Alan Moore is Full of Shit

 

“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,” Moore said. “Because that kind of infantilization – that urge towards simpler times, simpler realities – that can very often be a precursor to fascism.” -Alan Moore

I have never liked this quote. Ever. Something about it has always felt wrong, and the fact that it has been pushed so freaking hard as of late has not warmed me to it. If anything, it just dredges up all the reading I've been doing and fills me with a rant. So take this for what it is: a rant. Alan Moore's wrong. Just period. He's using Communist-style propaganda and his clout to confuse people who think he may be a truly great writer. Facts don't really agree with him, and I don't think my interpreation of said facts is really that far off.

Here's what we got. 

Alan Moore claims to be an anarchist: no leaders. He regards all leadership as inherently oppressive. And there is some truth in this: the definition of government is the monopolization of force. An organization has decided that it should be the only one to have the right to kill people. That's a government. Some of you will have shuddered at that. Some of you either weren't bullied as kids, or you forgot how most bullies stop bullying you: you make them. You stand up and make a stand of force that's so overwhelming the bully leaves you the fuck alone. I had to do this at twelve, against a whole freaking neighbhood of kids. One day they attacked my six year old brother.. a group of thirteen year olds. Yeah, a group of thirteen year olds had attacked a six year old boy. I had let them bully me for years. I could have stopped them, but frankly I didn't really want to do what needed to be done. But this was it. That was my brother. And the bastards were going to pay.

I remember very well how onerous I found it: I had to fight, ambush, and intimidate an entire group of people. By myself. And I did it. By the time I was done with that neighborhood all who had bullied me and mine without cause for five years were begging me to leave them alone. And I do mean begging. As in, they sent a delegation of their smallest and most vulnerable (they noticed I didn't go after their little siblings, the cowardly fuckers) to sue for peace. They agreed to leave me and mine alone and I agreed that I would no longer stalk them openly in the streets, my taunts in their ears. I would follow them and yell obscenities at them until they would attack me.. and then I'd beat them in front of their friends. I'd embarrass, break them in front of their friends, who for some odd reason decided that they didn't want to find out what would happen if they went after me right then and there.

By Alan Moore's and most modern comic writers' metrics, I should be a supervillain. 

I'm not. 

Oh don't get me wrong, I've got a lot of anger, sure! I'm still working through the anger of watching my family get picked on mercilessly, and frankly I've got enough abuse leveled at me for three or four people. But that has nothing to do with the violence I did. It is a hard instrument to wield, but your intention in picking it up really does make all the difference. I wanted my siblings safe, and so therefore I picked up the tool of violence. It is not addictive, if anything the work is repulsive and brutal and if you have any soul in you at all you will avoid it as much as you can for the rest of your life. In fact, most of the infrantrymen I've met have a strange nobility and honor to them that is hard to truly define. If anything, the experience with violence and killing seems to have done something to them, made them make a decision that made them better. You can't know it until you see what I'm talking about. So Alan Moore is just flat out wrong in this aspect, on an obvious level.

A government is an organizing body who has a monopoly on violence. Which is not corruptive on a very obvious level.

But even beyond that, the idea of an anarchist, whose philosophy led to many a mass murder (they were the original "blow up places of huge public import!", the godfather of all school shooters in America today) having the gall to call superheroes a precursor to facism is so obviously hilarious that I could end the essay right here. The guy who shares an ideology with mass murdering fools is telling me that superheroes are bad for me? Sure, Mr. Moore, what are the historical consequences of your worldview again?

Oh, wait, that's right, the mass scale deaths of the very people you're trying to save. Watchmen sure looks ironic at this point, doesn't it?

But that's really not the worst of it. The worst of it is that, historically, his words have some really really clear connections. See, anarchism eventually gave way to Marxism: instead of just trying to blow up the upper class they hated, the upper class who thought they had sympathy for the working class organized to try and sting the populace into action. What they found was shocking: the upper classes they thought were evil were just mostly ignorant of the working class's pain. As it turns out, the nobles were actually noble enough. 

