“Volume 2 meets the pornographic and offensive standards.”
Here are a few Amazon.com user reviews of some of Alan Moore’s selected works. Enjoy, won’t you?
“Moore’s original burst of inspiration was to take a form of children’s literature – the super-hero comic book – and fuse it with the Hemingway-derived melodrama of the hard-boiled school of crime and detective fiction. Teenagers, poorly-read and possessing malnourished tastes in prose, were predictably awestruck by the results. They thought it was ‘realistic’; they thought this was ‘great literature’.”
“I was quite disappointed with Watchmen. I had heard so many great things about it and was expecting a memorable read. Now that I have read it I’m left with a feeling of ‘What was the big deal?’. […] Three GREAT examples of graphic novels at their best are: Kingdom Come by Alex Ross, the Rising Stars series by J.Michael Straczynski, and The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller.”
“There are people around who insist on comparing this stuff to great works of literature. I wonder if they ever read any.”
“Over-praised and stolen for the most part, WATCHMEN was the first step downward for Moore following his great run on SWAMP THING…from here on out he took himself way too seriously, thought he was much more profound than he actually was, and rapidly became the comic book equivalent of Sting.”
“When I really lost interest however was with the whole Mars thing. I mean it was insipid beyond belief but attempting to be the ultimate in metaphysical insight. The art also stinks.”
“If you’re a comic fan, Watchmen is a harmless waste of a few hours. If you want a real introduction to the comic medium, though, stick to Maus or Hepcats.”
“I would not really call The Watchmen the ‘Citizen Kane of graphic novels.’ It is more like Tarentino’s movie, Pulp Fiction, multiple plot lines, hip references, and plenty of gory violence and power trip fantasies to satisfy a basically adolescent audience. But it is not as good as Pulp Fiction.”
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 1:
“This was one of the worst books i have ever read and i am a big reader. […] I don’t know how people can say its better then the movie because their is no comparison, i mean the movie is not one of the most popular but its still a really good movie and compared to the book the movie show will as many oscars as possible.”
“Filled with racist tones and needless violence, this [expletive deleted] book is complete and total [expletive deleted] compared to The Watchmen. What the [expletive deleted] wass Alan Moore thinking when he wrote this?”
“It’s tiresome except for nerds who want to play ‘spot the hidden reference’.”
“The sex and graphic immorality level was barely tolerable in vol. 1 and rises painfully in vol. 2. Volume 2 meets the pornographic and offensive standards.”
“Unfortunately, Moore did a great damage to the Ripper case, becasue he chose to write about the less convincent theory of them all (but one with the greatest appeal..), that of the Royal COnspiracy, laucnhed in 1976 by writer Stephen Knight, in his book JACK THE RIPPER: THE FINAL SOLUTION. FOr a glimpse of the truth, read Philip Sugden’s THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF JACK THE RIPPER.”
“I got the sense that he pieced together a lot of his own philosphical essays, inserted them into the mouths of various individuals involved with the murders, and packaged it as a graphic novel.”
(headlined “It’s A Big Comic Book!”) “I did not realize when I ordered it that it was just pages of illustrations with TINY LITTLE WRITING coming out of the various character’s mouths. The writing was so small, I could hardly read it, and finally just gave up.”
“‘From Hell’ is boring. I can’t think of a worse sin for any story. At one point, one of the characters decides to go on a tour of London and recite the history of various landmarks to the cabbie. This monologue goes on for some thirty pages, and after forcing myself to read the first few pages, I skipped over the entire section.”
“Moore is a very readable prose writer, but then again so is Stephen King, and he does’t have anything to say either. […] …Any time he tries to write about even semi-serious subjects he comes off sounding like the B-grade sci-fi writer he is at heart. I guess that’s why he finally gave up and went back to writing superhero drivel illustrated by artists more technically competent but less visually interesting than guys like Eddie Campbell.”
“If I were less familiar with some of the books Moore had drawn from, perhaps I would have liked it better, but I think Moore is trying for the umpteenth time to be seen as some literary figure for a work that was lifted from what someone else wrote.”
“I picked this up because i was interested in the controversy surrounding the movie. I read 40 pages and returned it to the book store. all the book is, is Christian bashing. this book is disgusting, please stay away from it. do not buy this book, it is terrible and blatantly anti-Christian”
“What is Moore trying to say with this book? It sounds and looks like something a seven year old kid would write and draw. Only in Moore’s case, maybe it’s more like Norman Bates.”
“I found it to be very two-dimentional and introspective. It reaches for an epic scale, but comes across like an adolescent in-joke. This graphic novel might play better to youths than Moore’s other works- but clearly NOT to adults.”
“In the scene where he broadcasts a message via a TV station, he plainly states that we are just animals, fresh off the tree. And this was the exact view that Hitler, for one, used to justify his campaign of killing the unwanted: the old, the infirm, the mentally ill, gays, Jews.”
“I’ve been reading that the movie version […] is not all too faithful to the actual comic, and I can only hope that this is true. Hopefully the Wachowski brothers re-vamped and pumped some much-needed life into this story”
“Good story. A bit over the top. The ending is so-so. The art is poor at best. The movie will make up for that though.”
