Alan Moore Month - Lost Girls

Lost Girls
Written by Alan Moore
Art by Melinda Gebbie
Published by Top Shelf Productions. $45.00 USD

Now available as a single hardcover volume, I remember the stir around the 2006 Comic-Con International - San Diego when the first, limited edition, three volume slipcase edition was released. I believe it was touch and go whether the book would debut at the convention at all. Moore was enjoying renewed attention in 2006 with his America's Best Comics imprint and all those quality titles like Promethea, Top 10, Tom Strong and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, so it wasn't a bad time to put out this lavish work.

The book received good reviews, though they were fairly scant, due no doubt in large part to the $75 price and there only being 500 copies printed. But I think there may also have been a reluctance on the part of critics to follow Moore's lead and engage pornography as a valid artistic medium. Although I was one of those who purchased the slipcase edition then, I was surprised to go searching and find I, too, had failed to review the book.

Moore may be a self-proclaimed anarchist, and some of his work reflects those ideals, but the manner in which he constructs his stories, while complex, is rarely very subversive. More often, he uses his intellect to try to recapture elements of a genre or character that gave him delight in the past, but whether he adds darker layers or references or storytelling conceits rare or new to comics, his first intention is entertainment. Watchmen, for everything else going on with it, is a superhero story, and there's a good deal of extraordinary individuals fighting. In Lost Girls, like any pornographic work, there is lots and lots of sex. A shameless amount of it.

In fact, being shameless is the whole point of the book. Moore wants to rescue pornography from the gutter and place it not on a pedestal but at least on a level with other literary genres. Sex, whether with others or oneself, is a regular, necessary part of life, after all, so why not make the facilitator or stand-in for it something of a high quality? To this end he enlisted his partner, Gebbie, who brings a style both feminine and fearless. So much pornography is ugly and harsh and anti-woman, so Gebbie's use of soft, glowing pastels is perfectly welcoming. It's also probably a necessary corrective as it makes the social taboos being violated in the sex scenes more palatable.

Moore has three goals in mind with the book: 1) to get the reader off; 2) to get the reader to think; and 3) to have fun with old literary characters. In the story, Moore has taken Dorothy from Baum's The Wizard of Oz, Alice from Caroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and Wendy from Barrie's Peter Pan, and brought them together as adult guests at a libertine European hotel just before WWI. The three women meet and begin exchanging their stories, as well as copious amounts of saliva and other fluids. Moore models their stories on the literary works, so that over the course of the tale-telling, Dorothy has had sex with farmhands with the traits of The Scarecrow, The Cowardly Lion, and The Tin Woodsman, while Wendy and her brothers are led into sin with the young vagrant Peter, and Alice is raped by a friend of the family nicknamed The White Rabbit. Moore banks on readers recognizing their beloved childhood stories being turned dirty, and it works. Moore understands that achieving the first and third goals requires a combination of not just inventive scenarios but also deft characterization. The brain is the largest sex organ humans possess; naturally situations are more erotic if we can engage the imagination. Moore isn't satisfied with just a lavish Tijuana Bible (and indeed it gets a little dull by the time of Dorothy's third farmhand, despite the addition of a horse), so he also draws on Gebbie's skills of mimicry (and his own) to punch up the book with several pages taken from the hotel manager's "White Book," with stories in the style of legendary pornographers of their day such as Aubrey Beardsley and Alphonse Mucha. Moore seems to be paying homage to those who inspired him and who took great risk with their artistic careers to tell their scandalous stories.

With all three characters, Alice, Dorothy and Wendy, we get variations on dewy innocence spoiled. The nubile virgin being awakened to adult pleasures is a prime fantasy. If Moore only wanted to show these literary characters as sexual beings, getting it on together with no worries, that would have been fine. But what he attempts is to deliver on two almost contradictory ideas and make them work. First, that sex and pornography are necessary and healthy, and second, that sex is never without consequences. Moore has to walk a fine line throughout the book. Wendy's stuffy English husband has been stifling her for years, condescending to her and not considering her needs. His inability to see the hot-blooded woman right before him, and his awakening to his own homosexuality, are presented comedically, as well as with that great old technique of shadows revealing the desires the characters can't say out loud. Wendy's and her brothers' young gropings with Peter have left them estranged and embarrassed, and her not able to tell her husband what she wants. Alice's rape led to endless depravities with her lesbian schoolmistress and eventually, a stay in a sanitarium and estrangement from her family. And Dorothy's own incestuous shame has left her without a family as well. Monsieur Rougeur, who runs the hotel and has staffed it with attractive, willing young servants, embodies the contradictory ideas Moore is putting forth, in that he is not simply a bon vivant with a wonderful, guilt-free pleasure palace, but a man who made his fortune trafficking in child prostitution and art forgery. There is no children's book for Rougeur, but he is just as much a creature of self-deceit and repressed memory as the women. What Moore is saying is that fantasies--sexual or otherwise--are good. Expressing our desires--no matter how dark or depraved they may be--is also good, as long as that expression is through art and not hurting anyone. When we act on these desires in real life, there are always consequences. To this end he sets this bacchanal a few days before the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, which led to the First World War. As a date for a kind of loss of humanity's innocence, it's as good as it gets. It's a remarkable book in that it really does succeed in being extremely dirty, and yet even with the revelations about the characters, there's no guilt. That's not what Moore is after. He wants the reader to be aware of the consequences, but at the same time, to revel with the three women as they overcome their own repressed feelings.