when good comix go bad

if you've seen the league of extraordinary gentlemen, you prolly think alan moore (the author of LoEG-the-comic) must have been lobotomised, then chained in front of an endless looping series of movies including, but not limited to, michael jackson's privately-remade, soft-core paedophiliac porn version of the wiz, the entire run of that tv show highlander, the monstrosity of waterworld, and the 1999 remake of the mod squad and forced to write the screenplay for the movie version without food, drink or sleep, while on copious amounts of caffeine and tina, on hundreds of notecards with pens that kept running out. and then the story was given to an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters to type up. after the producers-to-be randomly shuffled the cards. and then they took the first version of the story said monkeys provided.

but you would be wrong. because the author of LoEG wasn't the author of the movie of the same name; in fact, he fucking loathed it, which is because it is an abomination unto the face of the LORD, much like jar-jar binks.

in fact, the original comics - now available in available in perfect-bound format - are utterly brilliant, totally insightful and original and fabulous, with the most excruciating art, and by that i mean you linger over each panel and can't ever get to the next bit of the story. plus each issue was presented with fake victorian ads and story-bits at the end, making the entire reading of a single issue a most intense experience. and the stories? rocked.

so, in what might not be a surprise to the reader at this point, alan moore told DC to go fuck themselves; he is going to an indie publisher as a bitch-slap to them for what they did to his work (and continue to do with another one of his series).

no emily zilch story is complete without a fabulous, ellisian quote, so here it is:

Speaking to me on Friday, Moore added to this sentiment, telling me "after the films came out, I began to feel increasingly uneasy, I have a dwindling respect for cinema as it is currently expressed." This came to a head when Alan Moore was sued as part of a suit against 20th Century Fox for plagiarism of the screenplay Cast Of Characters, which bore heavy resemblance to the movie version of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen starring Sean Connery...

"They seemed to believe that the head of 20th Century Fox called me up and persuaded me to steal this screenplay, turning it into a comic book which they could then adapt back into a movie, to camouflage petty larceny." This led to Moore giving a ten-hour deposition - he believes he'd have suffered less if he'd "sodomised and murdered a busload of children after giving them heroin."

thanks, bOING-bOING!