One thing is for certain -- you won't forget reading Alan Moore's and Melinda Gebbie's Lost Girls. Just in case you don't know, this lovely bit of erotica was a continued story (strict eight-page installments) in the pages of Taboo and elsewhere. It was completed and collected by Top Shelf and the volume I read was the expanded edition from Knockabout. Before commenting on the story itself, let me applaud Melinda Gebbie on some of the prettiest comic artwork I've ever seen. She works in a soft pastel style well suited to this material and that is often contrasted with other images supposedly from lurid tales which our characters draw inspiration from. Who are those girls? No less than Alice of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Wendy from Peter Pan and Dorothy from The Wizard of OZ. They are grown women in this story which reveals to us the somewhat sordid "truth" behind those children's classics.
Book One introduces us to the women. Alice is an older lady who has been shuttled over to Austria to hide her lesbian sexual appetites from polite British society. She takes up residence in Monsieur Roget's hotel where he has arranged for it to be the setting for sexual escapades of all kinds. Each room is supplied with The White Book which has counterfeit erotica in it to inspire the guests. Dorothy is a young woman fresh from America who is sexually adventurous. Wendy is a married woman to a man much older than herself and she is rather repressed by her husband and society's expectations in general. By the end of the first Book the three women have become friends and tentative lovers, at least in the case of Wendy. Alice and Dorothy are not timid.
Book Two showcases how the three women continue to explore their sexual fantasies with one another and the hotel staff when available. As they share one another physically, led by Lady Alice, they also tell their stories which are cast in terms similar to the famous episodes from the children's stories they all star in. We discover that Alice was interfered with when she was young and her later inclinations to lesbian behavior were encouraged and later preyed on by her older tutor, and who is married to a rich man oblivious to his wife's wanton ways. Drugs become a part of her sexual experiences. Dorothy is a randy young woman isolated on a farm who finds she enjoys sex and opens herself up to the hands on her "Uncle's" farm who it turns our come to resemble a famous scarecrow, lion and metal woodsman. Wendy and her brothers find a young male prostitute named Peter who introduces them to sexual pleasures on summer in the hidden manicured woods of a local park. We encounter these stories blended together and peppered with great deal of explicit sexual activity.
Book Three tells us what happens after the assassination of Duke Ferdinand. The rumors of war cause the hotel to clear out and for a time it allows those who are interested in becoming more open with their sexual escapades a grand opportunity to do so. The three women are now far along in their storytelling and the darker aspects of their tales begin to emerge. The lightness of the earlier pages suggested darker secrets and now we learn them, though the revelations prove to be a boon to the three women who are the last to leave the hotel just a day or two before troops arrive to destroy it. The shadows of war wipe away the innocence which was never innocence, but neither was it the horror of death and utter destruction, the inevitable legacy of war.
This book is not for the faint of heart. The images are at once exceedingly graphic as is Moore's dialogue. But likewise, they are eloquent and even charming. I've long wanted to read Lost Girls, fascinated by the notion that these three children's book icons would be treated in a new way. To prepare I read both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, as well as Peter Pan and The Wizard of OZ. While I knew the stories well enough, I suppose, I'd never actually read the actual texts before in all my many years on this planet. At the very least Lost Girls pushed me to fill that gap in my learning. Without that understanding Lost Girls might disintegrate into just some pretty pornographic images, but the book is much more than that.
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Nicely drawn porn is still nothing but porn and this is certainly not a book I'll ever read. Not so much because of the porn angle, but because it uses other people's characters and imposes something on them that the original authors would be horrified by. I've met Alan Moore a couple of times, and though he was perfectly amiable, I find it difficult to overlook his attack on Stan Lee, attributing things to him that he was innocent of. (Stan never claimed to have created Captain America, as Moore claimed.) Also, for someone who so vocally resents other writers using 'his' Watchmen characters, he has a cheek to not only use other people's characters (public domain or not), but to impose his own sexual fantasies onto them. It's particularly hypocritical of him, as Watchmen were little more than stand-ins for Charlton heroes to begin with. Yes, he's written some good stories, but he's also written more than his fair share of crap.
