Ed Brubaker hasn't been on John Siuntres' Word Balloon podcast, but he returned yesterday with one hell of a story to recount.

The episode is two hours long, and always a great listen, with Brubaker talking about his work with Sean Phillips with My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies and Criminal, but looking how it began with Sleeper. How his sales went up when he quit social media.

The upcoming HBO Watchmen series came up, Brubaker says that Damon Lindelof wrote to Alan Moore regarding it to let him know what he was doing, knowing he wouldn't approve and would have no interest, and asked not to have a curse placed upon him.

The Alan Moore Curse is a comic book urban legend that suggests that people working on Moore projects that he doesn't approve of, see karma visited upon them.

He was asked to develop the League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen as a TV show, and said that he would but Alan Moore is one of his favourite and most important writers when growing up and couldn't go to sleep at night knowing Alan Moore hated his guts.

Brubaker talked about how he was asked by DC Comics to write an aftermath story to The Killing Joke with Barbara Gordon, as part of a series that rewrote key scenes from Batman history for a comic series. It needed to have flashbacks to the Killing Joke, Brubaker talked about how he didn't want to rewrite Alan Moore's work, so instead took the original dialogue directly, asked DC to credit Alan Moore for it and pay him, but they refused. Brubaker didn't feel comfortable about it, so he wrote a letter to Moore explaining his part in it, that he was wanting to do the right thing and included a cheque for two pages worth.

Brubaker didn't hear back from him, but he did get a call from Moore's then-editor Scott Dunbier at Wildstorm. Moore had called up Dunbier and read him the letter Brubaker had sent him, and told Dunbier that Brubaker seemed like a good guy and should give him work.

This led to Wildstorm hiring Brubaker to write Sleeper, the seminal work by Brubaker and Sean Phillips, which led to their collaboration on so many projects since… and it seems that Alan remembers these events too.

The Alan Moore Blessing rather than the Curse?