superheroes, or critiquing the genre from within
(Watchmen and Marvelman/Miracleman reboot come to mind), but his personal
disdain for the consumers of his products is odd to me.

This has been a half formed thought bouncing around in my head, but I think
part of the reason for the resurgence of comic books and superheroes is the
simple fact that we live in a complex world where there are very few instances
of Good and Evil. We live in a subtle, complex, and nuanced world, where if
you take the time to dig in to an issue, you find more complexity...and a lot
of really morally compromised people. We don't live in a Good/Evil world, but
we want to. I think that comics are a retreat from that, a mental/moral
bulwark that gives us an outlet for our need for Right and Wrong. We might not
be able to figure out <insert political issue> without coming to blows, but we
sure as hell can agree that Thanos is a piece of shit, and that Batman is
wicked cool.

Is this a retreat from reality? Sure, but we need that. Moore is wrong here to
suppose that adults need to be doing Adult Things at all times. The world is
hard enough as it is - taking a few hours respite from it is hardly a crime.

~~~
brad0
I think his problem is more along the lines of:

Rather that an entire country or group of people getting angry because people
in power are morally corrupt they're just watching the latest Iron Man and
discussing pointless things like Art Direction and the Actresses Performance.

~~~
QAPereo
At least the distraction now isn’t blood on the sands of the arena, or burning
witches. Most people want to be distracted most of the time, with sports, sex,
drugs, music, movies, tv, books, learning new things, family... it’s called
living. We can’t all be joyless pricks like Moore, who haven’t learned even
the simplest lessons or history.

“There can be no disputing matters of taste.”

------
Iv
I wholeheartedly agree. More than the simplistic worldview they offer, what I
I find distressing in superheroes culture (that contaminated other genres as
well) is that it promotes a narrative of the providential individual, set to
save the day. Teams are 4 or 5 persons max, bigger organizations are seen as
either evil or incompetent.

We are losing the taste for collaborative work. We are promoting the idea that
only a single individual can make things better. The idea that the humble
contribution of the masses can amount to a powerful wave are totally lost.

~~~
pmoriarty
Exceptional individuals making a difference has been the stock and trade of
almost all fiction, of religious and mythical literature, and even a lot of
non-fiction like biography and history, for thousands of years.

You have a tough road ahead of you if you want to convince most creators that
this is the wrong direction.

That said, there have been some literary periods when writing about ordinary,
completely unexceptional individuals was fashionable, and I suppose it still
is in some circles.

~~~
Iv
Fiction has always focused on heroes, but organizations used to play a bigger
part, especially for the generation that remembered WWII.

Take the Star Wars franchise. Most of the original trilogy is about a bunch of
heroes helping a huge resistance movement against a bigger empire. In the end,
the heroes are the drops that tip the scale in the rebellion's favor, but the
rebellion had to push all their might to make that possible.

Look The Force Awakens: a bunch of clueless heroes, dismissing the while
rebellion, manage to make a big thing go boom with almost no external help.

------
Theodores
It sounds like Alan Moore has had enough of the media and journalists. Well
meaning that they may be individually they are collectively like a passive-
aggressive narcissist eager to latch on to the slightest thing to bring the
man down. It sounds to me that he just wants to get out of this abusive
relationship and get on with his life.

The point of the article - that there is something weird about grown adults
and their willingness to live in the comicbook rather than real world - is a
fair point.

At some stage we crossed over from only seeing 'comic' based movies as kids
where adults would only go to escort their children to what we have now. Now
grown ups with no children of their own or signs of learning disabilities can
go and watch this comic-superhero rewrites on the big screen and talk about
how great the acting, story and everything else was, as if it was serious art
that they had seen.

There have been too many occasions over the last few years where it has been
much too easy to hide away and watch these comic super-hero movies than endure
what has been going on in the world. Times like when Iraq was being bombed to
pieces, why engage with that when you can spend all week thinking about some
make-believe movie?

This is not to dismiss the craft, dedication, skill and effort that goes into
these movies or to deny the pleasure that they do bring to people. However,
how did it happen that movies for kids became movies for grown ups?

~~~
simonbarker87
Could it be because the kids who these stories were initially aimed at, grew
up and became adults, DC/Marvel realised they could “adultify” the plots and
appeal to the same audience now 20-30 years older to expand their demographic
leveraging nostalgia and thus make more money?

