I have to chime in with the chorus and say that this new direction for the Wire completely sucks, and I miss the dry news presented in an easily digested format. When the focus groups tell you 'big pictures' and 'more opinions... you know, blog-like', they are laughing into their free chicken behind your back afterwards. This piece on Alan Moore is an insult to him, to you, and to everyone else involved. I'll be looking for news elsewhere now, thanks.

Dear Dog! Worst web redesign ever. What the hell happened?
My god what what an awful new site. Ok there were bits I didn't use on the older site. But for so many years I can't even remember, I came back to SFW every week, ever since the original SFW. How many years is that? SFW was the oldest link in my browser. I could skip the Interviews and bullshit so-called News.

Instead I could get selected Movie, TV & Book reviews, same for web-sites, games etc.

There was a Letters page, you know, for the READERS. (Don't give me an Web 2.0 guff, I'm not an idiot). It had EXCESSIVE CANDOUR. JOHN CLUTE, John Clute, I tell you, the world's most important SF reviewer.
It had........ AN EASY SEARCH BOX.
It didn't load all the crap that some PRO muppet wanted to say about his pet new project .

IT HAD EVERYTHING located off ONE good from PAGE. IT WAS AHEAD OF IT"S TIME in page design.
Jesus. I feel like my brain has been raped. I'm really REALLY pissed off. (Don't give me any of that "we're sorry to hear, but we hope you stick with it" crap either. I have 3 (and a half) Degrees and adult children older than you. I know what the hell I'm talking about).

I hope to Dog at least one of you goes back to design school. Or ever has to work with a customer.
You have no LETTERS page but have an "Opinion" page, where, apparently your readers opinions arent sought. Your Poll page has, ummm, nothing when it should have ONE item: "how bloody awful is this new design?" I can only comment on individual items? Wow, I must be a semi-literate idiot!

I don't normally curse but I'm so dog-dam annoyed over this. You've vomited over the loyalty of all your readers.

I emailed these clowns directly since they no longer want our thoughts.

Moore has been ill-used by Hollywood at every turn. He has every right to spit venom at and disavow his connection to any adaptations of his work. More than that, his desire to do so is completely understandable. I laud his willingness to take a stand and say "My integrity as an artist is not for sale."

One the new SciFi Wire format, well, I miss the old format, particularly the pithy, new-like posts.

i agree with this op/ed . but at this point Moore is aware that he will lose his street cred if he comes out and says something crazy like " wow, this was a terrific adaptation of my work". at the end of the day i'm sure he will get a copy of it and watch it, whether or not he admits it.

Another thing to consider: as bad as any film adaptation of his work might be, it will *never* be as bad as film adaptations of Steven King's novels have been. Not that Moore and King need to compared in any other way...

Oh good, another self indulgent list where the author thinks they are some how smarter or cleverer than the person they are writing about. When did Sci Fi Wire fire their journalists and replace them with fanboys with no frame of reference outside of bad science fiction? The worst part is that these lists only inspire me to write more lists. Well can't fight the inevitable:

1.The scene at the end of the film version of V for Vendetta where everyone wearing Guy Fawkes masks is not about conformity. It's a variation on the "I am Spartacus!" scene. The people of London are showing solidarity with V. They are dressed like V because V is all of us, he is the personification of the common man's will to finally fight back against injustice and corruption at the hands of the government.

2.The use of the phrase, "It can't be as bad as..." implies that you think Watchmen will be a bad movie but better than what you are comparing it to. It's too soon to judge. It might be worse than the other film adaptations of Moore's work.

3.If Alan Moore doesn't want to watch the film versions of his comics, he doesn't have to. If the film version of something I wrote was as bad as Extraordinary Gentlemen, I would shy away from other films based on my work too.

Rorschach, you complain and yet you read and respond. So does that mean you're trying to encourage or discourage lists?

Actually this piece has a lot of interesting info in it disguised as commentary. Although I happen to really like From Hell and V the movies, and I liked most of the Constantine movie, so I don't agree with the writer, but I don't mind reading his opinion either.

And I'm glad this site finally has comments!

I just wish that the writers who create these lists would just come out and say what they really think. For example, Michael Marano, who created this list, should just say, "I Michael Marano, think that I am cleverer than Alan Moore. Even though Moore has been writing comics for thirty years, I think I know more about whether or not he should watch the movie version than he does even though I have never written a comic myself."

Alan Moore said in an interview about LXG, that he doesn't want people to watch a movie and think it is indicative of his other works.

From Hell the movie may not have sucked as much wind of LXG, but in comparison to the graphic novel, the movie is incredibly stale and shallow.

Also, Moore has said repeatedly that he doesn't care about the money, and I think his behavior backs that up, so boosted trade sales and moving more of his older stuff probably isn't going to convince that this movie won't suck.

As a final point, why did this movie need to be adapted? What does this movie do to further the story from the novel? Does if benefit the work or the characters? I just don't see why this movie needed to be made.

Rorschach, you do realize that Michael Marano was a SciFi Wire regular contributor well before the reformat, right?

I think so far you get the same content you used to get, though the ratio between number list "editorials" (eds., blog readers like these but not more than one a day, quality over quantity) "hard news" and "reviews". The problem in this new blogscroll format is that the old version allowed you to skim headlines and pick the content you want. With this format, you need to scroll through a bunch of ledes. I'm also one who prefers to check in SciFiWire once a day and so prefer everything published in one shot, rather than this "breaking news" format.

A lot of these strike me as moves to develop a blog that doesn't have an established audience. A known product like SciFiWire I think may be driving its audience to seek, or develop, other outlets through this change, though I'm hoping bugs and editorial direction are just being worked out and a better product will be up an running shortly.