ReplyDeleteMy point is that this is well drawn and not just porn, but leaving that aside, I tend to agree with your criticism of Alan Moore's critiques of other talents who have used pre-existing characters. He's made a career of it. More than a few talents from the Bronze Age have bickered about the lack of ownership of their creations, while at the same time making a career using the creations of others already owned by the company, be it DC or Marvel or some other publisher. Moore's reticence to let others play with his Watchmen toys (especially given that they were dark copies of the Charlton "Action Heroes") is really not justifiable. I don't idolize Alan Moore by any means, I'm just getting into some of his stuff, but at the same time I want to give him credit where it's due.
DeleteI'm not really a fan of erotica/porn in comics so this isn't something that I'm going to read . Saying that I enjoyed this post as I had no idea what this book was about or indeed that the book revolved around these 3 well loved literary characters. I can't really criticise his use of other characters as I very much enjoyed his "League of..." books but I agree with Kid, using them in what seems be a porn ( or at least erotic) comic is not the sort of thing the characters creators would have wanted. I have enjoyed all Alan Moore's "mainstream" books that i have read and if he wrote any new stuff for DC etc I would probably pick it up, but this doesn't intrigue me I'm afraid.
ReplyDeleteFor me using characters, especially public domain ones in transgressive ways is fine and dandy. It's making use of their iconic status, which no one will forget or confuse with the more debatable use, as a lightning rod for commentary. Having unknown women meet would not have had the same impact as using these literary icons and suggesting something perhaps darker lurking in there myths. The creators are long dead and past caring.
DeleteThink of the many ways that the mythological heroes have been used and transformed over the years or the knights of King Arthur's court. Whether it's Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (Thor and all of Asgard as well as Hercules and Olympus) or Mighty Python (Monty Python and the Holy Grail), the new sometimes satirical use has increased credence because of the heft of the originals.
I will confess that I handed this book to my girlfriend who is interested in these topics of potential abuse and other women's issues, and she was not impressed. She did like the art. So maybe I'm off base here, but I don't think so yet.
Thing is, Stan and Jack didn't portray Thor and Hercules as gay lovers, so it wasn't quite the same thing.
DeleteSo, it's fine to acquire characters and make use of them as long as they aren't used in a way that offends some portion of the audience. They did make Hercules into a hot-headed dumbass very often. Satire is supposed to be by its nature transgressive and even offensive, using traditional characters in new and provocative ways to imply new insights into a worldview seems justifiable to me.
DeleteThis sounds remarkably like the arguments I run across when folks object to Superman being portrayed as anything other than a smiling All-American farm boy. The character is large enough to handle multiple interpretations, a sign of the characters fundamental soundness of design. Just because a character is not always like we left them doesn't invalidate the changes made.
I have no problems with new stories about old characters, RJ, as long as they're in the tradition of what has gone before. Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Wind In The Willows, etc., have all had new 'instalments' and I don't mind that at all. However, I'd say there's a big difference between that and using characters from the Alice books, the Oz books, and Peter Pan in an 'adult' setting. There's something quite disturbing about that - sick even. Someone once suggested that Superman should be retconned as gay or bisexual so that the LGBT brigade could feel more included. My response? NO!
DeleteSo you like seeing porn in your comic strips, but why not just admit to it instead of trying to justify it with some ropey rationilazation? Hey, I like looking at 'nekkid' ladies myself, but Lost Girls just seems depraved. And when the author himself (in an interview on Hard Talk) says it was an exercise in pornography, that suggests it was the defining factor, nothing to do with 'new insights' into a 'worldview'. Moore would be (and has been) the first person to object to any of 'his' characters being used in a way of which he wouldn't approve, so he should accord the creations of others the same professional courtesy. One 'law' for Moore it seems, another for everybody else.
I love looking at "nekkid" ladies! Got no problem proclaiming that at all. But I sincerely think there is more to this book than just "porn". And I know Moore says that it's porn, but the U.S. Supreme Court definition of porn in these United States is that it's "utterly without redeeming social importance". I see a measure of "redeeming social importance" here despite the scandalous elements. I think Moore knows that as well, but he likes to tweak the general audience with audacious announcements. But I can see I'm alone on this one. But we do agree Moore is a bit of a hypocrite. Have a Happy!
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