Lost Girls (Alan Moore & Melinda Gebbie)

http://www.newsarama.com/TopShelf/Lo...ooreLG_01.html
After sixteen years, Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's massive work of pornography, Lost Girls is coming out. Top Shelf will present the three-volume, slipcased work in August, and it's already receiving glowing reviews - and concerns, given its content. As named above, Lost Girls is, without any shadow of a doubt, pornography. Within its pages, Alice, from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Dorothy, from The Wizard of Oz, and Wendy from Peter Pan meet, recount their intimate backgrounds in graphic detail, and have many sexual adventures together. There is virtually a graphically depicted sexual act on every page.

But, as with every work by Moore, Lost Girls is more than its surface appearance. It's a challenge to readers and to critics. It's eye opening. It's a history lesson of classic erotica. It's tender at moments, heartbreakingly lovely at others, while virtually every reader will find some page that makes them uncomfortable. It's undeniably breathtakingly beautiful. It's Moore and Gebbie's plea for more works like this - more works that engage the sexual imagination.

And, as Top Shelf Publisher Chris Staros has said, it's the most important graphic novel Top Shelf has ever published. Lost Girls is Moore and Gebbie's way of reclaiming pornography, wresting it from the hands of simple smut peddlers and producers who merely crank out tripe to appeal to baser instincts. It has very strong messages about sexuality (obviously), as well as free speech, and even the horror of war. While we'll talk with Staros more at a later date, Lost Girls operates on at least two fronts, first and foremost as a work of art, and secondly, as a flag firmly planted, claiming (or reclaiming) free, artistic expression as the birthright of all creators.

That's also to say, there will be reactions to Lost Girls when it reaches its audience.

We spoke extensively with Moore and Gebbie about Lost Girls, and bring you those conversations now in three parts. First, Part One of our conversation with Moore, wherein we talked about the history of the project, and the desires that informed both he and Gebbie as they created it. Part Two with Moore will cover more of the controversial aspects of the story, as well as his views of the reactions Lost Girls may receive upon publication. Finally, Part Three will be our conversation with Gebbie about her approach to the art, and the intensity and honesty she found that she had to bring to the project if it was to succeed.

In the interest of making sure Moore's views and opinions on pornography and the work come across as clearly as possible, we are presenting the transcript of the conversation about the book between Newsarama's Matt Brady and Moore.

Additionally, given the all-ages nature of Newsarama, we will not be showing the uncensored images from Lost Girls here. However, through an arrangement with noted sex blogger, writer and educator, Violet Blue, the full images are available for viewing at her website. Warning - the images are not work safe, and not meant for minors.

Newsarama: Let's start with talking about the intent behind Lost Girls. Take me back to the beginning of the project, going on what, sixteen years ago now. What was the seed that this grew from? Was it just a desire to create pornography - and that's how you refer to it, correct?

Alan Moore: Oh, I insist on calling it that. I suppose the original seed, it was a tiny idea, or half of an idea that occurred to me years ago, where I'd just noticed how awkward…well, almost any medium, not particularly comics, were when it came to approaching sex. It struck me that I'd written by then an awful lot of characters, and yet none of them had been able to have fully developed normal, human sex lives. They may have had quantum abilities, or been plant gods, but this most common field of human expression was something that couldn't really be addressed, except in a very seamy, under the counter genre where there were no standards, and where there was a pervasive ugliness about almost every aspect of the material. It would be aesthetically ugly, it would be politically ugly, morally ugly…ugly in more ways than you could easily name.

So I thought about it, thought if there was anything I could do that would be successful in that area. That was more or less where the idea stuck for years, which was a bit dispiriting. I had a vague idea about maybe doing a sexualized version of Peter Pan, and that purely originated from thinking about Sigmund Freud's contention that dreams of flying are expressions of sexuality. Thinking about the flying scenes in Peter Pan, it seemed as though there might be some kind of connection. But I really couldn't see any way of doing it that wouldn't have made it just another sexualized parody of Peter Pan, of which there have probably been a number already, and which I don't think the world needs any more of. So my thinking kind of completely bogged down at that point. I made some sort of vague noises about getting a project off the ground, but these all came to nothing - very fortunately, as it turned out.

