Alan Moore is retiring from comics

Alan Moore, titan of the comics world, told the Guardian that he will be retiring from comics — after finishing up a few outstanding projects.

"There are a couple of issues of an Avatar [Press] book that I am doing at the moment," Moore said in the interview, "part of the HP Lovecraft work I’ve been working on recently. Me and Kevin [O’Neill] 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."

The reclusive and unabashedly counter-culture writer is the co-creative force behind many of the best-known English-language comics of the 1980s. Moore's work made huge contributions to a particular thematic turning point for the medium with books like Watchmen, V for Vendetta and The Killing Joke. At that point in his career he’d also done long-lasting work in many superhero comics — including Green Lantern and Swamp Thing — created John Constantine and produced some of DC Comics’ most enduring Superman stories, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? and For the Man Who Has Everything.

"I will always revere comics as a medium. It is a wonderful medium."

Moore famously left the world of superhero comics following a still unresolved dispute over rights to his original characters with DC Comics, and continued writing for comics with books like Promethea, Top 10 and many others, including From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the first of his books to be adapted into films that he openly derided and famously distanced himself from. In 2014, he announced that he would be retiring from public life after writing a lengthy rebuttal to critics of his use of a racist caricature in a volume of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and recurring themes of sexual violence committed against female characters in his work.

Moore told the Guardian that he feels that he’s accomplished everything he can in comics, and that if he were to continue to work in the medium he would eventually "retread old ground," which he sees as a disservice to both himself and his readers. Instead, he’ll be focusing his energy on mediums where he feels much less sure, like film and "literary novels." His novel Jerusalem, which explores the history of his native Northampton, England, will be released this month.

"I will always revere comics as a medium," he told the Guardian. "It is a wonderful medium."