Watchmen co-creator Alan Moore disowned the HBO series and told the showrunner never to contact him

Like many of you, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect when it was announced that Damon Lindelof would be transforming Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ acclaimed graphic-novel Watchmen into a television series, but against all odds, it was met with great enthusiasm. While the Watchmen series may have been a pleasant surprise, it’s not surprising in the least that Alan Moore hasn’t watched it.

While speaking with GQ, Alan Moore revealed that he had disowned the Watchmen series and told the showrunner never to contact him. The Watchmen author doesn’t mention any names, but the showrunner of HBO’s Watchmen series was Damon Lindelof. Moore said that he received a letter when the series was in development that opened with, “Dear Mr. Moore, I am one of the bastards currently destroying Watchmen.” That does sound like a Lindelof line.

“That wasn’t the best opener,” Moore said. “It went on through a lot of, what seemed to me to be, neurotic rambling. “Can you at least tell us how to pronounce Ozymandias? I got back with a very abrupt and probably hostile reply telling him that I’d thought that Warner Brothers were aware that they, nor any of their employees, shouldn’t contact me again for any reason.” Moore explained that he had “disowned the work in question, and partly that was because the film industry and the comics industry seemed to have created things that had nothing to do with my work, but which would be associated with it in the public mind. I said, ‘Look, this is embarrassing to me. I don’t want anything to do with you or your show. Please don’t bother me again.’” When Watchmen was released to great critical acclaim, Moore was a little puzzled by the response.

When I saw the television industry awards that the Watchmen television show had apparently won, I thought, “Oh, god, perhaps a large part of the public, this is what they think Watchmen was?” They think that it was a dark, gritty, dystopian superhero franchise that was something to do with white supremacism. Did they not understand Watchmen? Watchmen was nearly 40 years ago and was relatively simple in comparison with a lot of my later work. What are the chances that they broadly understood anything since? This tends to make me feel less than fond of those works. They mean a bit less in my heart.

Alan Moore doesn’t plan on watching HBO’s Watchmen series anytime soon, nor any adaptation of his work. “I would be the last person to want to sit through any adaptations of my work,” Moore said. “From what I’ve heard of them, it would be enormously punishing. It would be torturous, and for no very good reason.“