Lost Girls

I hated this. I hated, hated, hated, hated this. I hated it with a pure hate I haven't felt toward a book in many, many years.

I think I'm angry because I've spent a fair amount of time defending Alan Moore and his obsessions over the past two decades. "He's a bit weird, but he's cool," I'd say. "Yeah, he likes to throw shocking curveballs but there is always some really interesting deconstruction going on." Well, there's no interesting deconstruction here. It's just a lot of sex: every kind of sex imaginable, basically, and on nearly every page. It's not erotica; it's pornography. And it's pretending that it's "saying" something about three of the most beloved children's stories within memory: Lewis Carroll's Alice books; J. M. Barrie's show more Peter and Wendy (aka Peter Pan); and L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

I'm also angry because I'm no stranger to grown-up examinations of these same works, and while I don't love them all, some of them are quite interesting and have meaningful observations to make. Some of them are just weird and fun: I'll defend A Barnstormer in Oz 'til my dying day, for instance, because it's clearly a thought experiment (What if Oz were a real place where magic was just advanced science? What if the story was dumbed down because no one would believe the real thing?) taken to a logical, if occasionally slightly ridiculous conclusion. There is nothing like that in Lost Girls. I can't even defend it as having a perspective if I wanted to; there's no perspective to give.

I had expected something rather more like Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which - aside from being a genre fiction easter egg lollapalooza - treats the classic characters involved as living, breathing, sometimes uncomfortably troubling people, all of whom have their own motivations. Mina Harker is forever changed by her experience with Dracula, and it makes her into a morally upright leader. Dr. Jekyll can never escape the bestial pull of his "other half," and it causes him to do truly inhuman things. James Bond can barely disguise his true nature as a nasty, misogynistic thug. And so on. Despite the entire three-volume book being centered around them, there are no such insights in Lost Girls on Alice, Dorothy, or Wendy.

In fact, all three have been rendered down to flat, two-dimensional characters: Alice the articulate, aristocratic widow, Wendy a quiet and submissive wife, and Dorothy an "Aw shucks!" farm girl stereotype. Yes, it's very clever-clever that Moore's found a way to reframe their stories as sexual experiences - Alice's first sexual experience is an assault by an older man named "Bunny," Dorothy has her first self-induced orgasm as the tornado hits the house, etc. - but that doesn't tell me anything about my favorite books from childhood. It just feels like a particularly raunchy party trick, one that is repeated again and again and is already boring by the end of Book One.

I have read elsewhere that Moore and his wife, Melinda Gebbie - who created the art in the book, which is certainly very colorful if loosely styled - worked on Lost Girls for almost twenty years, and their goal was not to inspire conversation about the stories they adapted but about the nature of pornography itself. And that's...fine, I guess? I just don't see the point of involving Alice, Dorothy, and Wendy, except that it makes a great elevator pitch: "...They're all in a hotel together and they're all getting it on!" Perhaps those interested in pornography as an art form will find meaning in it, but to me, this feels like little more than an over-expensive vanity project. It was a waste of my time and especially of my money. show less

*Some Spoilers*

How do we approach this graphic, very graphic, novel? As a consistent continuation of the ouevre of Alan Moore? As an investigation of the pornographic? Or as a subliminal political tract?

Let us start with Moore because this text is recognisably within his style. Artists may come and go but Moore's themes are often those of the power of imagination to cast new light on the world.

Much of his earlier work involved alternate futures and histories - the dystopia of Thatcher's Britain in 'Skizz', a fascist Britain of 'V for Vendetta' and the world where Nixon won the election in 'Watchmen'.

Later work overlays this with a game of memes set around a grand theme - magic and the esoteric in the magnificent 'Promethea' series and show more popular literary figures in the finely tuned but sometimes disappointing 'League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' series.

'Lost Girls' takes the theme of pornographic literature and cross-fertilises it transgressively with three seminal (excuse these puns) children's stories about girls written by men - Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Alice is older and a lesbian defensively avoiding men, Dorothy is an up-front American flirt and Wendy is the repressed wife of an equally repressed and shatteringly dull British businessman.

The whole is set at a point of maximum decadence - Austria-Hungary in the days before the First World War - and Moore's words are set to brilliant pastiches of the erotic art of the preceding decades: the cards of Becat, Von Bayros, Mucha, Schiele and more.

He has found a superb artistic collaborator in Melinda Gebbie who has not flinched from the subject matter - my initial irritation with the girlish soft-hued pastel shades collapsed before the skill of her interpretations and versatility.

