Some comics creators love to see their work adapted for the screen, gladly taking producer credits and even making cameos. Then there's Alan Moore. The British writer has chat rooms abuzz over his efforts to distance himself from Warner Bros.' upcoming adaptation of his totalitarian thriller V for Vendetta, starring Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving. His beef? Moore is rankled by one of V's prerelease endorsements: his own. It began earlier this year, when Moore got a call from Larry Wachowski (The Matrix), who was writing the screenplay with his brother, Andy. ''I politely tried to explain that for personal reasons, I wasn't interested and didn't want to be associated with it,'' says the famously un-Hollywood Moore. ''I thought that was the end of it, but the next thing I heard, there's a press [conference with V producer Joel Silver] talking about how excited I was, which was simply not true.''
That's really bad news for Warner subsidiary DC Comics, with whom Moore has had a contentious relationship since the company's publication of V and Watchmen in the '80s. Unhappy with Warner's response to his demands for a retraction, Moore announced in May that he was severing his ties with DC next year, after it ships Dark Dossier, a new story from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (which was made into a movie in 2003). Moore, who co-owns the League copyright with artist Kevin O'Neill, will then take the series to indie Top Shelf, publisher of his graphic novel From Hell. Although in the past DC has tussled with Moore over the copyright to V and Watchmen, a source familiar with the flap says that DC did indeed talk to Silver to try to find a solution, but to no avail. (Reps for DC, Warner, and Silver declined to comment.) Still, Moore won't budge. ''I'm a snake worshipper, so I wouldn't want to make too big a point of how reasonable I am,'' he says with a chuckle. ''But everybody seemed to understand why a movie producer would say the things he did, and nobody understood why I was taking the measures I was. That's disappointing.''
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