One of the main problems was finding an artist. That was largely a problem with my thinking. Having come up through the traditional comics industry, I was only thinking in terms of male collaborators. Shockingly, Melinda is only one of the few women that I've ever collaborated with, and certainly one of the only women that I've ever collaborated with on something of the statue of Lost Girls. So it wasn't really until me and Melinda hooked up that the idea really came out of both of us, and out of the fusion of our sensibilities.

In terms of the actual run of events, one of us had been approached by an erotic magazine that was due to come out that had these eight page stories in it. Neil Gaiman put me in touch with Melinda, whose work I'd admired for years, since her underground comics work over there in San Francisco. That opened up a whole new range of possibilities. We originally started out doing an eight page comic strip of an erotic nature, if we could think of one.

As we started to mull over ideas together, I might have brought up this fairly lame Peter Pan idea at one point, and said that I couldn't think of anywhere to take it. At one point, Melinda said that she's always had a lot of fun and success in doing strips that had three female protagonists - that was a dynamic that she kind of enjoyed.

At that point, that idea from her kind of collided with my half-assed Peter Pan idea, and I suppose somewhere I thought, "If Wendy from Peter Pan is one of those characters, who would the other two be?" From there, it was fairly obvious that it was going to be Alice and Dorothy. So from there, it was very quick - once we had the initial idea, the idea for the whole book blossomed very, very quickly. Over a week or two. It became obvious to us very rapidly that we were no longer talking about an eight page comic strip. The kind of possibilities that the idea opened up were obviously of a much, much broader stature.

We started to think about it along the lines of, "Alright - we've got these three characters. We want to have them meet as women, when they can look back upon their experiences and can recount them to each other, when they've got a more mature view upon them."

The actual reason why we were excited about using those three characters to tell a story about sex is because it is such a perfect metaphor for the way all of us, by the very nature of sex itself - when we enter into it, we are not mature. It doesn't matter what age we happen to enter into it, there is still a part of our maturation process that is incomplete until we have entered that peculiar realm. When we come out the other side of it, we may not be adults, but we're certainly not children anymore. I suspect that for many of us, the world of our first sexual encounters is a world every bit as strange and disorienting as Wonderland or Oz or Neverland. I suspect that we kind of find that all throughout our childhood, we had seen the world a certain way, and people's reactions and behaviors going according to certain rules. All of a sudden, when we are plunged into the world of sexuality, it is like we are living under the logic system of Lewis Carrol's Red Queen - everything is kind of backwards, you have to run twice as fast just to stay where you are, nothing means quite the same thing, words that used to mean one thing now mean something completely different.

It struck me that all of those three stories would serve brilliantly as metaphors for that kind of strange, peculiar landscape that is the landscape of our earliest approach to sexuality.

So, having decided upon these three characters, we next tried to think of the logistics of it. We decided to adopt a chronology that was loosely based on the actual publication dates of the books, working from the assumption that the books must have been published at some point after the events had "happened." So, working from there, obviously, Alice would be the oldest, with Dorothy being the youngest. Once we had their approximate ages established, we wanted to find an optimum time period where all three of them could have coexisted. That seemed to be around the 1913-1914 period, which was a time where Alice would not yet be too old, and Dorothy would not be too young.

Of course, the 1913-1914 time period is incredibly rich in terms of history - it's a major turning point in the history of…certainly Europe, and I think of the broader world as well. And there were all these other interesting things happening in the arts - there was Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring being performed at the Paris Opera, which, when we looked at it, seemed to be significant. I never really thought about that fact before - the riots that attended Stravinsky's opera preceded the first World War by just less than a year. It seems that The Rite of Spring's performance, to some degree, and if anybody had the eyes to see it at the time, was a very strong warning about eh kind of pitch that European sensibilities was at, where something so profoundly beautiful could set them off like that.