But be in no doubt - the pictures and text are 'pornographic' in the most extreme way and there is no let up in it. As in all pornographic material, the story seems thin (three women tell stories of their past in a hotel on the eve of war) so that couplings and multiple copulations can be effected without too much distraction.

Of course, Moore is cleverer than this. The story is, in fact, sophisticated with its investigations of the difference between fantasy and reality even if it slips into cliche with the 1914 theme by the end.

The casual reader must understand in advance that this is not just the graphic presentation of sexuality but the sexuality of the histories of the young girls who became women, of fantasies of incest and exploitation and of the most callous Sadean activity.

Each of the children's stories is subverted into a tale of simultaneous pleasure, extremity and both willing and unwilling exploitation.

Alice is a victim of child abuse who becomes a sexual addict dragged into orgies, drugs and prostitution by a lesbian 'set' of singular obsessive cruelty.

Dorothy discovers masturbation and sex on the farm and effectively half-seduces and is half-victim of a seriously abusive father. On the way there, she happily masturbates a horse while being anally buggered.

Wendy is 'perverted' by street urchins who provide sexual services for middle class men when they are not engaged in sexual activity among themselves. This 'Tinkerbelle' is the sexual plaything of her brother, Peter, giving more cause to the jealousy in the story than Disney scriptwriters had managed.

Incest is a central theme of the book - fantasies of every form of coupling (though minimally male homosexual) express a vision of the family dynamic which nods to Freud but which, in fact, is simply a play on one central theme: how is it that we both have such desires and control or repress them so effectively.

Which is where we come to an implicit politic because Moore's position seems to be that civilisation depends on the maintenance of the separate realm of a free imagination which is uncontrolled.

It is the pornographic extremities of the imaginative realm that act as an outlet for the repressive miseries and potential for violence and exploitation seen in the girl's 'real' stories and in the onset of war.

This is not an easy argument for many people to understand. For them, the map of literature or art is the territory of real life and social relations. They cannot 'get' that the imaginal realm is 'other'.

It is the same flaw in thinking that makes God a real presence in people's lives or has the same imagined creature judging an act from within.

The inability to understand that these are two different realms is what results in the 'politics of disgust', the attempts to repress desire and the failure to deal with acts of exploitation when they appear.

Child abuse is a general theme within the book. It is expressed graphically and often. Moore intelligently avoids the black and white interpretation where some evil adult seduces the innocent in favour of something more ambiguous and true to life. What is going on is a trading of desires and power which are enabled by secrecy and denial.

Another theme is the fact that the girls are lost because no one talks about desire in their world of innocence, things are done in secret and the girls are left to fend for themselves and work out mysteries that are imposed on them by circumstance - whether stuck on a Kansas farm or in an English middle class household.

This sophisticated and multifaceted work raises the essence of the problem behind social control and repression of sexual desire, one which appears to have passed by the Christians and feminists who encircle our unimaginative Prime Minister.

Pornography as cause of sexual crime is simply special pleading by the criminal. The expression of erotic fantasy for most people most of the time is a liberation of desire and violence precisely so that it does not act in the world. It is a salve. It may even be a form of salvation.

Sexual pleasure and even transgression between adults 'works through' the system so that exploitation and abuse remain in the literature and the art and do not leach out into the real world.

Attempts to control the imagery of desire drives what cannot be obliterated not merely underground but into vicious corners where the imagined may become real - as in rural child abuse, predatory sexual abuse of urban minors and systems of economic sexual exploitation.

All the pornographic styles and stories in the book arise out of an age of repressed expression of desire but are part of the solution and not part of the problem.

The problem lies elsewhere - not in a fascination with the sexual, masturbation or curiosity but with social structures that make all these normal interests out to be 'deviant' or 'perverted'.

The 'lost girls', on the other hand, are all exploited and abused not because they are sexual beings but because they are sexual beings without power to express their sexuality on their own terms.

Alice is, in fact, not permitted just to be a lesbian but must enter a sub-culture that is vicious. Dorothy is a highly sexual creature who just wants to experiment on equal terms with men. Wendy has sexual desires but is forced by circumstance into danger or total denial and ends up with an apparently a-sexual bore who turns out to be a submissive gay.

But it is even more complicated than this. Alice is not in control of her history and is even a little predatory towards Dorothy and Wendy but Dorothy and Wendy, as adults, embrace the predation.

Dorothy avoids to the end the admission that her sexual affair was with her father but she is not traumatised by it, merely avoiding discussion of a social taboo where she was actually in more (though not complete) control than we might like.

