I would say Alan Moore’s had a mad one this weekend, but he’s Alan Moore, he’s always on a mad one. If you’ve not heard of him, Alan Moore was a pioneer in deconstructing comics, particularly superhero comics, but he became so jaded and horrified by the industry and the way his works were treated he’s turned against them. Also he’s the closest to an actual dark wizard left.

Anyone, Moore’s distaste for modern comics extends to the movies, in fact given his famed hatred for what people did to his comics when converting them to films, he probably hates the movies more. But in particular he’s been telling the Guardian this weekend how the recent superhero boom contributed to the rise of fascism.

“I said round about 2011 that I thought that it had serious and worrying implications for the future if millions of adults were queueing up to see Batman movies,” said Moore, writer of Batman: The Killing Joke, one of the best Batman stories ever.

“Because that kind of infantilisation – that urge towards simpler times, simpler realities – that can very often be a precursor to fascism,” indeed Donald Trump was elected, “when we ourselves took a bit of a strange detour in our politics” Superhero films were at a height.

The creator of Watchmen went on “Hundreds of thousands of adults [are] lining up to see characters and situations that had been created to entertain the 12-year-old boys – and it was always boys – of 50 years ago. I didn’t really think that superheroes were adult fare… I think that this was a misunderstanding born of what happened in the 1980s – to which I must put my hand up to a considerable share of the blame, though it was not intentional – when things like Watchmen were first appearing. There were an awful lot of headlines saying ‘Comics Have Grown Up’.

“I tend to think that, no, comics hadn’t grown up,” he continued. “There were a few titles that were more adult than people were used to. But the majority of comics titles were pretty much the same as they’d ever been. It wasn’t comics growing up. I think it was more comics meeting the emotional age of the audience coming the other way.”