If you are looking at today's elites and going "But what about them?" you really must start asking yourself the content of today's elites' education versus then, and actually do some deep soul-searching on what noblesse oblige really might mean. I do not claim it is 100% effective, nor am I doing anything other than asking the question.

Anyways, the nobles were actually noble enough, and actual change began. This put the Marxists in a bind: they thought the revolution was coming, while it objectively grew less and less likely with each protest and rally! Even in Germany, the heart of Marxism, the force of objective reality was beginning to win out.  So the reformed school began to form, and by 1913 or so the Marxists, the ones who thought revolution inevitable, were more or less the minority. We call the descendants of the reformed school democratic socialists.

But over in Russia the elites laughed and came up with what we now know as Communism, or Leninism, etc. See, part of the dirty secret of Marxism is that it was never a movement of the people, but a weaponizing of the people by the elites for their own supposed good. That's true of all socialism, for the record, but the Russians reached the logical conclusion: if the common people will not rise up we will do it for them. 

And thus began the Bolshevik Revolution.

We talk about Nazis a lot these days. I'm not saying not to. Nazis are evil bastards and anyone who says different needs to get their head examined. But we have a kill count for the Nazis, no matter how approximate: about 17 million people, by way of a quick Google search. Holy. Shit. That's a lot of people. That's monstrous. What an awful thing to have happened!

But that's chump change.

The Soviets we can't get a number on, for sure, but the minimum death count for the Soviet Union is 28, 326,000, by way of a Google search. 28. Million. People. That's one and a half times the Nazis, and that's us being conservative and kind to the Soviets, and they don't deserve that. If we were liberal and vicious it could be in the neighorhood of 126, 891, 000. But even that we don't truly know. That's over ten times the Nazis. That's actually maybe more than the Chinese, who are still actively killing people today! But yes, somehow facism is the problem.

You know that saying "Silence is compliance?"

Oh, you want to know where I'm going with this? I mean, sure, these are all awful facts and figures and whatnot, but why am I doing this? I just accused Mr. Moore of being in cahoots with the Soviet Union, that's a pretty awful thing to say, not to mention probably unfounded, not to mention where are you going with this Nathan???

Look over that history I just presented. Look over it. Like, really look over it. Communism or Leninism, the one party state, whatever it is you want to call it, did not occur first. Anarchism, the belief that no human can handle power, came first. When that didn't work the Marxists stepped up. And when they failed to bring about the revolution someone else said "Okay, we'll make it happen then!" Pretending that theMarxists and then Communists weren't influenced by the stuff  going on in Europe isn't just factually inaccurate, it's naive; the Socialists talked to each other internationally frequently and often. They were an openly international brotherhood, by their own proud admission. The Anarchists did not organize, but they wrote funny little pamphlets that said "You should kill your boss, 'cause if you did your awful working conditions would improve". And then they dropped them off in neighborhoods and watch as the blood started. And everyone knew about this, internationally. So yes, the Communists reacted to the Marxists who reacted to the Anarchists. It's one long river of blood.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and power is as natural as it gets. As is hierarchy. So, Mr. Anarchist, when you start killing people in the streets so they run red and terrify the entirety of Europe, because as it turns out you were never on the side of the people, you create a vacuum of violence. And nature loves filling vacuums. The consequence of "no one can have power" is inevitably someone taking power over you. And then killing so quickly and quietly that we still can't figure out the kill count, decades later.

But the thing that clinches it, at least for me, is that the words facist and reactionnary are specfically Communist insults. If you said anything against the Party you were called a facist or a reactionnary. In fact, Solzhenitsyn was frequently told by former colleauges that his writing of the Gulag Archipelago, a work that insults the Nazis as rank amateurs in the world of genocide was written because he'd been corrupted by facistic thought. 

The guy who couldn't stand Nazis and thought they were just garden variety assholes was accused of being a facist.

So, for you leftists who like to throw that word around, congrats, you're in the fine company of a government whose kill count cannot be properly ascertained. As is Mr. Moore. The garden variety leftist can be forgiven for such things, given that all leftists I've talked to are ignorant of the Soviet Union. Mr. Moore should know better. 

