Parenting & Family Quote by Alan Moore

Moore swings this line like a blackjack: first at the cultural snobbery that files comics under "kids' stuff", then at cinema’s inflated self-regard. The opening move - calling the dismissal of comics "lazy" - isn’t just name-calling; it reframes the prejudice as an intellectual failure. If you can’t read comics as literature, Moore implies, that says more about your reading habits than about the medium.

The neat trick is in the pivot: "very literate" doesn’t merely mean comics contain lots of words. It’s a provocation about literacy as a practice: tracking image-text interplay, handling ellipses between panels, reading rhythm and framing the way you’d read syntax. Moore, whose own work (Watchmen, From Hell) leans heavily on formal constraint and meta-textual play, is defending craft that hides in plain sight because it doesn’t look like the traditional novel.

Then comes the dagger: "unlike most films". Moore isn’t arguing films can’t be art; he’s indicting the mainstream movie ecosystem for rewarding spectacle over reading-level complexity, and for outsourcing meaning to score, performance, and momentum rather than language and structure. The subtext is also personal and historical: Moore’s antagonistic relationship with film adaptations of his work sharpened his suspicion that cinema often flattens what comics can do formally.

Underneath the jab is a power argument. Comics have long been treated as culturally suspect, policed by moral panics and gatekeepers. Moore insists that the "illiterate" label is a convenient way to keep a popular medium in its place - and to excuse not taking it seriously.