Watchmen is coming out soon, and Alan Moore wants nothing to do with the movie, which is fair enough (though I’m still cautiously optimistic about it).  There’s no denying Moore’s talent and his astounding assertion that comics, graphic novels, what-have-you, are capable of the same emotional depth and ambiguity as their less colorful counterparts.  Here’s a good sample point from a fine interview:

You made the villain such a pitiful figure. In the comics for years, he was a psychotic maniac who kills indiscriminately, just does terrible, terrible things, and you made him so pitiful and sad.

I suppose that’s what I was saying. Well, psychotic murders — the key word there is “psychotic,” which is, as far as I know, an illness. This is not to say that people shouldn’t be entitled to feel rage or the lust for revenge when something happens to them at the hands of somebody like this, but you’ve got to remember at the end of the day it’s not strictly speaking that person’s fault. That something has happened to them, they have made some bad decision in their life, and while all of us are responsible for our actions, sometimes people get broken and it is increasingly difficult for them to know their own actions. So I suppose that if there was anything actually being said in “The Killing Joke,” it was that everybody has probably got a reason for being where they are, even the most monstrous of us.