Watchmen, V for Vendetta Writer Alan Moore to Retire from Comics

Alan Moore has been an outsider to the mainstream comic world for more than a decade. After wrapping his imprint under DC, America’s Best Comics, Moore cut all ties with the Big Two comic publishers and has since written for publishers like Top Shelf, where he brought The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Avatar, where he pens the Lovecraft-inspired Providence.

Now, the Watchmen scribe and comics’ perennial outsider is apparently done with the medium for good.

At a press conference promoting his 1,280-page novel, Jerusalem, Moore announced that the comics he’s currently working on will be his last, saying he has “about 250 pages of comics left in me.”

Moore said the books he’s working on now are the aforementioned Providence, the Kickstarted, black-and-white horror anthology Cinema Purgatorio and the final entry in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series.

While he plans to come back to the medium for “the odd little comics piece at some point in the future,” Moore said that, “I think I have done enough for comics. I’ve done all that I can. I think if I were to continue to work in comics, inevitably the ideas would suffer, inevitably you’d start to see me retread old ground and I think both you and I probably deserve something better than that.” It’s a funny statement coming from the man who, along with Frank Miller’s work on The Dark Knight Returns, completely reinvented the superhero genre and mainstream comics with Watchmen and The Killing Joke in the late ‘80s.

Speaking on the persistence of comic book superheroes, he said, “I think this century needs, deserves, its own culture. It deserves artists that are actually going to attempt to say things that are relevant to the times we are actually living in. That’s a longwinded way of me saying I am really, really sick of Batman.” Moore said he’ll be moving on to “things I don’t know if I can do, like films, where I haven’t got a clue what I am doing, or giant literary novels.”

It’ll be interesting to see what kind of film work Moore might do, considering his distaste for the mainstream and his notorious hatred for any and all adaptations of his work. Following a one-two punch of bad adaptations with From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Moore has had his name removed from subsequent works, leaving the movie versions of V for Vendetta and Watchmen to be solely credited to the filmmakers.

Moore is going to go down in history as one of, if not the, greatest writer in history of the medium. When his final comic page does come, it’ll be the end of an era for comic books.