The Scribbler by Daniel Schaffer

Read a brilliant graphic novel called The Scribbler by Daniel Schaffer recently. It's about a girl who uses an experimental device that burns through her alters/personalities in her dissociative identity disorder [formerly known as multiple personality disorder.] Great book, and interviews with the author were fascinating.

Interview with Dan Schaffer (Dogwitch, Indigo Vertigo) - The Comics Review Forums

...Being allowed to be creative to your fullest potential is the most important thing in the world for me. Being trapped in offices, following other people’s routines and rules is, it makes my brain sweat like a caged tiger. It’s not that my body wants to get out and run around, but my mind does. Chaining my head down to solving someone else’s problems is slow death. I did that for long enough to appreciate where I am now.

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I'm an individualist, I suppose. I see a lot of interesting and imaginative people being reduced to a series of ticks and crosses in their everyday working lives by uninteresting and unimaginative people. Corporate drones with a hive mind mentality. There are probably lots of benefits to having a business running like a well-oiled machine, but the side-effect of that is the destruction of individuality. And that slowly becomes the criminalization of individuality. Individual technique isn't allowed to develop anywhere because everyone has to do the job the same way to get the right amount of ticks in the right boxes.

COMICON.com: SCHAFFER: A SCRIBBLER AT IMAGE

Modern society denies most of us the right to develop identity and original character traits in our everyday working lives because now everyone has to do the job the same way to get the right amount of ticks in the right boxes. Personality traits, identity markers, style, ability, it's all pigeon-holed and scrutinized and usually frowned upon unless it fits a pattern some guy you never met made up for you. THE SCRIBBLER came from the question, if someone invented a machine that could make us act just like everybody else, how would we react to it? The optimistic answer is that our individuality would rise to the challenge and fight back - it would tweak the machine for its own ends and use it against its creators.

...The story of THE SCRIBBLER isn’t about the mental disorders; it’s about he creation of archetypes, and the human tendency to view things in black and white. It challenges the acceptance of “good” and “evil” as accepted universal truths. If you’re going to suggest that there is no such thing as “good” and “evil” then you really have to offer up some kind of alternative. So my alternative here is psychological and neuropsychological understanding. A scope that’s at least as big as your mind, obviously, and probably as big as the universe! It’s an area where you have to take time to figure out the difference between sociopathic disorders and dysfunctional behaviour. You can’t just point and say, “That’s the bad guy!” It’s about remembering the details. One line of dialogue in the book reads, “They say madness is culturally relative” and the book tries to stay close to that observation. It denies any black and white answer to its questions and aims straight for the grey areas.

...because understanding psychology may possibly be the only sensible way forward for the human race. I’m not talking therapy or padded cells or self help groups, I’m talking about neuropsychology, angles of perception, cognitive behavioural patterns, synaptic biology. That stuff. I’m sure that’s where the truth is hiding, just under the surface. We’re so quick to point blame or demonise people, whether it’s Marilyn Manson’s fault, or Brett Easton Ellis’s, or whoever, but the real reasons are more complicated. In fact, they're insanely complicated. I’m looking for genuine understanding of human nature.