Ditto. The new site sucks. Bring back Sci-Fi Weekly and the Letters column. At least we had a voice then.

Alan Moore doesn't receive any money from sales of Watchmen trade collections. It's part of why he's so angry with DC Comics. They've deliberately kept the series in print so that they wouldn't have to pay him royalties. If your employer ever kept you from getting money you're earned, you know that's a pretty good reason to hope it fails.

I wrote a long comment about why the new site sucks. I copied the editors directly. Unsurprisingly it hasn't shown up here.

Wow, what a horribly misleading headline, given that the article itself (thankfully) doesn't actually expect Alan Moore to go see a movie he doesn't want to see.

ANOTHER freaking blog-piece? Is news out of fashion now? Couldn't you have found a less-kicked dead horse for a subject? And this assumes that Watchmen will ever actually be released, which thanks to FOX is no longer a guarantee. But then you wouldn't have known that, because you don't report news anymore.

I have to agree with most comments posted here regarding the new direction of Sci Fi Wire - I always made it part of my daily ritual to read it as it was one of the few outlets that provided actual news about everything SF - if I want to read a blog, I'll choose one of the other million out there espousing more opinions that I could care less about. As Joe Friday famously said (and Sci Fi should heed), "Just the facts, ma'am".

Well, that was a long article, but all I can remember is the caning you gave V for Vendetta. V for Vendetta was a superb movie. Great acting, great storytelling, fantastic score, awesome visuals, superb editing, excellent dialogue, and most of all, a very deep, profound and real-world philosophical message. If you missed that I'm sorry to say your loss - and Alan Moore's (and by all accounts the enjoyment of Zack Snyder's delivery of the Watchmen will also be his loss).

This column wouldn't be out of place on a site like JoBlo.com. What is it doing on SciFi Wire?

And yes, I miss the news page. This piece meal feeding
of news bits in fluffed up pages is not a good change.
I will give this site the benefit of the doubt for a few more
weeks - because of old-time's sake. But who am I kidding... I know how it works. The people who told you to remake the site into
what it is now also told you to ignore the criticism of the
first few weeks and "stay the course". Congratulations
on losing another fan.

My views on Moore's comics are incendiary, to say the least.

Moore's work is boring, with a particular lack of focus on a coherent plot. This is particularly apparent in Watchmen, which almost has an ADHD quality about its wandering attention -- why anyone finds the Pirate substory interesting is quite beyond me.

Finally, to throw gasoline on the fire, I happened to enjoy the movies a whole lot better than the comics. The movies, for all their flaws, at least had the virtue of telling a coherent story.

Off-topic, allow me to chime in with my agreement that this new web site sucks.

Which part of the Watchmen story is incoherent? In what aspect is it lacking a plot?

I've always thought that the Pirate story was boring to the point of tears, but I recognize it's significance to the larger work.

Your opinion is almost 180 to my own views, and I'm curious at how you arrived at your conclusions.

Just to clarify, I do believe that Moore has signed all of the rights to movies adapted from his comics work over to his co-creators, so I don't believe he's getting a dime from the Watchmen movie.

As to the look of the site... what a bunch of pissy, whiny babies. This is the first time I've checked out this site, and I have to say that the behavior of the posters here does not make me want to come back.

Ditto Ibsen. I came across this with stumbleupon and things were looking good until I saw the behavior here.

He does not need to "get over it" about this movie. Its his creation and has a right to his opinion. In fact, if anyone has a right to be opinionated about this movie its Moore.

Get over it is right. Watchmen is not "all that" by a long shot and could have easily been filmed 20 years ago, though the effects would be less. But who expects the effects to carry a movie anymore? Was that all anyone was waiting for, or was it simply that the story isn't very good?

Watchmen is a poorly written melodrama, more a soap opera, with the writer so sure that all of humanity is as venal and puerile as he is, that he finds it intolerable to think that anyone, much less heroes, might be better than he is. Watchmen, and Moore's other works, was not an effort to show "real" superheroes, it was an exercise of Moore to tear down those things he has personally failed at. There are plenty of people more smart and more clever than he is.

I agree that Alan Moore has the right to complain about the Watchmen movie and "spit venom" if he wants. He doesn't have to like it and he should say so as much as he wants. But some people here keep referring to Watchmen as "his." Moore was a grown-up who created Watchmen as a work-for-hire assignment for DC and signed a contract, which he read, to do it. His original proposal, as many people here know, uses the Charlton heroes, which he didn't create. He produced a brilliant graphic novel that I've probably read about 20 times since it first came out. But he doesn't own the book, never did, and knew that when he entered into the agreement to do it. He had no reason to believe that he was going to have control over what happened to it if it was adapted into different media.

There were times years ago, closer to when the book was published, that he seemed to think he would be consulted and worked with if there was going to be a movie made. If I'm remembering that correctly, and he did, then that was an assumption. There was nothing in his contract that told him that and no reason to believe that he would be treated any differently than any writer ever has been in Hollywood whether he is Tom Clancy or Tom Newguy. If it was me, I'd be unhappy to see my story get turned into something it wasn't, but I wouldn't complain that it shouldn't have happened. I would understand that it was a work-for-hire situation.

There were creator owned books being done when Watchmen came out and Moore could have done only those, or put his heart into only those, if he chose. But he apparently had expectations he shouldn't have. At the very least, the public and his fans shouldn't be complaining that he was taken advantage of. Just that, if they didn't like the movie, that it was a shame such a bad adaptation was made, the same way it always is. There's a reason the phrase, "The book was much better than the movie" is a common cliche.