The thing is that, if you shame people into thinking that the law is the only way force can be used (which is an inherently Communist tactic) you create a vacuum. One which others will think that they have a right to. And they will. You can't say "Eh, that can't happen, no one would do that!" because it did, and we still don't know where they put all the bodies. To say "no one should have power" and to say "to idealize those who vanquish evil-doers is bad" does nothing for the people who will ignore that statement, because humans have a habit of not following the directions. And if the people who actually mean well think of violence and force as inherently evil things then they will stand aside and let themselves be steamrollered.

The folks who went to see that Batman film, Mr. Moore, did so because there is some part of the human soul that knows that violence, although a grave force that should never be picked up lightly, is not inherently evil, that it is not evil to rejoice in the defeat of the bandit and the looter, and that sometimes it is perfectly fine to say "Well, he certainly had that coming". To conflate the catharsis of seeing the bandit and the looter defeated (even if you must do it yourself because of the incompetence of the government) with an addiction to violence will lead to the very power vacuum (and thus totalitarian government) that Mr. Moore professes to hating.

At best Alan Moore is a useful idiot.

Regardless he's full of shit.

My Issue with Most Modern Comics

 

No, Zeb Wells, good is indeed something you are. God, what a stupid panel. See how dumb that is? Just, the whole panel? I love JRJR's art and even I have to admit this just poorly drawn. I feel bad for the inker, 'cause man did he have his work cut out for him or what???

Yes, she's dying, as opposed to something else that historically was compared with death.

Beyond just how bad the above panel (and the book it comes from) is, it sums up my issue with the modern "style" of comics. Comic books, sequential art, are about reincorporation: each new image, paired with its text, is put atop the old images and text, and your brain combines these images into a narrative, because narrative is one of the central functions of the human being. This isn't the same as animation, although it's a related excercise. Text is layered together with these images to allow you to fill in the gaps that the pictures didn't address, like dialogue. Because of this, comics are extremely difficult to pull off, and not, I REPEAT NOT LIKE MOVIES. The same rules for shots that you use for movies do not apply to comics, and never did.

So that above panel? That's nonsense. It's a transitioning shot showing Kamala dying. Here's the rest of the page so you can see:

This is not a good page. These seven panels would actually make a much better splash page... okay the dialogue would actually have to be good too. Which this isn't. But even so, none of these moments really add anything to the story. It's one moment, and if you're going for gigantic impact you splash it all over the page. If you were going to actually go for a good story flow without it being a splash page you could do this instead:

Those two two panels are instead one larger panel of Kamala momentarily panicking, with the whole "something's wrong", with Peter freaking out in an inset panel. You then have the same panel set up for the second row, with even the left panel being mostly the same, except Peter's calming down.... but the right panel is a close up on Peter's hand encircling Kamala's hand. The bottom row could actually stay pretty similar... but JRJR would actually need to try. He can draft a hell of a lot better than what that page shows.

Now, you can argue "But Nathan, c'mon, this is a bad page. "And yes it is, but it's pretty emblematic of my issue with most modern comics: the images don't really add much to each other. There isn't really a narrative. Don't believe me?

This one section is actually really long, and it's masterfully done. Each panel in all of these pages adds new information, shows Spidey's resolve slowly overcoming the rapidly disintegrating world around him. If you want to do slow, this is how you do it. Peter's claim that he has the strenght of many men is deliberately contrasted against the heavy machinery. You then move in to place more emphasis on his resolve to unlock his potential. You then jump to him trembling and then the next panel actually shows less trembling because he's getting ready. You then get a panel where he doubts he can do it... and then he starts to do it, come hell or a flood. Each of these panels is a new piece of information for the reader to fold into his narrative.

He then addresses the fact that he's about to drown... which makes him doubt again, but only for a moment and then he starts to stand up. And up.

AND UP.

