8 Times Marvel And DC Screwed Over Comic Book Creators

4. DC Promised Alan Moore The Rights To Watchmen... And Then Reneged

Watchmen comics
DC Comics/Dave Gibbons

It's absolutely horrid the way the industry treated Alan Moore. Creators and readers love to vilify him as a bitter old figure who just doesn't 'get' comics anymore, and that couldn't be anymore disrespectful.

Alan Moore is a legend of the comics medium and a talent creators all owe a debt of gratitude towards. He redefined the way we look at superheroes and contributed countless seminal offerings to DC and other publishers, including Swamp Thing, Watchmen, and From Hell among others. So again, there is no way he deserves the treatment he's received from creators or fans, and especially not from the industry he helped transform during the eighties.

As for the way the writer has been mistreated, Moore's troubles with the industry all go back to Watchmen. His opus, written with art from David Gibbons, was originally meant to star the Charlton Comics characters DC had acquired a year earlier, but when the publisher decided that they planned to use those heroes elsewhere, Moore and Gibbons were forced to create their own.

And they did. The heroes of Watchmen were created and Moore and Gibbons signed a clause with DC that the rights would return to both authors were the publisher to stop printing comics about those characters, which was the assumption at the time. Comics weren't typically printed in collections and Moore had expected to regain control within a few years, only for Watchmen to become a huge hit, and for him to never get ownership of the characters ever again.

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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.