8 Times Marvel And DC Screwed Over Comic Book Creators

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

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.