Lost Girls
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Lost Girls is an erotic graphic novel depicting the sexual adventures of three important female fictional characters of the late 19th and early 20th Century, namely Alice from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz, and Wendy Darling from Peter Pan. They meet as adults in 1913 to describe and share some of their erotic adventures with each other.
The story is written by Alan Moore, and drawn by Melinda Gebbie (who also created and drew The Cobweb series of stories for Tomorrow Stories, part of Moore's America's Best Comics line). Moore describes the work as "pornography"[1], a genre whose literary and artistic quality he and Gebbie hope to raise:
| Certainly it seemed to us [Moore and Gebbie] that sex, as a genre, was woefully under-represented in literature. Every other field of human experience—even rarefied ones like detective, spaceman or cowboy—have got whole genres dedicated to them. Whereas the only genre in which sex can be discussed is a disreputable, seamy, under-the-counter genre with absolutely no standards: [the pornography industry]—which is a kind of Bollywood for hip, sleazy ugliness. | ||
The concept of characters from multiple stories co-existing in the same universe is also explored by Moore in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; this premise is similar to the Wold Newton family subgenre.
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[edit] Publication
The first six chapters of Lost Girls were initially published in the Taboo anthology magazine, beginning in 1991 with Taboo #5. Kitchen Sink Press's Tundra imprint later reprinted the Taboo chapters as two separate volumes, containing all of the previously-published chapters. A ten-issue series was scheduled at one point, but Moore and Gebbie instead decided to take the time to finish it, then offer it to various companies as a finished product. Eventually Top Shelf was selected as the publisher, and at one point the finished product was meant to be released in late 2003 or early 2004. More recently, Top Shelf had planned to debut it at the 2005 San Diego Comic-Con, but due to graphic design taking longer than anticipated, it was released at the July 2006 convention instead.
- Lost Girls Collected (by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie, Top Shelf, 26th August 2006 ISBN 1-891830-74-0)
Over the course of the book's sixteen-year production, Moore and Gebbie entered into a romantic relationship, and in 2005 they announced their engagement to be married. "I'd recommend to anybody working on their relationship that they should try embarking on a 16-year elaborate pornography together," joked Moore. "I think they'll find it works wonders." [1]
Moore originally planned to write in his usual style, producing a lengthy script from which Gebbie would work, but after some initial attempts they decided "to collaborate much more closely. So, she would construct the pages of artwork from my incoherent thumbnail sketches and then I would put the dialogue in afterwards." [2] Such a collaboration is known in comic book circles as writing Marvel style.
The idea of writing new adventures of classic fictional characters brought together into a single universe, which Moore first used in Lost Girls, later formed the basis of his series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
[edit] Controversy
The graphic novel release by Top Shelf Productions has come under fire from critics who have argued that the book's controversial sexual content involving children might open up stores that carry the book and people who buy the book to be charged with child pornography possession. Many retailers have argued that they will not stock the book out of fear of possible obscenity prosecution, though some have argued that they might make the book available via special order and simply not carry the book on the shelf.[2] Prosecution in the United States is unlikely, since the work will probably pass the Miller test without much objection given that child pornography requires a child. (See the U.S. Supreme Court's 2002 decision about the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996.) The legal situation in other countries is less clear: many countries forbid any images of nude children in a sexual context. The definitions of child pornography vary between nations, and may be applied in different ways to Lost Girls.
On June 23, 2006, officials for Great Ormond Street Hospital -- which was given the copyright to Peter Pan in J.M. Barrie's will -- asserted Moore would need their permission to publish the book in the UK. Moore indicated that he would not be seeking their licence, claiming that he hadn't expected his work to be banned and that the hospital only holds the rights to performances of the work, not to the individual characters.[3] On 11th October 2006, Top Shelf signed an agreement with GOSH that, while not conceding copyright infringement, they would not publish Lost Girls in the UK until after the copyright lapses at the end of 2007. [4]
[edit] Synopsis
Alice from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (now a grey-haired old woman named "Lady Fairchild"), Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz (now in her 20s) and Wendy Darling from Peter Pan (now named "Wendy Potter", in her 30s, and married to a man named Harold Potter who is 20 years older).