~~~
CommentCard
I'd argue that the vast majority of superhero movies are engineered through
focus-group testing to be as palatable to as many people as possible that they
become bland.

Logan was the only genre movie in recent memory that eschewed this formula and
confronted the messy topic of the senescence of the age of the superhero.

~~~
ThatGeoGuy
Which is an interesting counter-point to Alan Moore: just because a (sizable)
portion of superhero movies aren't thrusting culture forward, doesn't mean
that they have to be.

Having familiar characters in a known environment can certainly help pick the
audience up to get them to a point where more complex topics become palatable.
The fact that these characters are "superheroes" is incidental, and not
terribly important to the overall plot of the movie.

~~~
CommentCard
That's a fair analysis. They are blockbusters first, and superhero movies
second. I do hope that the genre will evolve towards more interesting topics
beyond Good vs. Evil. The Dark Knight showed a nuanced view of how one cannot
exist without the other, even within one hero's mythos itself. Unfortunately
movies like The Dark Knight and Logan that are willing and capable of tackling
nuance and complexity in a feature film aren't common for the genre.

------
pmoriarty
Moore's own words in full[1] are far more interesting, provocative, and well-
written than this Guardian summary.

[1] - [https://slovobooks.wordpress.com/2014/01/09/last-alan-
moore-...](https://slovobooks.wordpress.com/2014/01/09/last-alan-moore-
interview/)

~~~
WillyOnWheels
Alan Moore has dedicated his life to writing comic books and hating Grant
Morrison.

------
tboyd47
I think he's overstating Marvel/DC's cultural significance. The new generation
of viewers have a very different moral sensibility. The evil is much more
shockingly evil, but the good is less cartoonish and more relatable, and
therefore more vulnerable.

I just finished watching the new Stranger Things season. One of the things I
love about that show is that it juxtaposes the 1980s kids' sci-fi genre with a
storyline that would have been totally intolerable to the consumers of that
genre back then. The tone that results is kind of this weird combination of
nostalgia and tragedy.

~~~
mc32
His lament seems to be the cartoonish worlds were for kids to indulge in,
while they formed ideals of good and bad, etc. However, today's comics
audience is a mature audience seeking escapism rather than one forming its
moral compass.

~~~
kakarot
I dunno. I don't think it's such a clear-cut situation. I definitely just read
comics because it is something to do and I like contemplating the stories.

But as a kid I suffered long term child abuse and it was about escapism for me
from day one growing up. I seriously talked myself out of suicide more than
once on the premise that I would get to find out what happened in the next
episode of ______.

But now I'm older, away from those horrible people and have much less to
escape from... It's more about the intellectual curiosity, and yes, the
dilemma of good vs evil.

Upon reflection, my experience is literally the opposite from what you and
Moore are claiming.

------
brad0
Half formed thought, but are today's superheroes last generation's Clint
Eastwood/Steve McQueen/John Wayne?

~~~
andy_wrote
I have sometimes looked at old cinema and wondered, "Why did they make so many
Westerns?" I figure that in some decades people will be looking at our time
and asking, "Why did they make so many superhero movies?"

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
> so many superhero movies

That's overlooking the plague of zombie stories since the turn of the century.
They were pretty rare, and then, boom, you can't move without bumping into one
of the things.

My pet theory is that we're reduced to beating up the dead because they can't
complain.

~~~
brad0
I had a good laugh at your theory. Every other person cannot be bad so we have
to attack things that are mindless.

I guess you can put aliens and AI robots in that theory as well. Except both
of those have the potential to be understood.

Zombies can't be cured! Our only choice is to kill them! My Conscience is
Free!

------
junkscience2017
Alan Moore alternates between trashing mainstream comic companies and cashing
their checks.

DC is a villain to Moore because he willfully traded away the rights to his
greatest creation (Watchmen) and then watched them cash in on it.

Moore is a great writer but a poor (contract) reader and he's been ranting
about it ever since.

