Alan Moore has been through this before. With his comic books The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and V for Vendetta, filmmakers sought to turn his unique visions into box-office gold. Moore wasn't a fan of the recreations, so much so that he refused to lend his name or offer his help during the long process to get Watchmen onto the big screen. Why, Moore asks, would anyone want to change what he's already done? In an excerpt for his interview with Wired, the 55-year-old Brit talks about the evolution of superheroes and his disenchantment with Hollywood. To read the full interview, click here.

Wired: When you were working on your later stuff for DC [Comics], were you still aiming for that young of an audience?

Moore: By the end of my original tenure with DC, I was a much younger man, and I was still following the basic agendas that I'd decided upon when I was a part of the emergent phenomenon of comic book fandom in this country in the 1960s. I think 1967 was probably the first British comic convention, and so it was very much infused with the spirit of the time, which was very progressive. With the American conventions, which had started sometime earlier, I think that there was an element of nostalgia that undercut that American comic phenomenon right from the outset. Over here, yes, there was certainly that element as well. But, like I say, it was the 1960s. Most of the comic fans I met at the time were 14- or 15-year-old proto-hippies, as was I. They were very interested in the progressive spirit of the time.

So, those were the agendas that we were following then. We thought it would be a great idea if comics could be recognized as the wonderful medium that we secretly knew them to be. And when I say "we," I'm talking about the 50 actual people who turned up at those early conventions, which was pretty much the sum total of everybody in this country who'd ever heard of American comics. But back then our agenda was this progressive notion that, wouldn't it be terrific if people were to get involved with comics who could make them more adult, more grown up, to show the kind of themes they were capable of handling? So this was the agenda that, 20 years later, I was still following toward the end of my first DC run.

At the time I thought that a book like Watchmen would perhaps unlock a lot of potential creativity, that perhaps other writers and artists in the industry would see it and would think, "This is great, this shows what comics can do. We can now take our own ideas and thanks to the success of Watchmen we'll have a better chance of editors giving us a shot at them." I was hoping naively for a great rash of individual comic books that were exploring different storytelling ideas and trying to break new ground.

That isn't really what happened. Instead, it seemed that the existence of Watchmen had pretty much doomed the mainstream comic industry to about 20 years of very grim and often pretentious stories that seemed to be unable to get around the massive psychological stumbling block that Watchmen had turned out to be, although that had never been my intention with the work.

When I returned to work for—well, I didn't return. I was kind of press-ganged. I had DC buying the company I had just signed contracts with, which is flattering in one way and very creepy in another. It's like being stalked by a very rich demented girlfriend who can just buy your entire street in order to be close to you.

When I found myself working, even remotely, under the auspices of DC, I had very different intentions. Well, maybe they were the same intentions: to do progressive comics that adults could enjoy. But by then I'd become very tired of the wave of grimness that seemed to have been unleashed by Watchmen.

When I was working upon the ABC books, I wanted to show different ways that mainstream comics could viably have gone, that they didn't have to follow Watchmen and the other 1980s books down this relentlessly dark route. It was never my intention to start a trend for darkness. I'm not a particularly dark individual. I have my moments, it's true, but I do have a sense of humor. With the ABC books I was trying to do comics that would have perhaps appealed to an intelligent 13-year-old, such as I'd been, and would still satisfy the contemporary readership of 40-year-old men who probably should know better. But I wanted to sort of do comics that would be accessible to a much wider range of people, and would still be intelligent even if they were primarily children's adventure stories, such as the Tom Strong books.

So, although I was still committed to progress, which I think was evidenced by some of the very experimental things we did in Tomorrow Stories with Greyshirt and Cobweb, some of the incredibly experimental things we did in Promethea, which I think pushed the capacities, the capabilities, of a flimsy comic book about as far as I have ever personally pushed them. Some of the things we did on Promethea were so smugly clever that I'm still basking in the radiance three or four years later.

But it was a change of emphasis. I didn't want to spark off another wave of frankly miserable stories about psychotic vigilantes battling it out with equally psychotic villains. I wanted to do stuff that had a fresher feel to it, had a bit of a morning atmosphere. And I think, to a degree, we succeeded, but of course it all ended in tears.

Now I'm pretty much divorced from the comics medium. Of course, it's a medium I will always love, and I'm still working on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but I don't think either Kevin [O'Neill, the artist] or I see that in the context of comics anymore. For me, it's one of the things I do, like the new novel, or the music I intermittently work on, or the book of magic. These are all things I do. I don't think of them in the context of the different media that I do them in. I still do think of new things to do with the comic medium, but now they're all pretty much sublimated into the League, which we're having a great time with.