Comics legend Alan Moore calls out 'reflexive belligerence' of pop culture fandom: 'Fan attitudes have toxified the world'
Alan Moore, widely regarded as one of the best and most influential comic book writers in the world, has penned a treatise in The Guardian on the rise of «fandom» in popular media and beyond, warning that while it can be «a productive force for good,» it has a tendency to toxify into «a grotesque blight that poisons the society surrounding it with its mean-spirited obsessions and ridiculous, unearned sense of entitlement.»
Moore's essay begins by casting back to older comments he made about the rise of superhero movies, originally published in 2017 on Folha de São Paulo and translated and posted to his own site a couple years later. The most famous part of the interview is probably his comment about the «deliberate, self-imposed state of emotional arrest combined with a numbing condition of cultural stasis» among superhero movie fans, but the real fire actually comes a bit later.
«The superheroes themselves—largely written and drawn by creators who have never stood up for their own rights against the companies that employ them, much less the rights of a Jack Kirby or Jerry Siegel or Joe Schuster—would seem to be largely employed as cowardice compensators, perhaps a bit like the handgun on the nightstand,» Moore continued. «I would also remark that save for a smattering of non-white characters (and non-white creators) these books and these iconic characters are still very much white supremacist dreams of the master race. In fact, I think that a good argument can be made for DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation as the first American superhero movie, and the point of origin for all those capes and masks.»
The damning critique didn't go over super-well with some people at the time, particularly fans of superhero movies, as you might imagine. But it forms a foundation for his new essay, in which Moore takes a closer look at the nature of fandom and the ways it's changed since his early days to be older, more affluent, and firmly in the grip of nostalgia. That increase in age
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