Whether you’re making comics or film, much of what you’re doing is done for dollars and for US-based multinational corporations who sell back what you’ve done to the UK and to the world. MirrorMask was a very English film, albeit made with money from Sony. Alan Moore, tired of bad films made from good comics he had written, and of the accompanying Hollywood-associated irritants (including a legal suit over The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), recently removed his name from the upcoming adaptation of his graphic novel V for Vendetta, disassociated himself from his previous films and, in the kind of definitive grand gesture that indicates that you really mean business, also declined his share of the money that came with them.

Even knowing that Alan’s renounced it, I want to see V for Vendetta. V and I go back almost twenty-five years, to the first time I picked up a copy of Warrior magazine and saw those wonderful black-and-white David Lloyd–drawn people staring hopelessly back at me. (I find it hard enough to adjust to a world in which the V graphic novel is colored; a color V for Vendetta seems as pointless as colorizing Citizen Kane.) Moore’s story of one lone anarchist up against a fascist British state—in a world poised halfway between Tony Blair’s dream and Eric Blair’s warning—meant something important to me and to a handful of other comics readers, when it was first published, and the film trailer, composed primarily of images taken from Warrior covers, hooks into that.

Alan Moore himself is resigned, amused and wryly bitter about the process of turning comics into film. “Comics are one step in the digestive process of Hollywood eating itself,” he told me. “Are there any films made from the comics that are better than the original comics? Hollywood needs material to make into films as part of an economic process. It could be a Broadway play or a book, or a French film, or a good TV series from the 1960s that people want to see on the big screen, or a bad TV series from the 1960s that nobody cares about but still has a name, or a computer game, or a theme park ride. I expect that the next subject of films will be breakfast-cereal mascots—a film that chronicles how Snap, Crackle and Pop met and explores their relationship. Or the Tony the Tiger movie.

“Films are no friend to comics,” he concluded. “I think they actually impoverish the comic landscape. Turning it into a sort of pumpkin patch for movie studios to come picking.”

At my most cynical I also wonder whether the world of comics might simply become a cheap R & D lab for Hollywood. The San Diego comics convention, once a summer gathering of a few thousand comics readers and creators, has in recent years become a Sundance-style event with over one hundred thousand people in attendance and where the year’s major SF, fantasy and horror movies are announced and previewed. I confess that I am always relieved when another year passes without anybody making a bad film based on Sandman, the comic on which most of my reputation within the medium rests.