Her complaint is not of abuse but of having to continue a very run-of-the-mill sexual relationship after the transgressional glamour of a trip to the big city. She feels sorry, in the end, for her step-mother in a very true-to-life female reaction.

Wendy's childish familial incest is pushed aside in horror when the games go wrong and she is threatened with rape in woodland by a paedophile as she turns from child to woman - but the horror results in decades of unhappiness until liberated by her new 'sisters'.

The event is also not one of a victim either. She turns on the bully and uses words to whip lash him into humiliated withdrawal - she has become empowered under extreme pressure.

In short, both Moore and Gebbie (and we are reminded that the graphic images are all produced by a woman) are reminding us that sex-positivity is more complicated than the 'victim' mentality imposed on us by our current culture.

These ambiguities do not belong to society but to the individuals who are free to react in multiple ways - relaxed acceptance and complicity, defensive resistance or denial and unhappiness after a moment of empowered epiphany - and that any responses that may result in a personal transformation equally belong to individuals and not society.

If Alice brings Wendy's sexuality back to life, there is no suggestion that her life between the rape attempt and her new friendships was a lie but rather that it had served its purpose for both Mr. and Mrs Potter and now it was time to move on.

The men in the story are mostly all sad, lonely and weak characters - furtive child abusers, repressed homosexuals, men coming to terms with their own sexuality through strategies of denial, men who are thrown aside at their moment of transformation, secretive men, dead militarist men.

In the end, there is no real conclusion to the book. You either share a general position of sex-positivity and triumph over abuse as the best 'normal' way of things or you will be, frankly, confused, 'disgusted' and even horrified.

If the latter, then you have done something that Moore is warning us against - confused imagination for reality and failed to see imagination not as an expression of actual intent in the world but as a tool for internal transformation of the person who exists within that world.

Perhaps our Prime Minister and his somewhat dim-witted advisers will finally get it. A free imagination does not cause criminality or abuse, criminals and abusers do crimes and abuse and such crimes and abuses arise not from pornography but from a lack of imagination in using pornography as a tool.

The sexual imagination, like the Japanese and American imaginative flirtations with violence, is an inoculation against excess in a world that is stupid, brutal and cruel. The good society requires it because we are human animals in this world, not castrated saints in the making for the next.

Our sexual desire is central to who we are even when we deny it or it is absent and because we, not an abstraction, are central to the social, sexuality is best accommodated in a positive way and not as a furtive business of misery and guilt. show less

Lost Girls is a pornographic re-telling of some classic children's stories (Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and Peter Pan to be specific) by graphic novel mastermind Alan Moore. Moore's creativity is prevalent in the book--he uses the tropes of fairy tales and psychology to create a story of coming of age and sexual discovery. The result is entertaining, clever, and eventually tiresome. Lost Girls is divided into 3 books. The first book sets the tone, introducing the characters (Dorothy, Alice, and Wendy) and the setting (a decadent hotel in Vienna, Austria just days before the start of WWI--in fact, the characters reference the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand multiple times). These three women get to know each show more other--both in the Biblical sense, and also by telling stories from their childhoods. The second book focuses on the beginnings of these stories, which are relatively innocent; the third book focuses on the "climax" of the stories, which tend to be pretty extreme (incest, rape, BDSM).

My favorite of the 3 books was the second one. The stories the women tell in this book were far more sensual than the all-out depravity of the third book (the depravity didn't offend me, per se, but it did make me cringe). Dorothy, for example, has her first sexual experiences with a farm hand who bales hay (a man of the straw, you might say...) and is sexy, but kinda dumb (no brain...get it?). Dorothy gently lets him know that she can't be with him anymore before she describes traveling down a metaphorical road of sexual discovery. Likewise, Alice's stories involve exploring sex with other girls at her boarding school. I liked the emphasis on female sexuality and sexual awakening--and how not all the sex acts involved traditional heterosexual intercourse. Despite the Sadean sexual insanity of the third book, Moore has respect for sexuality as part of one's identity--something to explore and own, rather than to be ashamed about and repress. For these reasons, the book was enjoyable, fun, and somewhat thought-provoking. But not for the faint of heart, obviously. show less

I started reading Lost Girls back in the early 1990s when it was serialized in the Taboo anthology, and have revisited the collected version a few times now, with the new expanded edition and it's "32 pages of Gallery Art" showing up at the library being excuse enough this time as Gebbie's art is a big draw for the book.

