The prime motive is...

Excerpt from an interview titled "The unexplored medium" by William A. Christensen and Mark Seifert, published in Wizard magazine, volume one, n.27, November 1993.

Wizard: You seem to have an interest in the comics medium over everything else. Why is Alan Moore a comic book writer instead of a novelist or screen writer?
Moore: I think one reason I'm very interested in comics is that basically, it's an unexplored medium. Most of the other media have been explored thoroughly. Film has had its Citizen Kane, and literature has had its War and Peace. That is not to say there won't be other great works in those media, or that they are not worth exploring, but comics are relatively unexplored. There have been some notable works, but probably, we have yet to produce the first great comic novel. That excites me as an artist - the sense that you can actually make a difference in comics because you are there on the ground floor. You can actually influence the way in which comics will be perceived, the way in which they will grow; all of that stuff is very, very tempting for an artist. That is not to say that I don't have interests in the other fields. At the moment I am writing my first novel without pictures. I wrote a screenplay for film once. I handed in a script, and it was never made, because by the time I had gotten onto it they had already had three other writers, and the film was way over its deadline and budget, and so, like many other projects in Hollywood, it never got made. Although it was enjoyable, I realized it was probably enjoyable because the film never got made, because the film would have been nothing like my screenplay. This is why I turned down the offer to write the Watchmen film. I told Terry Gilliam that he shouldn't try to make a Watchmen film, because it was practically unmakeable. This is why when they asked me to write RoboCop 2, I begged off of that, and when I was asked to do the Silver Surfer film, I said I didn't want to do it. I'm not interested in writing for films; not because I don't think films have a lot of potential, but because of the way that the industry is set up. I recognized that any screenplay that I wrote would probably be handed to other writers to do rewrites, because Hollywood tends to work on the assumption that if a thing has been written once, it is good, and if it has been written twice, it is very good, and if it is written three times, then it is excellent. By the end of the day, what is going to appear on the screen is only going to have a coincidental resemblance to the script that the writer originally put down. In comics, I have complete control, other than the input of my artists, which is always respected and valued. Every full stop and comma that I put down on that script is going to end up in the finished comic, and it just seems foolish to relinquish any of that control just because of the financial inducements of Hollywood. The money has always been very welcome, but at the same time, that has never been the prime motive. The prime motive is to have fun creatively.