Wired: Could you do it [the latest League of Extraordinary Gentlemen story] in another medium?

Moore: No. Otherwise I'd have done them in another medium. I really don't think that the League would—well, it could have worked. There was a time I would have said that if any of my books could work as films, it would have been that first volume of the League. It was pretty much structured so it could have been made straight into a film, and it would have been as powerful as it was in the original publication. But that is to overlook the proclivities of contemporary Hollywood, where I really simply don't believe that any of my books could be benefited in any way by being turned into films. In fact, quite the opposite. The things I was trying to instill in those books were generally things that were only appropriate to the comics medium.

They were only about the comics medium, in a certain sense. To transplant them to the screen is going to chop off a good 30 or 40 percent of the reason why I wanted to do the work in the first place.

Jerusalem, this enormous novel I'm working on, which I'm two-thirds of the way through and it's already got to be somewhere around 1,500 pages, it's something that could only be done as a novel—and as an incredibly long novel. This wouldn't work as a comic strip. It's not got the right pace for a comic strip. It's something that's been designed to work as prose and occasional bits of poetry, just as the League is designed to work as a comic book—or a graphic novel, if everybody insists.

A lot of the effects in the League, the things that everybody remembers, they're kind of peculiar to the comic book. If you make the League into a film, even if you continue to, say, "remain faithful to my story or my dialog"—I mean, that is so unlikely as to be absolutely impossible, but say that that was to happen. What about Kevin's artwork? Kevin's artwork is so integral to the whole feel of the League that it couldn't be done with anyone other than Kevin. I think that he is probably one of the greatest and most individual artists working in the medium at the moment because his influences, his styles, come more from British illustration, British comics, than they come from the other side of the Atlantic. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but an awful lot of the people over here, myself included, were probably more influenced by the American material when we were growing up than we were by what was, in retrospect, brilliant British material. Kevin has always had an absurdist, grotesque British undercurrent to his work.

I think the material he's doing on this new volume—I know I say this with every new volume of the League—but I think it's Kevin's best work yet. But it always is. I really can't say anything different. It's extraordinary. He's surpassed himself again.

In a film, it's not a Kevin O'Neill drawing. I don't care how much CGI there is in it. It's not a Kevin O'Neill drawing. When I am thinking about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, it's Kevin's drawings that I want to see, Kevin's storytelling, or the storytelling that is the combination of both of our efforts. These are the things that are important to me about the League.

It's like the idea about the Spirit film that's being done. I mean, I would have thought that it was fairly obvious that The Spirit is not about a guy who wears a blue mask and who fights crime from his supposed grave in a cemetery. What The Spirit is actually about is the panels on the page, the way that the eye moves from one panel to another. It's from the innovative shapes and layouts and designs that Will Eisner brought to the medium. You can't translate that into a film. Much as Eisner loved the film medium and tried to get as many techniques to comics as possible, there are things about the Will Eisner page you simply cannot translate back into cinema. I think Will would have certainly been intelligent enough to know that.

I think that adaptation is largely a waste of time in almost any circumstances. There probably are the odd things that would prove me wrong. But I think they'd be very much the exception. If a thing works well in one medium, in the medium that it has been designed to work in, then the only possible point for wanting to realize it on "multiple platforms," as they say these days, is to make a lot of money out of it. There is no consideration for the integrity of the work, which is rather the only thing as far as I'm concerned.

I've got enough money to be comfortable. I live comfortably, I can pay the bills at the end of every month. I don't want a huge amount of money by diluting something that I happen to be rather proud of at its outset. That pretty much describes my attitude toward the idea of any of my works being realized in another form, really.

Wired: You've had the double problem of not only the difficulty of adaptation, but also having suffered through some pretty egregious adaptations.

Moore: I've never watched any of the adaptations of my books. I've never wanted to, and there's absolutely no chance of me doing so in the future. So I haven't really suffered through them, although there has been a certain amount of irritation and outrageous behavior on the part of the comic industry and the movie industry that I have suffered through. But I've gone into this at bitter and ranting length elsewhere. I'm sure that people can look up the relevant articles have they a wish to.

My books are still the same books as they were before they were made into films. The books haven't changed. I'm reminded of the remark by, I think it was Raymond Chandler, where he was asked about what he felt about having his books "ruined" by Hollywood. And he led the questioner into his study and showed him all the books there on the bookshelf, and said, "Look—there they all are. They're all fine. They're fine. They're not ruined. They're still there." And I think that's pretty much the attitude I take. If the books are as good as I think they are, then they are the things that will endure. And if the films are as bad as I think they are, then they are the things that will not endure. So, I suppose we'll see at the end of the day, whenever that is.