~~~
jblow
Condescending and unnecessary. How do you know he's a poor contract reader?
Compared to whom, you? Do you know exactly what position he was in at that
time? Have you ever been in such a position? Do you make art independently for
a living, or even try?

~~~
junkscience2017
it's clear you've decided to chime in on the conversation despite having no
familliarity with Moore, which is why you have nothing more to offer than a
lame sequence of pointless jabs

DC comics bought the rights to Watchmen fair and square but Moore will never
let it go, he made many early claims to want to be the greatest comics writer
in history...but he just ended up making someone else money

you could have learned most of this from Google in the time it took you to
paste your canned response

------
sirspacey
Reading this again, I cannot miss the irony that Alan is accusing our culture
of the very thing he has done - retreat from the complexities of conflicts in
our modern culture. Racism and sexual violence are at the top of that list.
FWIW, discussing either of those topics as a white, middle-class, middle-aged
male doesn't come with a lot of natural/implied moral authority. For the
philosophically inclined among that group, in which I'll include myself, we
are used to starting these kinds of discussions with the premise of our
natural-born right to contribute (as he argues for - i.e. otherwise all
identity politics excludes those without the identity, effectively killing the
concept of political discourse). For my part, I've come to the conclusion that
the greatest good we can do is support the voice of those who clearly have a
natural right to speak about those issues by virtue of experience. One way to
do that is to be the listener as they take the pulpit. Not because what they
have to say is inherently the correct view, or ours is inherently not, but
because they do deserve the forum to figure out an answer to these problems
that can work for them and society- a forum they have been denied. I share
Thomas Jefferson's view that the principles we cherish, that were developed
over millennia, were formed through vigorous debate amongst those with a
natural-born right to the outcome. I'm more curious to learn what is invented
when we support the forum vs. position ourselves as a group being victimized
by the vehement demand for our silence. While the vehemence is off-putting, it
may also be a signal of how great a wrong has been done. We cannot exclude the
later if we are unwilling to be patient with the former. I'm reminded of my
gratitude for how many second chances society has given me. It seems common
decency to pay it forward.

~~~
empath75
Even if you agree that it’s preferable that certain topics be addressed by
particular groups are are most affected by them — at the time Alan Moore was
writing originally, that wasn’t an option. Either a white male wrote about it
or it didn’t get written about, for the most part. He (and the rest of the
British Invasion) opened a lot of doors for various topics to get addressed in
mainstream comics for the first time.

Since then, the doors have opened wider for a more diverse group of writers in
comics, and that’s a good thing, but I don’t think you should be too angry at
Alan Moore for at least trying to address complex issues in an intelligent
way.

~~~
sirspacey
Good point, he was a pioneer in bringing those topics to the art form. His
response didn't anger me, it just struck me as less than consistent with his
justification for withdrawing from the public debate.

~~~
olavk
He is NOT withdrawing from public debate. His works are a part of and a
contribution to this debate, and as far as I know he have no intention of
stopping working. He is just wants to withdraw from the journalistic social
media shitstorms based on limited readings and misunderstandings of his works.

------
robotresearcher
From 2014.

~~~
DanBC
thank you, I edited the title to include the date.

------
itronitron
too bad we can't call on a superhero to save us from this cultural catastrophe

------
nnfy
Perhaps comics are beginning to fill the void left by retreating religion.

It is comforting to imagine a world in which things make sense, where good
triumphs over evil, where you have an opportunity to be a part of something
larger than yourself; especially when you're working a dead end job and you
feel like your nation is falling apart.

Unfortunately, unlike most religion, comics and comic based films are lacking
in the "nutrition" that religious escapism can provide, in the way of
community and self improvement, so we end up with man children withdrawing
from society.

It is ironic, I think, that the waning of religion in the first world may be
very much double sided. Perhaps we as a society are not prepared for
secularism, and this may manifest as a moral crisis wherin people on average
still require external guidance for morality and ethics.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" Unfortunately, unlike most religion, comics and comic based films are
lacking in the "nutrition" that religious escapism can provide, in the way of
community and self improvement, so we end up with man children withdrawing
from society."_

Rejection of society and worldly things, and withdrawal from them both has
been a rather common practice in religions for millennia. Religious hermits
and ascetics, and moralists escaping or otherwise rejecting corrupt society
are a pretty regular staple of religions the world over.

Superheroes could be a seen to be a kind of echo of that, in so far as they
are usually pretty moralistic and extreme in their world-rejection and
escapism, if you prefer to view it that way.

Something of that speaks to their fans, who are also greatly dissatisfied with
the world, yet usually don't have what it takes to escape, so they escape
vicariously -- through their movies, comics, and books where live heroes that
can.

~~~
nnfy
I dont think the people who withdraw into the world of comics do it for quite
the same reasons as " Religious hermits and ascetics, and moralists".

This seems to be a newer phenomenon, possibly because we now live in a time
where it is possible to contribute little and still survive for the majority
of a population.

