The comments of James Robinson regarding Alan Moore posted last week by somebody who enjoys fanning the flames of enmity, got stuck in my noodle. Alan was saying that the whole comic book industry is a morbid mess of putrefaction. No, actually he didn't say that, those are my words. Whenever you say comic books are crap, somebody always stands up to argue that they are just the way their readers want them to be. And you can't really argue with that. James Robinson is the guy who scripted the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the movie that made Alan Moore swear off any more dealings with Hollywood, the movie that brought about Sean Connery's retirement. ("Connery decided to accept the lead role in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, despite not "understanding" it either. In July 2005, it was reported that he had decided to retire from film-making, following disillusionment with the "idiots now in Hollywood" and the turmoil making the 2003 film."), the movie through which my wife was so bored she spent the whole two hours planning what underpants she was going to wear the following day. Robinson lists all the times Moore employed somebody else's ideas in his work: "And let’s not forget that Watchmen had an ending taken from an episode of the Outer Limits." I've been hearing that Moore purloined this 1963 plot idea in his 1987 masterpiece ever since one of the Hernandez brothers brought it up in a Comics Journal interview and I always figured that one day I would have to check it out for myself, just to see if it is relevant. After the Robinson remark it occurred to me that it is probably now viewable on Youtube. Sure enough, I found it instantly. So let's see how the Outer Limits version of the giant squid materializing in the middle of Manhattan plays out.
(If you give a hoot, watch it before I spoil the plot. It's an hour long)

The Architects of Fear, parts
One
two
three
Four
Five
six

It turns out that there is no squid.
A group of scientists figure they can save the planet from nuclear war by making it look like an alien invasion is imminent. To do this they draw lots and the guy with the short straw is subjected to a series of biological alterations over a period until he looks like a bug eyed alien. Then they send him up in a bogus spaceship with the plan that he will land at the UN general assembly and address the world's representatives with his bogus evil demands.The flight's trajectory goes wrong and he comes down instead in the woods, makes it back to the lab, and dies in the arms of his beloved pregnant wife who was kept in the dark all this time but had started to have suspicions that he hadn't really died in the bogus lab accident. The thing ends in voiceover: "Scarecrows and magic and other fatal fears do not bring people closer together. There is no magic substitute for soft caring and hard work, for self-respect and mutual love. If we can learn this from the mistake these frightened men made, then their mistake will not have been merely grotesque, it would at least have been a lesson. A lesson, at last, to be learned."


Alan's use of the essential idea of manufacturing an alien for the purpose of uniting mankind is turned into such a radically different variation, especially since in this version the plan succeeds where in the earlier one it failed, that I'm not sure why a thinking person would bring the matter up in a debate about the paucity of ideas in the current comic book field.