Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ epochal, destabilizing comic is resuscitated again, this time by someone known for getting lost.
One would assume that’s a bad thing, given our real-time capitalist dystopia, currently empowering an ongoing extinction event from which we can’t seem to escape. Turbulent times like ours demand particular clarities, and Lost’s Damon Lindelof isn’t really known for that.
Lindelof deleted his Twitter feed long ago. He also once admitted that he had no idea what he was doing on Tomorrowland with Brad Bird, auteur of The Iron Giant. The fact that Lindelof and HBO have chosen The Boondocks‘ powerhouse Regina King to do their heavy lifting for them so far speaks volumes about where their head, and money, is at.
Speaking of #CliFi, Alan Moore is known for legend and iconoclasm, Damon Lindelof is known for getting lost and missing points, and Regina King is a known queen. And then there is Bowie. #TheEndIsNear https://t.co/PbmgeqmfzU
— Scott Thill (@morphizm) July 20, 2019
Let’s hope it’s worth it.
Openly lifting the work of the hard(er) workers before us, simply to cash in during an existential climate crisis, betrays the scathing arguments Moore and Gibbons made so memorably in their apocalyptic classic — about elitists cashing in on actual historical crises. Our resounding failures to mitigate those crises have literally led us to where we are today.
And by us, I mean all of us, not just the United States.
Superhero myths are routinely about metahumans destroying planets and civilizations without figuring out how to save the puny humans whose environments they redundantly annihilate. One would assume that they don’t truly care about it, Moore once told me, the way they carry on, and on.
I’ve interviewed Gibbons and Moore before, the latter way more than once. And I’ve also sat alongside an once-young director named Zack Snyder tasked with capitalizing upon Watchmen’s prodigious cultural influence, a process Moore so infamously detested and resisted, always on the record.
Check in below for our greatest hits about the worst things, and worse people. It’s enough to take up an entire chapter of the Cli-Fi book I will probably never write.
‘The Majority of Us Folded like Bitches:’ Alan Moore On the ’60s, Superheroes, and American Impunity
Alan Moore Gives Watchmen the Gas Face
