Some ignorant turd recently asked "Who fucking cares about Alan Moore?" on the Brian Michael Bendis message board. This was in response to Moore's public statement to Comics Newsarama that he never wants to hear from Marvel again after the publisher went against his wishes in their recent reprint of his Captain Britain work with Alan Davis, with Marvel claiming all rights in the book's indicia.
My response to this staggeringly ignorant question "Who fucking cares about Alan Moore?" is "Anyone who has read comics for more than five minutes and has half a brain cell firing." As I am sure you know, Alan Moore is the best writer to ever work in comics, which is why this idiot's "God" (that's what he calls Joe Quesada...who is a good comics artist and an interesting Editor-in-Chief, but I suspect he'd be repulsed to know anyone called him "God") has bent over backwards to try to get Marvel back in Moore's good graces. There's not another writer in the world that Quesada values more or has tried harder to make amends with. And rightly so. Moore's output over the past 20 years started out brilliant and has only gotten better from there. Any one issue of Top Ten from Moore's ABC imprint, for example, is more entertaining and thought-provoking than a year's worth of Marvel Comics. And Quesada knows this.
I am sure Quesada did not deliberately fuck up the Captain Britain TPB (although someone may have -- it was widely known how important getting this right was, both inside and outside Marvel Comics). Marvel's trade program has been hopelessly fucked up for quite some time. Off the top of my head, I can remember printing errors and other problems with the Simonson Thor volume, the two Frank Miller Daredevil volumes, the Avengers Ultron volume, and the Marvel Boy book. Every one of these was so badly botched that I got rid of them as quickly as I could, despite a great affection for the work in most of them. In every case, you are better off seeking out the original issues than the damaged goods Marvel passed off to readers.
At the end of the day, I am glad this happened. It would be a colossal waste of time and energy for Moore to go slumming in the Marvel Universe. While cape-fetishists may get semi-erect at the idea of a Moore X-Men one-shot or Spider-Man Annual, the chances that that was ever really going to happen are goddamned slim. Moore, a brilliant thinker whether he's writing comics or not, seems to be moving away from kids comics in any event. He even seemed to admit, although politely, that the recent return to the Dark Knight that Frank Miller has made is a step in the wrong direction for the comics artform. In his Newsarama interview, Moore said "I’ve got no interest in re-creating the 1980s. No offense at what Frank’s doing -- I haven’t seen Dark Knight 2, so I can’t really say. But Watchmen, as we said at the time, was something that was supposed to be complete in twelve chapters. It was completed as one book. It was one story. There isn’t any more to Watchmen. There never was."
And, let me say, thank God for that. Miller's D2K is an enormously wrongheaded and ugly project that has managed to stain whatever good memories I had of the original. His graverobbing first issue completely invalidates the ending of the original series to the extent that I've no desire to ever read either the original series or its shambling, garish zombie of a successor ever again. But I'm not Alan Moore. I don't need to be polite to Frank Miller.
It's sad that Marvel's latest fuckup has probably diminished even further the chances of a collected Marvelman/Miracleman, but in the long run, readers with discriminating taste who are interested more in quality storytelling that furthers the artform than spandex strokebooks with stain-resistant glossy paper will benefit enormously from Moore staying as far away as possible from Marvel Comics.