Snappleshacks wrote:
LoEG/Lost Girls on the other hand don't work without their literary characters intact, because the books are about what those characters represent and their ongoing legacies in our culture.
That's right.  These books work because we have built-in conceptions around the characters being used within them.  If you're not familiar with the childhood myths involved in Lost Girls, then it's not going to really work for you.  But Alan Moore has created plenty of characters (probably more then any other creator working in modern comics).  All of the ABC books -- Promethea (one of the best works from any creator in the last 20 years), Top Ten, Tom Strong, The Cobweb, Greyshirt, Jack B. Quick and the other Tomorrow Stories strips -- the 1963 characters, not to mention stories such as V For Vendetta, A Small Killing, the recent Neonomicom, and the incomplete Big Numbers.  I also consider Watchmen to be original as it really doesn't bear any material resemblance to the Charlton stories -- the deconstructed archetypes could very well have been Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, for what Watchmen finally became in its published form.