He recently told GQ how he asked Damon Lindelof, who made the critically acclaimed HBO sequel to Watchmen, to quit bothering him. He’s publicly and financially disowned any adaptations of his work, turning down big paychecks from movie and TV studios for them. He will no longer work with either DC or Marvel due to ongoing disputes over how the big two publishers treat creators. Very few of those dollars went to Moore, who is now famously ambivalent about comics and his place in them. There’s a direct line from those books to today’s multi-billion dollar superhero-industrial complex. Grown-ups could read them without too much ridicule. Watchmen, along with Frank Miller’s dystopian Batman series The Dark Knight Returns, turned comic books into serious business. Moore’s Watchmen - named one of the best novels of the 20 th Century by Time magazine, back when that meant something - deconstructed superhero cliches by putting the characters into a more realistic world, only to show how they’d deform it by their very existence. While mostly unknown to people outside the geek world, Moore tilted the whole axis of popular culture back in the 80s.

He imbues physics with personality, modernizes the Apocalypse, and, yes, returns to the world of comics for one more wrestling match. Most writers would be thrilled to pull off any one of these stories.

His pieces range from a truly disturbing work of fantasy to a light-hearted riff on the paranormal to extended jokes in Shakespearean and cosmic settings. Alan Moore is the best comic book writer of all time, and if that seems like damning with faint praise, then his new collection Illuminations proves his skill with stories that don’t even have pictures in them.

Alan moore the dark knight