So, it seemed that we knew what time this story was happening in, and we wanted an interesting place for it to be happening. We discovered a location called which is on the borders of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland and very close to the border of France. There is an actual island there that is apparently surrounded by snow-capped mountains, but is tropical for a very brief period, every year.

There were other little things as well that we put into the narrative that seemed to fit really nicely, so that was basically how the idea came together in a purely logical way.

A really major thing about the fact that me and Melinda had teamed up on the project was that it was now a man and a woman working upon it, which makes it fairly unique in terms of a work of erotica. It also makes it fairly unique in the broader world of creative endeavor. There are not that many male/female teams that are also partners who have worked upon anything of this nature or of this scale. We found that it was a perfect chemistry. Scenes that would have been questionable if it had been a male writer and a male artist - or any other artist other than Melinda, to be perfectly honest, were lent a kind of allure just purely through the laborious and painstaking work and sheer dedication that had been poured into each panel. Whatever the imagery is in that panel, it kind of elevates it out of any seamy context into something which is actually undeniably beautiful, which does much to diffuse any idea of obscenity.

It presents this material in a way which is every bit as sensual and beautiful and at times, startling, as the actual sexual act itself can be. I think that was probably why we did it. The sexual imagination, which is the biggest part of sexuality, is not well served in our culture, and I really don't understand why that should be. The only way that we can talk about or refer to sex - we have two choices: we can either do it in grubby works of pornography that will be read by people who are desperately ashamed of what they are reading, or we can discuss sex in the clinical manner of sex manuals or The Joy of Sex. Neither of these things have got anything that I, or probably most other normal people actually associate with our sexuality. I doubt that many of us are clinical about our sexuality, or wish to be sleazy about our sexuality either, but these seem to be the only two options where this material can even be discussed - where the sexual imagination can even be talked about. That startling omission in culture was probably the biggest impetus behind Lost Girls - we felt that there ought to be something like that that related to sex that was as beautifully illustrated and as beautifully written as one might expect from any other genre. Any other piece of literature or art.

Because there wasn't anything like that out there, we spent fifteen or sixteen years making sure that there was.

NRAMA: Was the long gestation period for Lost Girls mostly representative of the intense effort that was going into it?

AM: Probably the main reason was the sheer intensity that we poured into the material. As we found out, this is not easy stuff to do. It's a bit like poetry. Bad poetry is the easiest thing in the world to write - except for perhaps bad pornography. To do something that is worthwhile in either of those areas is a tremendous amount of work. Good poetry is very, very difficult. And so is good pornography.

So, we were having to feel our way into this territory. We were having to consider it scene by scene, panel by panel - what is the best way to actually set up this image, and how do we define it in words? We were taking it very carefully, and were very conscious of the subject matter that we were dealing with as well as these three beloved characters. That was an important thing. We've got the greatest respect for those characters and their authors. If it doesn't sound like too much of a contradiction in terms, we wanted to make sure that they were well represented in our erotic book, in our pornography. We didn't want to demean or debase those characters in any way. We wished to simply expand upon them.

Any story about a child carries the implication that the child will eventually grow up. It's made explicit in A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh books. I think the last Winnie the Pooh story is this heartbreaking conversation between Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh, in which Christopher Robin is clearly too old now, to be talking to a bear, and he's trying to break it to the bear as gently as possible. Likewise, at the end of Peter Pan, Wendy is a grown up woman, with her own children. Therefore, if this has happened in the normal way, she has presumably had a sexual relationship.

