Kaulen Fuhs said:
I think this comment (found in the link as a response to the article) sums up my feelings on the matter:
"Alan Moore's intelligence dwarfs most of the people who are going to comment on this article. You may not like him, but he is responsible for most of the comics that my generation considers canon today. He is smarter than you. Better educated. If he sees no reason for his original (albeit derived) graphic novel to be expanded upon then at least give him the benefit of being the source and not a dumb, uninformed opinion."
As far as I'm concerned, only one good thing has ever come out of an adaptation of Moore's works (that being thee Watchmen movie). He has every reason to think this is a shit idea.
But that quote is utter bullshit. Intelligence is extremely difficult to quantify, for one thing, and there's no be all and end all definition. If Moore is a great writer but complete shite at maths and, ahem, interpersonal relationships, how do we define his intelligence? Where does he fall on the spectrum of intelligence? Second, from all accounts Moore has had little formal education, so claims that he's "better educated" are in direct opposition to his biographical details and sounds like it's coming from someone who's spouting of a completely uninformed opinion.
Here's a partial quote from the Alan Moore wikipedia page:
'Subsequently disliking school and having "no interest in academic study"... ' Does that sound like a man who's better educated than... well, whoever the dickhole of a commenter is encompassing in his blanket statement of comic readers?
Another quote from a fan site bio:
'He was expelled from a conservative secondary school and was not accepted at any other school. In 1971, Moore was unemployed, with no job qualifications whatsoever.'
Why would you immediately believe unsubstantiated claims from an unknown internet commenter, without doing some research on your own?
I'll not deny that Alan Moore is intelligent and a talented writer, but he's also rude, opinionated, condescending, arrogant and so full of his own fucking self that he can't see past his own sizeable ego. True, he can think anything he wants is a shit idea, but that's just an opinion. Unfortunately for Alan Moore his opinion on Before Watchmen is just that, an opinion and until we see the finished comics they can't be fairly judged.
Is Before Watchmen just a cash in? Yes and no. Obviously DC wants to make money off of characters they own, but with Watchmen still relevant and popular decades after it's original publication, it's worth exploring those characters if for no other reason than pure entertainment.