Alan Moore on the Overabundance of Brooding Psychopathic Avengers

[Fenris Technique]

Alan Moore on the proliferation of "brooding psychopathic avengers" in an interview from 2009:

Quote

KA: And, it’s left a legacy where it seems like almost all heroes follow the model you created with Marvelman and Watchmen. Instead of a “straight ahead” approach to heroism like you’d find in the Silver Age, all the heroes are psychologically damaged. They all have drinking problems and sexual dysfunctions and broken marriages. And, it’s almost become a new status quo in and of itself. AM: Yes, it has. And, can I just say I’m sorry? That was never my intention for every book to be like that. The reason I wanted to do them like that was because nothing else was like that. I wanted to do something that was different. If I were, god forbid, still doing superhero comics today, just like my ABC work from a couple of years ago, they’d be very very different from the Watchmen or Marvelman template. They’d be much more about having fun—whether that be intellectual fun or just plain fun—much more about that than doing any revisions. I think, ultimately, that approach that I brought in—taking previously existing characters and reinterpreting them—has probably led to very grim and very un-enjoyable comic books. I didn’t want everyone else to copy what we were doing. And especially, if they were going to, I’d have preferred it if they’d copied the freshness and originality of the ideas—and, if they had managed to express a bit of the joy that we expressed, even in Watchmen, in Marvelman, and Swamp Thing. Yes, there were some very grim passages in all those books, but there were also passages of great joy. And, it seemed to me that people basically took from it what they were able to take from it—mostly a slightly depressing atmosphere and the idea that everybody had to be a grim, ruthless psychopath. Even characters like Stanley and His Monster—should they be reinvented as grim, brooding psychopaths? That completely robbed comics of a lot of the charm that, for me at least, they once had. Again, it was never intended as a blanket approach for all comic books. It was just an experiment that I was trying, and it worked better in some cases than it did in others. Yeah, Marvelman and Watchmen—those are pretty good books. On the other hand, where I was doing the same things in The Killing Joke, it was entirely inappropriate. KA: You think so? AM: I think so. This has nothing to do with Brian Bolland’s artwork, which was of course exquisite. I’ve never really liked my story in The Killing Joke. I think it put far too much melodramatic weight upon a character that was never designed to carry it. It was too nasty, it was too physically violent. There were some good things about it, but in terms of my writing, it’s not one of me favorite pieces. If, as I said, god forbid, I was ever writing a character like Batman again, I’d probably be setting it squarely in the kind of “smiley uncle” period where Dick Sprang was drawing it, and where you had Ace the Bat-Hound and Bat-Mite, and the zebra Batman—when it was sillier. Because then, it was brimming with imagination and playful ideas. I don’t think that the world needs that many brooding psychopathic avengers. I don’t know that we need any. It was a disappointment to me, how Watchmen was absorbed into the mainstream. It had originally been meant as an indication of what people could do that was new. I’d originally thought that with works like Watchmen and Marvelman, I’d be able to say, “Look, this is what you can do with these stale old concepts. You can turn them on their heads. You can really wake them up. Don’t be so limited in your thinking. Use your imagination.” And, I was naively hoping that there’d be a rush of fresh and original work by people coming up with their own. But, as I said, it was meant to be something that would liberate comics. Instead, it became this massive stumbling block that comics can’t even really seem to get around to this day. They’ve lost a lot of their original innocence, and they can’t get that back. And, they’re stuck, it seems, in this kind of depressive ghetto of grimness and psychosis. I’m not too proud of being the author of that regrettable trend.

Alan Moore Reflects on Marvelman - Part 2 - Mania.com

I'm somewhat surprised given Alan Moore's incredible success with the brooding psychopath archetype.
Akin to TL coming saying "All this hopelessness and allusion to people being soulless puppets is regrettable. I was trying something new, not intending to pull the genre off course. Sorry about that."
I wonder how an artists moves from revitalizing or innovating a literary theme to looking back upon their achievements with some measure of regret.

Is Alan Moore pulling our leg, or is he really bummed that he's particularly talented at writing a certain type of character?

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

He's said this many times. He definitely believes it. That old dark work was never a presentation of his beliefs. I think he even disowned Swamp Thing.

[Justin Isis]

It definitely gives you an idea of how retarded culture is when ideas that were cutting-edge in the early 1980s (grim superhero revisionism, for example) are still being solemnly executed by the mainstream in 2016. Moore has said elsewhere that he sees culture as being in a kind of time-warp, and that it's a shame fantasies for children from 60 or 70 years ago (superheroes, Doctor Who, whatever) are still dominating the landscape. To which I'd completely agree. Moore has consistently innovated and pushed himself to keep trying different things, when he could have easily fallen into self-parody years ago and been rewarded the whole time (sure he would have been paid handsomely for writing endless Watchmen prequels/sequels). Integrity, much respect.