Smash hit

However, for arcane reasons to do with the comics industry that have fuelled 20 years of resentment, Moore no longer owns the rights to most of his creations, and so has no say over whether or not they get filmed. So he cannot take the credit for Johnny Depp’s eccentric distillation of Moore’s scholarly opus From Hell into a detective romp; nor the blame for the casting of Keanu Reeves as the cockney demon-hunter Constantine, nor yet for the whole sorry witless farrago that was The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Which made it all the more hurtful when a lawsuit, settled out of court, accused him as well as the studio of plagiarism for a film that bore little resemblance to anything he had written.

“Before that I naively thought that you could have the films of my work on the one hand, and my actual work on the other, and for them both to exist but have nothing to do with each other. But I realised then that there was nothing to stop people making damaging claims, like I was getting ideas from American movie writers. I was cross-examined on a video-link for ten hours. Ten hours! “Besides, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was, by all accounts, a piece of s*** that cost $100 million, which is probably the budget of an emergent Third World nation. You are beginning to cross ethical lines there.”

He told the comics company DC (a subsidiary of the movie giant Warner Brothers) that if it insisted on filming any more of his books, they should take his name off and hand his share of the royalties to the artist. Which is where all the trouble began . . .

The latest film version of his work is the biggest, and also the one that had the most chance of being good. V for Vendetta, a dystopian tale of an England under fascist rule, was adapted by two brothers who are long-standing comics fans and writers, and who have since found some small measure of fame in the film industry for a little series called The Matrix Trilogy. Their pedigree notwithstanding, when Moore got a phone call from “one of the Wachowskis”, he said he was busy and couldn’t possibly meet up for, oh, a year or so. “He rang off dejectedly, and the next thing I knew, a press release had been issued saying how excited I was about the film! Now that kind of makes me look insincere.”

The result has been a year-long battle, that he is still not sure he has won, to get his name taken off any publicity for the film — and indeed, as the wrangle has intensified, from all the many books he has written but no longer owns the rights to. “It’s an awful wrench — it feels like gnawing off your own leg to get out of a trap.”

You might think this a petty inconvenience for a film that already has a public relations disaster to deal with, after a Rolling Stone article made long and scurrilous reference to Larry Wachowski’s penchant for cross-dressing and obsessive relationship with a dominatrix. But Moore is no ordinary comics writer. Watchmen came fourth in Time magazine’s readers’ poll of the 100 top novels, while DC bought up an ailing independent publisher just to get its hands on Moore’s latest line of books. And ever since the scandal caused, not long before Superman: The Movie, when it became known that his creators were not getting a nickel from the Man of Steel, studios have gone to great lengths to keep the original authors onside.

“It’s a pity Alan has issues with the film,” says the artist who co-created V, David Lloyd, very much on-message in a Dorchester suite. “I think it’s great. Some of it is like seeing a painting you’ve done come to life.”

Lloyd, who is still so proud of their book that he’s made his personal e-mail address a play on its title, has been sent a copy of each successive V for Vendetta script. “The first was terrible. The Wachowskis also wrote one eight years ago which was closer to the original than this one, but they are fans, they want to reproduce the look and spirit of something they are fans of, and I have no argument with them now adding their own flavour.”

Bravely, the film does not back- pedal on the trickiest element of the book to pull off on screen: V, like Mirrormask, demands that its hero’s face be hidden throughout by a mask, which is no small challenge for the actor (the first left, to be replaced by Hugo Weaving). Nor, apparently, does it downplay the political dimension to which 9/11 and 7/7 have given new relevance: V is an avenging anarchist out to liberate the people from right-wing rule by dressing as Guy Fawkes and blowing up government buildings. And this, you understand, is the hero. Arguably, if the Bill outlawing the glorification of terrorism ever did get through Parliamant, the film might find itself banned. “The film certainly can be seen as an attack on Bush,” agrees Lloyd. “There’s a strong message in there.”

Moore is less charitable. “Basically, it’s the work of two thwarted and impotent liberals who want to say how annoyed they are with their President, but want to do so in a safe way — by setting it in a fantasy Great Britain.”

The resulting film has its admirers but, according to Times critics who saw the world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, its main problem is the superabundance of explosions and Wachowski-issue trickery. It’s a far cry from the slow, thoughtful and morally ambiguous original.

At the end of the day, some of the more interesting comic/film combinations are not so much the big-budget spectaculars but the more personal, character-driven stories. Comics such as American Splendor, or Ghost World; even low-key thrillers such as Road to Perdition, or A History of Violence. As Dave McKean says, “comics are not a big public show, they are a more personal form, more intimate; they go on inside your mind like a novel.”