Part of the reason why this works is how immaculately words and pictures are piled on each other. Nothing is wasted. There is no stray image or word. It all builds on each other. My issue with modern comics isn't that they want to do slower storytelling, but that so few books are actually written like frickin' comics, but like movies and TV.

It's things like that abortion of a page that make me want to write comics. Probably not a good enough reason, but I'm over here, looking over my supply list, folks. It's coming. 

Fuck this horseshit I'm back.

How BoTW and TOTK Inspired My Design

I have made no secret of my love for BOTW. The reason I'm not writing about my love of Tears of the Kingdom is because I'm busy playing Tears of the Kingdom please go away. But, as I was playing and not writing and not studying for my Security Plus test, I realized just how much of what these games are has really informed the way I design games. And, I mean, I have one game out (Apex, check it out here!) so that does make me a published designer... kinda. 

Point is.

I have an opinion, totally non-existent clout, and a blog. Read at your peril.

I’m also not making the case that I used the following consciously. I started designing Crescendo two years ago, so this is more of a hindsight being 20/20 than any else. Any snarky comments about me attempting to capitalize on the current TOTK craze can be shut up by even a cursory glance at this blog: I’m not exactly blogging for the views!

Both of these games do a lot, but it's all towards the same goal: crafting your own story. And the way that they do this is actually really interesting. By making different classes of narrative events and sprinkling them acrost the map, BOTW/TOTK make narrative inevitable, because you picked a direction and you walked.  

But first, the  trick to TTRPGs and BOTW/TOTK is reincorporation. Reincorporation is defined thusly by dictionary.cambridge.org:

"the act of making something part of something larger again after a period when it was not part of that thing"

TTRPGs reincorporate on a level that's impossible to overstate. TTRPGs are reincorporation unchained. And BOTW/TOTK is reincorporation on steroids. They do this with what I call trailers: you see an item and pick it up, planning to use it later. BOTW/TOTK just showers you in this class. It's this "use it later" that's so important. The beginning of the reincorporation beings here. The rest of the game are classes of reincorporations.

So what are the classes?

• Transitions: climbing, flying, swimming, building, anything that transports or prepares you to transport without walking. 
• Cooking: grab Trailers known as food and make new, better Trailers with them!
• Conflicts: Obviously, fights. TOTK does this way better than BOTW just in about every way possible, what with the ability to fuse weapons and stuff to your arrows and just the ability to throw things, in general.
• Rewards: different from Trailers because you actually have to work to get these, via shrines, combats, quests, etc.
• Story: Dragon's tears and quest endings are the usual story beats, but something happens to make you feel like you're telling your own story.

Once you start combining the trailers with these elements you create reincorporation and thus a narrative. But it usually doesn't stop at just the trailer to another event: you usually string all these events together with Trailers along the way, weaving your own narrative of play. And then, by providing a guided framework of quests you actually increase the reincorporation, because the handing out of a quest is itself an event, and thus fits into the string of narrative. 

BOTW/TOTK are easily the best reincorporation video games on the market today, probably ever. Both games are essentially complete TTRPG engines put into a videogame: they take each of the classes and give them little rules. Nothing terribly deep or difficult, but wrinkles that let you reincorporate the Trailers just a bit differently for each class. So, if I’m in combat I’ll be using the Trailers I picked up very differently than for transitions or even story beats. The thing that makes this work is how flexible the system is, allowing you to fulfill the promise of the Trailers in many unexpected ways. 

And all so that everything you do makes you want to explore more. Everything. The experience is holistic, grabbing all these little things that most open-world designers don't even consider and making them integral to the experience. So, when I started designing Crescendo and my other games I looked at the tabletop experience in entirety and asked "How can I make it work to the design goal of character and setting development?" And when I say the experience, I mean players missing sessions, as well as how visitors usually end session, as well as best practices. such as journaling.

