I'm fairly certain Moore met Jack Kirby and probably supported Kirby's views about the Stan Lee issue. I don't blame him; Stan Lee could've stopped being such a company man and treated Kirby like an equal instead of a disgruntled employee. That might've made a difference.

It gets pretty tiresome where critics of Moore are concerned. It's easy to take shots at Moore's "sneering". Moore takes on a pretty straight-forward pean of love for Marvel in the early 60s called 1963 and gets derided endlessly. What's the point?

And yet we get Warren Ellis and good old Grant Morrison producing work that is heralded as a "return" to Silver Age story-telling, which is horseshit. And Frank Miller has been churning out flimsy superhero work since DK2. But I don't hear the label of comic book Antichrist when their names are evoked.

Moore isn't any ideal comic book creator of mine, but the man does know comics and does have an abiding love for them. How he filters that through his system is what should be judged.

Blame the comic book companies, and particularly the editors, for Moore's excesses. They flung wide the doors and Moore went with his own flaky impulses; the companies desired change and they got it, and so did the readers.

I have to admit there's one or two Moore stories I like.  Not so with Ellis or Morrison...

I loved Lost Generation, never read 1963, and second anything that is "M2"--the Spider-Girl universe stories.  I even loved the just finished Fantastic Five, as DeFalco seems to have gotten a better hold on characters he used to really struggle writing.

Sorry -- I can't remember ---- where was your office up at Marvel in the early Seventies?

Give us a group of superheroes, one of whom has a Moon for a head, and you're not doing a homage to the Fantastic Four, you're doing a less funny version of the Inferior Five. And the Inferior Five was not a great idea to begin with!