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In Hollywood Math, a movie has to make DOUBLE it's total budget (including advertising) to be considered a success.

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I don't entirely believe the figures that point to the mass printing of Watchmen books doing well. Otherwise they wouldn't have pushed out Paul Levitz this year.

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Unconnected.

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A few years back, largely at the instigation of Trina Robbins, the charge of "violence against women" began to be thrown at my own work. This was one of the nonsense claims that I actually protested, since it was so far off the mark. "Violence against women" carries a sexual undercurrent, and in some 25,000 pages published, I had shown only a single act of sexual violence against a female character -- and that was in NEXT MEN, where Bethany, the target, interrupted the would-be perpetrator's plans by punching his heart out!

A certain site that shall remained unnamed also mentioned your work had been accused of mysoginy, which baffled me. Meanwhile, Alan Moore is praised in the media for making those silly goddamn comic books into serious "literature."

...punching his heart out!

Another detail just occurred to me re: the above examples in Moore's portrayal of women--none of the brutalized victims ever get the upper hand on their attacker. They might be rescued or avenged, but never strike a blow for themselves.

And let'snot forget that issue of LOEG, where the Invisible Man raped a teenage girl onpanel at an all girl school/home.

……..

Yeah, I read about that; evidently, it it was Pollyanna. Andapparently Hyde (who is a hulking monster, for some reason) avenged her byraping the Invisible Man .

...........

The rape and the other immaculate conceptions were the point where the League mini fell on it's face for me.  The Invisible man doesn't pay for any of that at first, besides the League capturing him.  I couldn't understand why they would let him join the League.

Hyde doesn't punish the Invisible Man, until midway in the second mini-series, where the Invisible Man turns against mankind and attacks Mina.

A great deal of Moore's work is "sophistication" aimed at people who are not, themselves, terribly sophisticated.

I found WATCHMEN to be boring -- even the art itself didn't move me. Granted, I did not read it until last year but that just means it was either always boring or just incredibly dated.

Moore has been lucky to have worked with amazing artists. Even as a 13-year-old kid, I realized that it was Bolland's art that made THE KILLING JOKE compelling, more so than the story. The art ages wonderfully. The story... far less so.

Ultimately, Moore is not a very good superhero writer. Stan Lee, for example, is a great superhero writer -- consider Ben Grimm charging on against Doctor Doom's asault because he's "too ugly to die" or Spider-Man lifting an impossibly heavy weight because "anyone can win a fight" when the odds are on your side. The JOY of comics is great men and women triumphing over terrible odds because of their own inner strength. If that is not present in your work, you could make Shakespeare look like Joe Esterhas but you'd still be a lousy superhero writer.

Defenders of Moore will point to elements of his work where that theme is there: Gordon not cracking under the Joker's psychological torture or Superman overcoming Mongul's psychological prison but it always seems like crawling through the sewer in order to get on drop of untainted water.

I think Chad has it right.

It is easier to choose to believe mumbo jumbo than to accept a blatant and repetitve element in Moore's work.

I've read a lot of Moore's work, for good or ill. I wouldn't say he's anywhere near the top for me, as far as comic book talents. But I can see Moore's thematics, since he doesn't hide them. If violence against women is blatant and repetitive in Moore's work, it's because the man obviously feels like violence against women is the worst thing he can think of.

And frankly, I didn't read TOM STRONG for instance and read it dreading Strong's wife and daughter were bound to be brutalized somewhere in the narrative. It didn't happen. Not only because the Doc Savage SF analogue eschews such things, but probably mostly. Abigail Arcane in SWAMP THING, in a horror comic, does suffer. But she seems to endure and overcome, much like a star emotional character in a Suggested For Mature Readers comic book narrative is likely to. Readers don't expect Abby to turn into a gibbering idiot for the horrors endured, but they fear she might. Just like readers fool themselves into believing Spider-Man really is going to die from that fall at the end of the issue. Moore defeats the expectations, again in a Mature Readers book, with Abby staunchly, independently three-dimensional. She adapts, willfully, to survive.

You'll note that nowhere do I say there should be Mature Readers superhero comics. SWAMP THING was mostly a horror comic, and where Moore kept to the actual horror-shock elements the book had no peer at that time. Ninety percent of that success is undoubtedly due to artists Steve Bisette and John Totleben. In fact, it's Moore's flighty romanticism and god/myth-building which spoiled SWAMP THING by the end. But the product as a whole, released as a Mature Readers title in those days, did nothing to irrevocably damage the superhero or the horror comic. With some pompous takes on the Demon and Phantom Stranger, and the JLA even, Moore only proved he couldn't write superheroes without aggrandizing them into intellectual symbology.

But when looking to where comics have seen the worst distortion of female characters, look no further than Frank Miller. And I have loved me some Miller comics, mind you. But while Moore has been known to drag his female muses through the muck, Miller drowns his women in filth immediately, from ground zero, in order for someone, Batman or Superman or Daredevil, to reassert their fidelity to moral-ethical order.

Neither Alan Moore or Frank Miller are depraved in their respective approaches to women. Least I don't think so. I don't care for either one's outlook on comic books, but you can't fault them for adoring women in their own ways. I don't have to like it, nor read it, but publishers will still publish it.

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Also… Robert Louis Stevenson (who should know) describes Hyde as "pale and dwarfish".

Here we come back to a point I have made before. Historical figures -- "real people" -- can be interpreted in many ways. We filter them thru our own experiences, and ask "Why did Abraham Lincoln say that?" or "What was Julius Caesar's motive in doing this?" or "What was Adolf Hitler really thinking?" As people who actually passed across the world stage they are, perhaps ironically, fair game.

But fictional characters (outside the kind of serial fiction we find in comics, involving many hands over many years) exist only in the minds of their creators, and their creators tell us who they are and how they think. There is no room to ask "What did Sherlock Holmes really think?" We've been told. As we have been told what Mr. Hyde looked like, or what were Aragorn's motives for living so long as Strider.

When another author comes along and says "Here is my vision", he is, in effect, saying "Look! I'm getting it wrong!"