Journaling is essential to a good roleplaying game. The GM forgets stuff, the players forget stuff, and it's not hard to see why; most stories happen over the course of at least a month, making it difficult to remember details. The problem is that journaling is a pain in the ass and isn't directly a part of the gameplay... usually. I am going to be changing that in all of my games, to make journaling itself a part of the game. So far I've used journaling as a means of constructing Trailers in a method I've dubbed Hitting the Books: open up to a random page you know there's writing on, close your eyes, and put your finger down on a random passage, and read it aloud for the GM to stitch together. When you write down a passage you know it'll probably come back later, but you don't know how it will influence the game. My game Apex is entirely about Trailers and making new ones as quickly as possible.

People are going to miss sessions. It happens. There's no way it won't happen. But if you give mechanics for missing sessions and let that absence matter, turning an absence from a bummer to a Trailer. In Crescendo players answer a few questions when they come back, allowing them to just make up new lore right off the cuff. This creates huge twists in the story, allowing the story to twist and turn all on its own, without the GM's constant intervention. This one little change can really make a huge difference in the flow of your game, and I can't recommend it enough.

RPGs are normally an insular activity; because of the long-running format of most American games new people usually have an awkward time incorporating into a previously existing group, needing to be caught up on story they weren’t actually a part of previously. Worse, friends or family who are visiting are a virtual guarantee of missed players or even canceled sessions. So I’ve crafted rules in Crescendo, The Truth Found in Death, and Great is the Difference, for Visitors! Crescendo utilizes Servants, powerful spirits that serve the immortals, and The Chorus, minor spirits who basically can mess around and do whatever they like. Crescendo's visitor rules are defined by the fact the characters they play are specifically passing through, and do not know what is currently going on; this allows visitors to have a great impact without needing to get up to speed on things. The Truth Found in Death doesn't have visitor mechanics strictly,  but it does have nephilim, powerful and bloodthirsty characters that cause a lot of trouble; this allows people to show up, kill a bunch of people, and then walk off into the sunset. Great is the Difference will let visitors play The Grizzled, heroes from a prior generation who retired and who are having a bad day. So the visitors get to walk in and screw around and walk away, with the regular players holding the bag. It's fantastic.

Beyond putting making the experience of the table into the game rules itself, I deliberately have made each mechanic do something different within the story of the game. Each mechanic, similar to BOTW/TOTK, is deliberately set to change the narrative in a pre-determined way, allowing the players to make a narrative more easily, as well as defining actual ending mechanics. Reading "World Ending Game" blew my brain clean open. Endings are hard to do if you know what you're doing, and isn't the point of an RPG that you're not really supposed to know what you're doing, you're playing a game? So all my games have some form of transitioning and ending mechanics: Crescendo has Book mechanics, with unexpected consequences and satisfying endings that require almost no effort on the part of the GM. You have to read the book and just follow the directions. With these more meta mechanics in place you just play and don't worry about where it's going. The Truth Found in Death has story transitions and endings based upon the type of character classes playing in the session. Great is the Difference has a deliberately formulaic story structure, allowing players to focus on kicking ass and taking names, right there in the moment.

All this is all well and good, but it doesn't matter if the actual mechanics that we're usually familiar with aren't integrated into these more holistic systems. But in my three games they do: Saves in Crescendo push all these mechanics forward, everytime, The Truth Found in Death does the same with Struggles, and the meta structure of Great is The Difference dictates when you roll at all! Pushing on anything in any of these games moves the gears in unexpected ways, creating situations that are practically a cakewalk for the GM to run. Just figure out when the basic mechanic triggers and watch the fireworks ensue. And that feeling of "I just decided to do X and then all this crap hapened" from BOTW/TOTK is the core of everything my designs. As I begin to close the writing on Crescendo and look more to The Truth Found in Death and Great is the Difference, I've come to really appreciate how these two Zelda games have influenced everything I've done.

Life Story is Bullshit

 Look folks, it’s no secret Spidey comics have been stupid for a long time, and it’s even less of a secret as to why. But Zdarsky has been hailed as some genius writer who’s saving Marvel, and Life Story particularly has been acclaimed as one of the modern classics. And I’ll give those folks this much: Life Story is certainly better than 90% of Post-OMD Spidey. And yes, I'm glad that someone with a whisper of a potential of talent wrote a book for Marvel. But that doesn’t mean it’s more than mediocre, nevermind a classic. This is not a case of people loving a work because it's good,  but because the bar is so low at this point that anything not truly awful will be called amazing. I'm honestly scared of public taste as of this point.