The three are visiting an expensive mountain resort hotel in Austria on the eve of World War I (1913–1914). The hotel, named "Hotel Himmelgarten", is run by a man named Monsieur Rougeur. At the hotel, Dorothy meets a man named Captain Rolf Bauer.
The women meet by chance and begin to exchange erotic stories from their pasts.
The stories are based on the childhood fantasy worlds of the three women:
- Wendy, John and Michael Darling meeting a homeless boy named Peter Pan and the lost boys for sexual encounters one summer.
- Dorothy Gale having sexual encounters with three farm hands at the age of sixteen after a cyclone came to Kansas.
- Alice Fairchild having sex, first with a man and then with several girls and women, beginning at the age of fourteen.
In addition to the three women's erotic flashbacks, the graphic novel depicts sexual encounters between the women and other guests and staff of the hotel, as well as with each other. The erotic adventures are set against the backdrop of cultural and historic events of the period, such as the debut of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
[edit] Style and references to the "original" girls
Each of the three titular "girls" has a distinct visual layout that is used for her chapters: Alice has ovals reminisce of her looking-glass, Wendy has very dark, tall, shadowy rectangles meant to emphasize the repressive nature of her middle-class Victorian society, and Dorothy has wide panels in imitation of the flat landscape of Kansas.
Being raised in a farm, Dorothy has a very limited language and talks with extremely poor English, while Wendy's speeches are heavy with timidity and clumsiness, as a result of the repressive nature of her middle-class. Alice, having become a queen (for a very short period, in Through The Looking-Glass And What Alice Found There), is more authoritarian and usually reverts to higher-class English and uses formal words and expressions. Furthermore, Alice delights us by frequently including in her speeches hints to her past adventures ("to jab", "bandersnatch", "contrarywise", "the reflection is the real thing", "I made pretence", ...).
Each of the three books begins with a quotation from the three "original" authors (Charles Dodgson, J.M. Barrie, L. Frank Baum). Parts of these citations are used as titles for each book :
First book : Older Children ("We are but older children, dear, who fret to find our bedtime near." Dodgson). Second book : Neverlands ("Of course, the Neverlands vary a good deal." Barrie). Third book : The Great And Terrible ("I am Oz, the great and terrible. Who are you and why do you seek me ?" Baum).
This similarly extends to the titles of each chapter : their names hint to the three "original" author's books : "The Mirror", "Silver Shoes", "Missing Shadows", "A Vice From A Caterpillar", "Which Dreamed It ?", "The Cowardly Lion", "You Won't Forget To Wave ?", "Queens Together", "Snicker Snack", ...
Furthermore, in "normal" chapters, other hints can be found (for example, shadows are usually very suggestive and each reflective surface holds its importance).
Each chapter contains eight pages, just like the length of a chess board (which is the plot of Through The Looking-Glass and the key to becoming a queen) and like the eight fits of The Hunting Of The Snark, An Agony In Eight Fits.
The regular chapters are interspersed with pornographic pastiches of works by artists and authors of the period, presented as chapters in Monsieur Rougeur's "White Book", a collection of illustrated pornographic stories. Each chapter is in the style of different authors and artists of the period: these include presentations in the styles of Colette and Aubrey Beardsley, Guillaume Apollinaire and Alfons Mucha, Oscar Wilde and Egon Schiele, and Pierre Louÿs and Franz von Bayros.
[edit] References
- ^ a b Schindler, Dorman T. (2006-08-07). Alan Moore leaves behind his Extraordinary Gentlemen to dally with Lost Girls. Science Fiction Weekly. Retrieved on 2006-08-08.
- ^ Rich Johnston. Lying in the Gutter Volume 2 Column 54. Comic Book Resources. Retrieved on May 31, 2006.
- ^ Comic row over graphic Peter Pan http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2238812,00.html
- ^ MattBrady. Top Shelf, Ormond Street Hospital Settle Over Peter Pas in Lost Girls. Newsarama. Retrieved on October 27, 2006.
[edit] External links
- Top Shelf page for the Hardcover
- Two part interview, from April 2006, about Lost Girls for Cinescape with part two
- Two part interview at Newsarama with part two
- August 2006 interview with Alan Moore about Lost Girls, for The A.V. Club
- Interview with Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie for Nerve.com
- The full Publishers Weekly review by Neil Gaiman
