There comes a time when even the wisest, most capable of us should hold our tongues. It’s a rule that’s almost universally understood amongst those of middling intelligence but almost always overlooked by the incredibly stupid and the incredibly intelligent. Examples of the former case are mostly negligible; at most a particularly vicious idiot might rally a large group of idiots around himself in the hopes of starting a revolution (as if they understood enough about the world to even grasp what a REAL revolution would be!), but they’re simply preaching to the choir in these instances. There is no way that this idiot can really ruin anything.

When a genius, though, owing to his own inflated ego and need to prove how much of a genius he really is, starts mouthing off, the effects can be disastrous. Because the fact of the matter is, when a truly great mind speaks up, everyone stops and listens, from the most intelligent to the most idiotic. This is particularly true in a community like the one that makes up comics these days, just as it is breaking out of its insular little egg to become something more worldly. Now, the formerly isolated geeks desperately hold on to their slice of the comics pie by becoming some sort of all-knowing, all-officiating gurus (all in the hopes of becoming socially acceptable) while everyone else –the people who are jumping unto this bandwagon now that it’s cool to like comics – needs to prove that they’re NOT just jumping unto the newest bandwagon.

No comic seems more to blame for this bridging than Alan Moore’s Watchmen, especially now that it has some highly successful Hollywood-made simulacrum marching through the world. Common sense in the community seems to hold that if you haven’t read Watchmen, then, well, you just don’t know your comics, and if you don’t think it’s the best thing ever, then you just don’t understand anything at all!

While this is patently false bullshit – Watchmen is a fine comic, but it’s by no means the best one ever – it has somehow or another become gospel. Maybe this would be all well and good if only the unwashed and unread masses were purporting it to be the finest example of the graphic form out there, but at some point or another, Alan Moore fell off of his rocker and bought into the hype. Certainly this sounds preposterous, given Moore’s disdain for his earlier work, but in a recent interview with The Stool Pigeon, the venerable old bat confessed that “there hasn’t been a more sophisticated comic released in the 25 years since [Watchmen’s release].”

The statement is by turns hilarious and horrifying. Hilarious, because this means two things: that Moore has not been following the comic industry in those twenty-five years AND that Moore hasn’t bothered reading over his own work. Seminal a work as it is, Watchmen is almost passe’ at this point. Everything that Chris Ware puts out is more brilliant by far on a technical level – Jimmy Corrigan practically redefines the use and placement of panels – and Moore must have been napping when he wrote From Hell, because it is by far a better story, in terms of writing, art, theme and sheer artistry. Even if one accepts that Moore was simply talking about the realm of superhero comics, it is impossible to take him seriously, considering that Mike Mignola’s Hellboy is the undisputed champion of that genre (also the finest mainstream comic running right now, but that’s an article for another week). Either way, one must accept that Alan Moore has been writing his work on autopilot for years now while hearing only of the comic industry what random winds of chance bring to his ears.

But while Moore’s senility lends itself well to humor, it does NOT lend itself well to the progression of the medium. Certainly, the industry IS a bloated monstrosity right now, and there’s no denying that he’s right in some ways — every Vertigo title that comes out seems, in terms of paneling, dialogue and story-structure, just another Watchmen homage – but Moore’s little comment is going to do NOTHING to change this. Because instead of challenging writers and artists to look to the most sophisticated works out there – the Nausicaas and the From Hells and the Asterio Polyps – he is simply telling them to look back on a comic that is YEARS behind the curve and demanding that people find some value there that simply isn’t!

If only Moore realized how much influence a statement like this is going to have. All of the little cretins, all of the artfaggots and hipsters and pseuds, are going to go scrambling back to Watchmen, digging through it to find whatever scraps they can. Those artists and writers who were finally getting out from under that shadow are going to start doubting themselves again and go back to square one, and the critics are going to suck on Moore’s cock as they ALWAYS do and go right back to ignoring all of the really good comics that are crawling out from the cracks after all these years. It really is impossible to hate Alan Moore –he’s one of the most genial, well-mannered, intelligent and talented people writing comics these days – but he has become so obsessed with his own hype that it’s poisoning his mind; he has become so completely egotistical that he does not realize what an effect his words have on everybody in the comic community, and so he mouths off whatever the devil passes over his terribly clouded mind without a second thought.

Moore, I adore you, I really do, but please, think for just a second the next time before you go off on the subject of comics again. Too much cynicism can be every bit as poisonous and detrimental as too much optimism.