Alan Moore wrote some noteworthy comics and graphic novels. Those titles include Watchmen and Batman: The Killing Joke — which was huge when I was growing up. However, he has now given up writing comic books, and now looks with disdain (and maybe a certain amount of fear) at what they’ve done to society.
He thinks that’s not just infantile but dangerous. “I said round about 2011 that I thought that it had serious and worrying implications for the future if millions of adults were queueing up to see Batman movies. Because that kind of infantilisation – that urge towards simpler times, simpler realities – that can very often be a precursor to fascism.” He points out that when Trump was elected in 2016, and “when we ourselves took a bit of a strange detour in our politics”, many of the biggest films were superhero movies.
I’m not sure that comics are correlated to fascism, but I do sympathize somewhat with his perspective. The fact that half the movies made now are superhero movies I don’t think speaks very highly of the quality of our culture. There is nothing wrong with a popcorn flick but you can’t live on a popcorn diet.
