At this point even people who don't exactly know who Alan Moore is are aware that he doesn't want anything to do with the movies made from his comics. He is always very happy to talk about how much he hates the adaptations of his works, and is also very happy to tell people that he took his name off the V For Vendetta and Watchmen films and gave his share of the money to the artists on those books. On some levels I get where Alan Moore is coming from - I've seen both From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - but on the other hand I think he's also coming from a place of major hypocrisy.

"I increasingly fear that nothing good can come of almost any adaptation," Moore recently told Entertainment Weekly while holding forth on how little interest he has in the Watchmen movie (beyond talking about how little interest he has in it, I suppose). That statement is weird to me when taken in the context of the two latest Alan Moore comics I've purchased: Lost Girls and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier. Has anyone told Alan Moore that he's essentially doing adaptations?

Well, technically what he's doing is really fanfic - extending the adventures of beloved characters - and slashfic - making beloved characters have explicit sex - but let's be kind and not lump him in with the people drawing pictures of Lion-O fucking Snarf on Usenet. Alan Moore is rather angry about the guy who directed 300 taking a crack at his work, but does he think JM Barrie would have been okay with Peter Pan cumming on Wendy's stomach while her brothers look on and jerk off? Does he think that L Frank Baum, were he asked, would like the idea of Dorothy taking a facial from a soldier who was eating her out? I'm quite certain that opium addiction was never one of H Rider Haggard's plans for Allan Quatermain.

It's important to note that I think The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is quite wonderful and that Lost Girls is actually pretty brilliant as both deconstruction and as a self-conscious work of pornography. But it's also important to note that both of these works, arguably Moore's most important of the last decade, are based on other people's characters and situations. While Moore isn't exactly adapting the works of these authors, he's appropriating them for his own ends.

In the best of hands, that's what an adaptation does. I get excited when I see filmmakers putting their own stamp on material, in the way that a good band can put their own stamp on a cover song. Moore seems to be coming from the same place as the fanboys who bitch about unfaithful adaptations, a place that has no room for the alchemy of non-collaborative collaboration, where one creative person is sparked by another creative person's fire. My biggest worry about Watchmen has been that it will be a live action reading of the comic book as opposed to its own thing; the recent footage and trailer show that this probably won't be the case. I'm interested in seeing what the visual artist in Zack Snyder makes from the art that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons created, which was itself building on the art of the creators of the Charlton characters that DC Comics had recently purchased.

I'm setting aside the issue of quality, of course. There's no arguing that most Alan Moore adaptations have been horseshit (although I truly like V For Vendetta and think that it takes original and does interesting things with it in ways that mirror who the filmmakers are - again, non-collaborative collaboration), and I understand why the run of bad adaptations would leave a sour taste in Moore's mouth. At the same time the previous bad efforts have no bearing on future efforts by different filmmakers; surely the Schumacher Batman films didn't mean Batman should be abandoned as a cinematic character. Beyond that, quality is ephemeral and not an argument for the existence of art - would Miracleman have been a terrible basic idea if it hadn't been well executed?

Does Moore think what he does with established characters is more fair game because it's done in the name of deconstruction? Looking at Moore's entire comic book history I'm struck by how much of his work is building on the works of others, from Marvelman (known now as Miracleman) to his Swamp Thing run to Watchmen to 1963 to America's Top Comics, many of which are Watchmen-esque reclothings of pulp and superhero characters and archetypes. While not adaptations outright, they're the kind of non-collaborative collaborations that the best adaptations strive to be; that a man who has made his career messing with the creations of others should be so mad when others mess with his creations is ironic at best, hypocritical at worst.