Grant Morrison Reveals His Problems With Alan Moore and Watchmen

In an interview with IDW Publishing’s quarterly comics magazine, Full Bleed Vol. 3: Heavy Rotation (via io9), Grant Morrison spoke about his issues with Watchmen author Alan Moore and his problems with the graphic novel itself. Here are highlights:

On hating Watchmen: “I’ve read Watchmen many times. The reasons that I hated it when I was 25 are still there, but now I kinda like it because I’m older and I like the structure and I’m quite in awe of the absoluteness of it. But for all the same reasons, I hated it.”

On his problems with it: “The fact that none of the characters were allowed to be smarter than the author, that really drove me nuts. The world’s smartest man is an idiot. He makes a plan all his life that is undone by the end of the book in an instant. The psychiatrist sits with Rorschach for five minutes and Rorschach tells a super banal story of how he became a vigilante and the psychiatrist cracks. If you’re a criminal psychiatrist who deals with men in prison, you’ve heard a million of these stories. […] Watchmen, you can’t turn the page without him saying ‘Look at me, look at me, look at me.’ Okay, we get it, man. You got thrown out of school at 16 for dealing acid, you’re clever.”

On his feud with Alan Moore: “It was the archetypal struggle, and it wasn’t fair, ‘cause I love his work. Well, there’s a lot of it I don’t like, but of course, he’s great. We grew up in a very similar time even though I’m a little bit younger than him. It’s the same influences from ‘60s TV and ‘70s TV and the books we read, sci-fi, all that stuff, same comics. And the fact that he got into magic… it’s two people who are so similar but so utterly different that there has to be a feud.”