Although it's great fun to read Alan Moore grouse for paragraphs about the evils of Hollywood and corporate comics, Salon.com's Andrew Firestone delivers what's probably the best of the latest round of interviews by (mostly) avoiding those topics altogether.

He and Moore instead focus on the writer's actual work -- surprising, I know -- touching upon Lost Girls, Batman: The Killing Joke, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, From Hell and, of course, Watchmen.

"I was doing it [The Killing Joke] at roughly the same time I was doing Watchmen; a lot of my storytelling ideas are identical to the ones in Watchmen," Moore says. "I was pretty much under the influence of the other book, and also I thought that it was very, very nasty.

"I've got no problem with nasty scenes as long as they are for a purpose. There are some nasty scenes in Watchmen, but Watchmen is an intelligent meditation on the nature of power so it is actually talking about something which is relevant to the world in which we all live. Whereas in The Killing Joke, what you've got is a story about Batman and the Joker, and while it did draw interesting parallels between these two fictional characters, at the end of the day that's all they are, fictional characters. They're not even fictional characters that have any bearing on anyone you're likely to meet in reality."

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