A master of his craft is saying goodbye to the comic book medium. Alan Moore has officially announced that he’s moving on from comics to try new challenges (well, after a few more current projects),
Speaking to The Guardian during press for his upcoming novel Jerusalem, Moore said that with “about 250 pages of comics left” in him, he was officially retiring from comics:
There are a couple of issues of an Avatar [Press] book that I am doing at the moment, part of the HP Lovecraft work I’ve been working on recently. Me and Kevin [O’Neil] will be finishing Cinema Purgatorio, and we’ve got about one more book, a final book of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to complete.
After that, although I may do the odd little comics piece at some point in the future, I am pretty much done with comics.
Although Moore’s official retirement from comics is sad news — the man’s speaks for itself. So many iconic pieces of comic book history have his fingerprints all over them. But Moore has been discussing this exit for a while now, and has long expressed a desire to pass the torch to a younger generation of comic book luminaries. As he told The Guardian, he thinks he’s reached his natural end point already:
I think I have done enough for comics. I’ve done all that I can. I think if I were to continue to work in comics, inevitably the ideas would suffer, inevitably you’d start to see me retread old ground and I think both you and I probably deserve something better than that.
While there is that promise that one day he might come back for a project here and there, it’s a little heartbreaking to see the end of an era like this.