It struck me that this seemed like fair game. It seemed like fair game to speculate upon the perfectly normal part of every human life, that these characters would have experienced if their narratives had been extended beyond the childhood that was represented in the original books. Keeping it true to their characters, keeping Alice true to the quirky, curious child that Lewis Carroll represented; keeping Wendy true to the slightly repressed and unnecessarily grown up little girl that J.M. Barrie talked about; and the same with Dorothy - keep that same spirited sense of adventure. If those books are looked at in a certain way, it is possible to decode those stories into something that, sexually speaking, is quite profound. There are a lot of interesting little narratives to be found within most stories that are capable of saying something about sex and sexuality in an interesting way.

Did I answer the question? I'm afraid I've forgotten how we got started on that…

NRAMA: We started off with the long time Lost Girls has taken to get from concept to finished product. While some of it was the intensity of the work, you also had fits and starts in terms of publishers, that is, some of this material has already come out, albeit from long-dead houses…

AM: That's right. Obviously, the intensity was one of the reasons why we did take sixteen years over it, but that said, there was a string of collapsing publishers - through no fault of their own, that folded while the project was with them. For a long time, I've been paying Melinda to produce the actual artwork, because we both believed in the project so much, and this was something that had to get finished, whether it would've gotten published or not.

Finally, Top Shelf arrived on the scene, and here we are, on the brink of publication. So it was a mixture - there was the intense approach we took to the work was a factor, but there were other factors in the world that impeded it significantly.

Check Newasrama.com tomorrow for Part Two of our interview with Alan Moore on Lost Girls

http://www.tinynibbles.com/blogarchi...alan.html#more
exclusive: Alan Moore's erotic Lost Girls (25/05/06)

Sometimes I wake up and my inbox is full of surprises -- but this has to be one of the top five for sure. I've long, long been a fan of comic writer Alan Moore, who many of you will recognize from writing/creating Watchmen, From Hell, V for Vendetta, and the first two sets of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (among others; though my cult faves of his are The Killing Joke and Brought to Light). So it's with great, excited sleepless joy that I get to show you exclusive samples from his upcoming work Lost Girls (with Melinda Gebbie), featuring explicit sex -- portrayed in a compelling, highly pleasurable way. Like the setting of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Lost Girls has Moore revisiting characters from Victorian fiction, where the main female characters from Neverland, Wonderland and Oz meet as adults in a strange hotel in 1913 to set out on a sexual adventure together.

Why did they ask *me*? Because they thought I would present the work in an honest and respectful way, which seems difficult to come by these days when it comes to sex (especially for the sake of pleasure). In an interview about the book, sent to me in the email, Alan Moore said:

"It presents this material in a way which is every bit as sensual and beautiful and at times, startling, as the actual sexual act itself can be. I think that was probably why we did it. The sexual imagination, which is the biggest part of sexuality, is not well served in our culture, and I really don't understand why that should be. The only way that we can talk about or refer to sex -- we have two choices: we can either do it in grubby works of pornography that will be read by people who are desperately ashamed of what they are reading, or we can discuss sex in the clinical manner of sex manuals or The Joy of Sex. Neither of these things have got anything that I, or probably most other normal people actually associate with our sexuality. I doubt that many of us are clinical about our sexuality, or wish to be sleazy about our sexuality either, but these seem to be the only two options where this material can even be discussed -- where the sexual imagination can even be talked about. That startling omission in culture was probably the biggest impetus behind Lost Girls -- we felt that there ought to be something like that."

Read the first half of the interview with Alan Moore on Lost Girls here.

Not that I'm *not* a fan of sleaze or grubby porn, but he's hit on it. Our culture gives us either/or messages all the time about sex. And we're all *so over* it. As if to prove it, if you want to get your hands on a copy of Lost Girls, you're going to have to pre-order it, either via the publisher Top Shelf's site, Amazon or a comic shop. Borders is not touching it, and I was also told no comic shop will be ordering many, if any shelf copies, save Comic Relief in Berkley and the like...

Enjoy the art I was so graciously allowed to post, after the jump. Thanks, Matt!

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