I've thought about this article a lot ever since it's been published, and namely I've been very much mulling over how it applies to comics and a big problem they have now:
"We have learned psychology: we know that a person is composed primarily of feelings and experiences. Our feelings determine our experiences, which is why it’s important to be very acutely aware of them. But our experiences can also shape our feelings, and the word for when this happens is
trauma. One of the important functions of culture is to give you a better understanding of the feelings and experiences of others. But it can also show you what happens when your feelings and experiences are out of balance, and maybe, just maybe, how to get them in order again.
This system is fine. It provides a minimally coherent account of the human soul; none of these paradigms are really any better or any worse than the others. But it seems obvious that most of the characters created under the aegis of this system do not remotely resemble actual people. You start with the idea that humans are made of named and identifiable feelings, and then conclude that to invent a believable human, you have to stuff those feelings into everything.
I don’t mean that people never do things that are cruel, selfish, weak, petty, and vicious. But I do not think they ever do it in a way that’s so tediously
explicable. It’s all far too neat; it all makes far too much
sense, this moment on which a person’s entire being is supposed to hang. When actual people act, there’s always an element of the inexplicable at play, the sourceless molten stuff we call human freedom. An abyss in the other, the dark hole of their subjectivity. "
I feel like Moore has sort have engulfed himself into this rabbit hole. His characters, even Rorschach who is designed to have this simple A-B character progression ala a Batman, used to have more mysterious elements. Is this truly what changes him or was he always like this? What are the specific elements that made him *him*? Is he truly a believe in his morality or is it arbitrary? He defends Comedian because he liked the guy, which I think is a deliberate contradiction in order to make him more complex because if he was truly believed in his ideology he would go all the way with it. After all he made this whole point of him hating the people and saying "no" but it's all a front in the end
Now all of Moore's characters are products of pop psychology rather than their experiences, their mind, their matter, their neurosis and even the unknown blackness of the soul. James Bond in the books is a self aware misogynist trying to manage his behavior who hates England for its slow decline but is too jingostic to care, but in the LXG comic he's an innefectual habitual rapist turned King of Britain or whatever who wants to "destroy imagination". I'm sorry but at a certain point you get so sci-fi the character study evaporates. I couldnt tell you if James Bond would destroy the fountain of youth, but I can tell you he wouldnt want to be the leader of anything because the whole point of the character is he's a worn out tool. He's clever and introspective but not really villain material unless you make England itself the villain. Harry Potter gets groomed to be the antichrist, then kills all his friends because they lied about his adventures. Again, he has to contort the characters to fit the themes, but Harry Potter has a ton of negative and jingoistic traits he could've used. Instead he does the pop psychology thing of "le trauma makes him evil", even tho if those experiences were fake the traits these experiences gave him as a person would've prevented him from wanting to do that. The guy already knew in the original books he could potentially turn into Voldemort, he already had an abusive family who lied about his identity, the human brain is resilient to trauma already but especially his brain who doesn't even really care about being the Chosen One wouldn't do this
And I'm not saying this to defend Harry Potter, god no, but his criticism of these properties is based off this weird strawman when the original material gives sooooo much to make fun of. Harry Potter is an ineffectual loser who wont help out literal slaves and needs teachers and friends in order to beat the bad guys for him. James Bond will literally aim a gun at anything foreign because "for England" and basically has life because he's a slave to the state. These are great material for deconstructions but his obsession with psychological realism has ironically made completely unrelatable characters. James Bond and Harry Potter are as two dimensional as Stan Lee's characters but that's intentional: they're made to be relatable and recognizable. We've all known a Peter Parker or Aunt May. Moore either stuffs a ton of feelings into his modern characters in order to make someone who could never exist, or just makes a strawman who actually does resemble someone you could know (a chauvinist who thinks he's smooth or a chav addicted to pills) but it fails to portray the complexity of these rather simple characters because it doesn't dare get in their head like the originals do
Same thing with Quartermain. A hunter with a drug addiction? A guy like that wouldn't be literally rendered incapacitated by his addictions, because for one most people aren't and especially he wouldn't but also people build up drug resistances and if you're a basically immortal fictional character I think you would especially build up resistances
I think I'm just sick of pulp fiction taking it so seriously. We've let writers of Science Fiction and Fantasy who considered "Hemingway" boring for not writing about spaceships try to implement psychology and economics and religious philosophy into funny books while being illiterate commie atheists who think everything is some Freud book they read 40 years ago
Maybe now that he's making a new comic again after saying LXG IV was his retirement he'll actually try this time? Hopefully, he's a smart guy
