But Alan Moore has created plenty of characters (probably more then any other creator working in modern comics).


I love Watchmen, League (the first volume anyway) and Tom Strong as much as the next guy but I wouldn't say Moore creates characters so much as he does riffs on existing concepts. Tom Strong is Doc Savage with some Tarzan thrown in, the League and Watchmen are Moore taking existing characters as a starting point and adding his spin. I'd probably call Promethea his most original creation but even she has a strong Captain Marvel element. Like I said, I'm a fan of Moore's stuff (at least, the three works I mentioned.) But in my mind he essentially writes fan fiction rather than creating original concepts and he really, really needs to learn to relax.

Frank Miller created, from whole cloth, all the characters in his Sin City milieu, as well as Martha Washington and The Big Guy. Mike Mignola created Hellboy and the BPRD which encompass a slew of original concepts. As far as creating goes (and by the way, I can't believe you think "1963" represents Moore "creating" something, as it's a pretty straight-up homage to 60's Marvel) Moore isn't in their league. He likes taking other people's concepts and playing with them: HP Lovecraft, HG Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, whoever. (For another fun mashup of Moore's literary idols, look no further than the backup story in the first League book; you have a Lovecraft character and a Burroughs character being part of the same family, and hanging out with Allan Quatermain.) Moore's work is fun, and often great. But it's mostly fan fiction, and the fact that Moore is so damned prickly about it is often irksome. Maybe the ghost of Bram Stoker is somewhere out there screaming impotently about what Moore did to his poor Mina Harker.