A big part of the Filth is Morrisson really maxing out our empathy for the most disgusting parts of ourselves. This is something he's done well in Doom Patrol, Flex Mentallo, touched on in neWXMen, etc, but surely the whole concept of "The Filth" is about that certain sick epiphany: The Bondage thing. Breaking against the walls of heaven, only to find out you've escaped into a drab, mundane, dirty "real" world where you can see that your own native universe is nothing but a cheap and inconsistent entertainment for children and social retards. Escaping from the hallucinogenic terrors of the Hand to your old identity as... well, if not actually a paedophile then certainly a pervert and, basically, a pretty sad specimen of humanity. Sex with a woman with a combover, whom you don't really care about. A sexual epiphany which makes you shake off the fiction suit you were wearing to that point. Think about the feeling you get when emerging from a masturbatory fantasy in the moments after orgasm. To me, that is the quintessence of The Filth.
On the Four Ideas thing: Way back in the day, Mozza wrote a column at the back of the UK comics 'zine Speakeasy. I think it was called "Drivel". There's one at the back of an issue I purchased for it's (ahem) X-Titles reboot feature ca. 1992 in which GM gives creators a guide to how to sound interesting in interviews. One phrase sticks in my mind "the nineteenth nervous reworking of the good idea you had when you were 17". Oh, and "Next week: What to do about pretentious Morrissey types who need a good kicking." It seems to me that *most* comics writers only have One Good Idea. Don't know if anyone saw Garth Ennis' 'The Pro' this week, but, again, it's just the Ennis Matrix operating on the object of JLA (more or less). Much like 'Dicks' was Ennis Does Sleazy Detectives, or Marvel's new Ennis Does The Punisher. The difference between an idea, a style and a personality is only paper thin. Although I think that Ellis and Moore have metaideas which allow them to incorporate a wider range of material (Ellis' sci-fi obsession and Moore's mysticism) these two writers could also be pigeonholed as having very few "real" ideas: Moore's obsession with time, with magic(k) and mysticism, with human weakness and failure. Ellis' obsession with things that blow up or kill you with spikey bits, with secrecy and conspiracies, with human modification.
Your mileage will vary, but I think that this is part of the human cognitive condition. In 'Don't Read This Book If You're Stupid', Tibor Fischer penned the memorable line "By the time we're thirty we've finished building all the mental roundabouts we're going to build." I know that as I get older the frequency of Big Ideas which are genuinely new to me, as opposed to fretwork on the chords I already know how to play, has definitely decreased.
As a final point, I'd point out that a lot of writers don't even seem to have that many ideas. Chris Claremont had one: What if the X-Men were people and lived soap-opera style personal lives? (And, later, what if all female X-Men had to be turned evil and start wearing very skimpy costumes?) That made him the "hottest" writer in the field for nearly 20 years. Frank Miller has his tough guy schtick and, before that, he had some interesting stories about religion which he told in Daredevil. Ann Nocenti likes morality tales (and, for my nickel, does them well). How many ideas does Scott Lobdell have? Fabian Nicieza? Dan Jurgens?
The prosecution rests. |
. 