Far from Moore's best work, it is still probably the most literary Tijuana bible ever created. He pulls out plenty of clever storytelling tricks as he draws you down a rabbit hole of erotica with Alice Liddell, Dorothy Gale and Wendy Darling, passing through a Wonderland of pornography, only to land you in a Michael Jackson Neverland Ranch of the darkest and most taboo sexual fantasies.

For adults only, and probably not show more for most of them either. I recommend Andy Weir's new Cheshire Crossing for a more palatable take on a meeting of the same three heroines. show less

Alice (in Wonderland), Dorothy Gale, and Wendy Darling, all grown up now, meet in a European hotel and start recounting their sexual histories. All the fantasy elements of the old stories are translated into sex, often sexual abuse, with fantasy both aiding and muting the effects of the abuse. The authors seem to want to say something about the relationship between desire, fantasy, and reality, along with sex as an alternative expression of the death wish, but I found it terribly flattening: all of the characters were the same as they dissolved into endless polymorphous perversity, including at the end the one specifically lesbian character declaring that she was going to try men because it didn’t really matter. There was a lot of show more mirror imagery and doubling as one fantasy slid into another or into the “reality” of the story. Images that looked nonsexual were revealed to be people fucking; casual conversations masked or ignored the sexual activities going on all around. I’m not surprised that the publisher apparently thought hard about obscenity: there’s a lot of underage sex depicted, including crossgenerational incest with young children; the worst of which is sort of disavowed by being in a book-within-the-book, about which the characters comment that it’s just fantasy, but that’s not terribly convincing in context. I don’t want to pay for shipping on PaperbackSwap to get rid of these large and heavy volumes, but if you’re in the DC area and think you might have a different opinion of the books, I’ll happily give them to you. show less

Lost Girls
by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie
Review by Karl Wolff

Personal History: Alan Moore wrote an epic erotic comic. And Lost Girls also carried with it hints of controversy. As a longtime fan of Moore, I had to see what he did with this particular genre of comics.

The History: Published in 2006, Lost Girls is still too new to have "a history," at least in the same way as Story of O or Naked Lunch. Those two novels were controversial and shocking when they first hit bookstores, but have since accrued literary respectability and legitimacy with the addition of so many years. Lost Girls isn't even ten years old, therefor I will hold off on any premature announcements to its status as a classic.

The exact nature of the controversy is in show more its depiction of child sexuality. Without the proper contextualization, the words "child sexuality" comes across as shocking and horrific. This requires unpacking and seeing it within the narrative framework of Lost Girls. Moore and Gebbie have created a work that explores an erotic world based on the fictionalized lives of three protagonists from children's literature. Alice from Alice in Wonderland, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, and Wendy from Peter Pan. Here is what Alan Moore has to say about this, "if we'd have come out and said, 'well, this is a work of art,' they would have probably all said, 'no it's not, it's pornography.' So because we're saying, 'this is pornography,' they're saying, 'no it's not, it's art,' and people don't realize quite what they've said." (quote from The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log). The whole art versus pornography conundrum, while saving the authors and readers the headache of legal prosecution, does little to solve the issue.

This is what makes the arts different from the sciences. Because of the slippery subjectivity of artistic intentions, reader reactions, and critical interpretation, things can get ugly when butting against the ferocious consequences of the law and psychology. Back when I began this essay series, I cited Susan Sontag's "The Pornographic Imagination." In Sontag's influential essay, she works diligently to support erotica and pornography as a legitimate literary genre. She also goes out of her way to avoid discussing either legal or psychological aspects of the works she selected. But (and this is key) the works she discussed were prose. Lost Girls is a comic, a medium built upon an interplay between words and image. It is these images where things get dicey.

At CONvergence this year I attended a panel titled "Fetishes: Gone Too Far?". During the discussion, one of the key points was the interrelated issues of controversy versus legality. Like William S. Burroughs, I hold an ideological position of "First Amendment absolutist." What this means is that I believe artists should have almost no restrictions in terms of subject matter. In a related legal case, Neil Gaiman went so far as to assert that comic book characters have no claims to legal personhood. Comic book characters do not exist in the same way that fictional characters represented by a film or stage actor exist. And in cases like these, where someone is prosecuted for possessing a comic where underage characters have sex, is a dangerous precedent. One shouldn't confuse moral judgments (what said person does with said comics) with legal writ. What is moral and what is legal isn't always a 1:1 ratio. This holds especially true in a multi-ethnic, multicultural pluralistic democracy like the United States.

