Alan Moore Has Nothing But Harsh Words For Frank Miller

Legendary comic book author Alan Moore has nothing nice to say about his contemporary Frank Miller. Moore and Miller both helped change the landscape of comics in the 1980s and 1990s, but while the V for Vendetta and Watchmen author believes he had a positive impact before his acrimonious split with the industry, he won't say the same for the writer of The Dark Knight Returns.

In an interview with The Observer, Moore was asked about Miller, and he didn't mince words, saying: "He’s one of the reasons I’m embarrassed to be connected with the comics industry." The beef between the authors is the result of a mix of personal, professional, creative, and ideological differences; though they followed similar career paths up to a point, the pair are wildly different as people and as creators.

Alan Moore stopped writing comics completely a few years ago, going into self-imposed exile from the industry. Since then, he's stayed busy writing prose fiction. He's currently working his Long London series, which is slated to run five books. The first novel, The Great When, was published in 2024.

Now, the second volume, I Heard a New World, arrives in just a few weeks. Moore spoke to The Observer about the book, but unfortunately for him, comic book questions remain unavoidable. He didn't dwell on his feelings toward Frank Miller, but he did make them unequivocal.

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"I don't want to be associated with the comics industry," Alan Moore told The Observer, "which is poisonous." This is a refrain in every interview he gives these days. Moore carefully distinguishes between the comic medium, which he still loves dearly, and the industry, which he has nothing but savage criticism for.

The interviewer took this as a chance to bring up Frank Miller. Moore didn't really take the bait, passing up the opportunity to really go off on Miller. But what he did say is brutal enough. The divide between the two creators goes back awhile, but it's clear that it has become an insurmountable chasm. It wasn't always this way. Miller and Moore were reportedly on friendly terms at one point, decades ago; notably, Moore praised The Dark Knight Returns upon its release in 1986.

However, that friendship was already seemingly over by 2011, when Moore was harshly critical of Miller's public comments about the Occupy protest movement in an interview. Both before and after that, Moore has criticized what he considers the "misogynistic," "homophobic," and "fascist" overtones of Miller's work. Alan Moore clearly came to dislike Miller's later comics, like Sin City and 300, but the root of the issue, on and off the page, is political.

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Frank Miller is frequently described as a conservative, though he disavows that label himself. Meanwhile, Alan Moore is a self-avowed anarchist and magician. But one thing they share is how much their personalities, and their ideologies, drive what they do on the page. Which makes their creative and political differences indistinguishable. Then add a professional layer to that: Miller embraced the comics industry, while Moore forsaked it.

Even the closest one-time friendship would be hard-pressed to surmount all those hurdles. And while Moore and Miller might've been friendly once, they were never close enough that a friendship could've endured as they got older and became radically different individuals.

Still, they're irrevocably tethered together by their shared role in comic book history. They pushed boundaries in very different ways, even in the '80s, but they were both part of the vanguard of the future of comics at the time. That surely pains Alan Moore, knowing how he feels now about Frank Miller, who he claims is "one of the many reasons" he's no longer part of the comic book industry.

Alan Moore's I Hear A New World will be available May 21, 2026 from Bloomsbury Publishing.