Let’s get the good out of the way: Bagley is firing on all cylinders. His designs, layouts, action, expressions… this is honestly top notch. Bagley’s a classic Spidey artist for a reason, and he brings his trademark energy and emotion on a level I’ve not seen since Ultimate Spider-Man. Bagley takes the script and makes it pant with life. I felt the story all the way to my core because of Bagley's expressions and storytelling.

And yeah. The art’s pretty much it.

I’m going to cut to the chase: Chip Zdarsky ain’t a good comic writer. He could be! He’s got a good enough grasp of raw human emotion to where if he used a plot generator (and don’t pretend the greats didn’t) he could put in some true pathos for his plots. But Zdarsky is too obsessed with ruminating and big emotions to set them up properly. The fight with Norman at the end of issue one? It’s so badly set up it’s actually funny: Peter’s spider-sense would have seen the trap coming miles away, literally. Throwing in Miles at the end was boneheaded. And don’t get me started on Kraven and Venom’s total botching! I have no unearthly idea why people like this comic. Nothing is set up. Nothing is really paid off.

But the real fly in the ointment is Gwen Stacy. Zdarsky has a revolutionary idea with her… and then uses the decade time skip between each issue to resolve it, in a truly petty way. Instead of allowing the consequences to play out Gwen is swept under the rug, creating questions about Peter no one should be asking about their protagonist. The pettiness of the decision is impossible to ignore for me, it screams "I want my definitive take on the character and this plot point is something I want to get out of the way". The decision actually riles me up thinking about it, because that was the good idea, Chip, and you swept it under the rug. I don't like seeing a good idea put down, and Zdarsky puts this particular idea down with an electric chair execution, where the victim doesn't actually die in the first few seconds and is zapped to death in front of everyone, eyes rolled into the back of the head in a way that lets everyone else know they're still alive, thank you very much.

Yes, that happens a lot with electric chair executions.

Yes, death by firing squad is the most merciful way to execute someone, still.

A review says as much about the reviewer as it does about the work; a good review is ultimately about seeing the perspective of the reviewer meet the work and the perspective in it. And frankly I find myself disgusted by Zdarsky’s perspective. Part of it is that if there’s a petty line he can put in a character’s mouth he’ll do it. Part of it is that he can’t avoid stupid things like Peter wondering if his spider sense reacts to Osborn because he’s a capitalist… while somehow missing the ten pumpkin bombs seeded around the building. 

But the greatest fuckup is that Zdarsky perpetuates the myth that Peter is made unhappy by the existence of Spider-Man, that his power is an influence that must be fought at all costs, as a vent for his guilt over Uncle Ben’s death. 

Spider-Man elevates Peter Parker. That's a basic tenet of the character from the Lee/Ditko days, and it's one that modern writers have forgotten, much to their detriment. And yes, it appears to be an ideological failing on their part. Power does not corrupt, power magnifies, and whatever you got rattling on in your skull loses all illusions of privacy with it. And denying that, by using that tired leftist “Power is for me to endure so you won’t be corrupted by it” shit looks so bad on Peter Parker, so transparently contrived, that honestly I couldn’t recommend this comic to anyone.

This is a middling comic, and that’s all because of Bagley doing a wonderful job. But given how awful the rest of Marvel has been doing recently? Yeah, it's hard to remember that less smelly turds are still shit. The plotting simply isn't good. Zdarsky is so freaking excited to get to the ideas that made him feel something that he forgets that the math of the plot still has to add up. It doesn't. Nevermind that his "big feeling moment" is simply not. In the hands of a proper editor (aka NOT Nick Lowe) who would actually challenge and push, Zdarsky would actually be a pretty decent writer.

He doesn't.

So he's not even decent.

Jeez the main scene in comics has gotten bad.