If you were one of the many folk who picked up a couple of comics at Icon over the weekend, it may interest you to know that one of the medium’s biggest names thinks you have a bit of a problem.

In a recent interview with Slovobooks, comic-book legend Alan Moore says he thinks that the interest in superheroes exhibited by the current generation of adults is potentially ‘culturally catastrophic’. The author of Watchmen, V For Vendetta and The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen also says that this interest seems to indicate that most adults have given up on trying to comprehend the reality they live in.

“To my mind, this embracing of what were unambiguously children’s characters at their mid-20th century inception seems to indicate a retreat from the admittedly overwhelming complexities of modern existence,” Moore wrote to Pádraig Ó Méalóid at Slovobooks.

“It looks to me very much like a significant section of the public, having given up on attempting to understand the reality they are actually living in, have instead reasoned that they might at least be able to comprehend the sprawling, meaningless, but at-least-still-finite ‘universes’ presented by DC or Marvel Comics.”

“I would also observe that it is, potentially, culturally catastrophic to have the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times.”

In the same interview, Moore also hinted that he wouldn’t be making himself available for interviews in the future and withdrawing from public life.

“I suppose what I’m saying here is that as I enter the seventh decade of my life, I no longer wish that life to be a public one to the same extent that it has been,” he wrote.