But with any absolutist position, this has a number of caveats. This circles back to context, genre, and child sex. The First Amendment protects speech not acts. Lost Girls is work of fiction and, as such, is legally protected free speech. This isn't a how-to manual on how to solicit children for sexual acts. And even with the protection of the First Amendment, it is clear that the depictions are artistic renderings. When it comes to photographs or filmic representations, the context changes entirely, since that brings up a host of issues like age of consent, coercion, criminal enterprise, and more.

I spend a lot of space discussing the context and particulars because one should be able to read Lost Girls without fear of legal prosecution.

Despite the sensational subject matter, Lost Girls is a groundbreaking erotic comic that Moore and Gebbie use to explore issues of genre, history, and narrative.

The Book: Lost Girls centers its narrative around an Austrian hotel on the eve of The Great War. At the hotel we meet Wendy Durling, Dorothy Gale, and Alice Fairchild. As the story progresses, Wendy, Dorothy, and Alice recount erotic tales from their childhood. We see eroticized origin stories. Dorothy masturbates during a tornado. Wendy meets a strange boy in the park who initiates her (and her young brothers) into the world of adult sexuality. Alice engages in sexual escapades with a schoolmistress named Mrs. Redman (a sexualized version of The Red Queen). They continue regaling each other with their erotic autobiographies admist sexual shenanigans at the Austrian hotel.
In a way Lost Girls comes across like slash fiction, the sexualized version of fan fiction. This is relevant since Moore and Gebbie are using characters and situations from classic literature.

But Moore and Gebbie further complicate things. The hotel proprietor named Monsieur Rougeur lends the women The White Book, an anthology of erotic pastiches allegedly written and illustrated by such luminaries as Aubrey Beardsley, Guilliame Apollinaire, Oscar Wilde, and Egon Schiele. Near the end of Lost Girls, the specter of war hovers ever closer. Archduke Francis Ferdinand is assassinated and various European powers prepare an imminent war. The husbands of the three female protagonists leave to attend to the immediate crisis. The hotel is emptied but for Dorothy, Wendy, and Alice, and the lusty hotel staff. It is during this orgy that Monsieur Rougeur recounts his own origin story. He tells about his life as a master forger and pederast. In typical Moore fashion, the comic depicts three simultaneous storylines. The first is a story from The White Book; the second is Rougeur's life story; and the third is the present-day hotel orgy. But because Rougeur is a master forger, we don't know whether he is telling the truth with his story. And this relates back to the alleged authenticity of the art in The White Book. Lost Girls exists simultaneously as an epic piece of slash fiction and as an avant-garde exploration of narrative itself.

The very final scenes involve German soldiers breaking a mirror (a prop present in the prologue) and a slow pull back that reveals the entire narrative was a dream by a dying soldier in a trench. One recalls the endings of Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and The Wizard of Oz : the common ending trope all these works had was that it had been a dream.

The Verdict: As I stated previously, I'm avoiding any verdict saying Lost Girls is a classic. Too early to tell. Although this will be yet another example within Alan Moore's oeuvre that scholars can puzzle over, dissect, and contextualize. Despite its controversial subject matter, it holds its own both within Moore's body of work and against other erotic comics.

http://www.cclapcenter.com/2014/08/the_nsfw_files_lost_girls_by_a.html show less

IMPORTANT NOTE: This story is very sexually explicit (and then some), but not titillating. If you're looking for a "stroke book" to turn you on, look elsewhere; this is NOT it. This is a serious tale for readers who are actually mature, not a Tijuana Bible "for mature readers." If you can't tell the difference between the two, just stay away.

"Lost Girls" is an intriguing exploration of three classic "children's books" - Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and The Wizard of Oz - from a very new perspective. The books are treated not as literal fact, but as metaphor. The fantastic beings and adventures become ways to express Alice, Wendy, and Dorothy's sexual awakenings.

Children, teens, immature wankers, and prudes should all stay far away show more from this story. The rest of us will find significant food for thought as those three women meet in an Austrian hotel and open up to each other (take that as you will) on the eve of the German invasion.

I have to give special recognition to the artist, Melinda Gebble, for her fine work in numerous styles. The sheer variety of artistic styles is as much a part of this story's impact as are the scripting and dialogue. One does not normally see this sort of visual diversity in a graphic novel, and the casual reader could be forgiven for thinking it was the work of several different artists. In fact, I have read many graphic novels that are the work of multiple artistic teams which look much more uniform.

Highly recommended - for the right reader. show less