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For more than a century, Alice, Wendy and Dorothy have been our guides through the Wonderland, Neverland and Land of Oz of our childhoods. Now like us, these three lost girls have grown up and are ready to guide us again, this time through the realms of our sexual awakening and fulfillment. Through their familiar fairytales they share with us their most intimate revelations of desire in its many forms, revelations that shine out radiantly through the dark clouds of war gathering around a luxury Austrian hotel. Drawing on the rich heritage of erotica, Lost Girlsis the rediscovery of the power of ecstatic writing and art in a sublime union that only the medium of comics can achieve. Exquisite, thoughtful, and human, Lost Girlsis a work of breathtaking scope that challenges the very notion of art fettered by convention. This is erotic fiction at its finest.… (more)
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Lost Girls is certainly an effort to say something truthful about women – as well as about men,
Is it…is it sexy?
The premise is an interesting, almost Stoppardian, one. Three girls from classic children’s stories – Wendy from Peter Pan, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, and Alice, of Wonderland fame – meet by chance as grown women, in a Vienna hotel in 1914. As they tell each other their stories, their childhood adventures are re-imagined as sexual coming-of-age tales, which all three of them find they still have to come to terms with in some way.
Uncharitably, you could say this is a relatively flimsy excuse for three volumes of hardcore sex. Or you could find yourself wanting to cheer about the fact that someone’s taking pornography and trying to do something interesting with it. And if this does have artistic merit (which it does by the way – in spades), does that make it somehow not-porn? Moore and Gebbie seem to have tried to stop anyone thinking of this as anything less: this can’t be classified reassuringly as ‘erotica’. They aren’t just dipping their toes in here, playing with some of the conventions. This is out-and-out porn. It’s like they’ve rolled their sleeves up, and taken on every stereotype they could think of.
We have boy-girl sex, boy-boy sex, girl-girl(-girl-girl-girl!) sex; sex with children, sex with parents and siblings, sex with animals; consensual sex and rape; sex oral, anal and vaginal; sex with toys. Sex in vast, pullulating groups. Sex alone.
How much any of this turns you on will depend on where your tastes lie, but anyway turning you on isn’t necessarily a high priority of Lost Girls. Working out what the priority is exactly is one of the many pleasures to be had here. The systematic way all of these set-ups are worked through in the book makes it seem almost parodic at times; but some serious effort is also being made to work out what artistic effect can be drawn out of a famously un-artistic genre.
Visually, it looks stunning. Gebbie has gone to town in the most incredible way with the period, creating sexy Matisse take-offs, Victorian erotica imitations, parodies of Schiele and Beardsley, and erotic references to the original illustrations associated with these characters. All of this works well with Moore’s approach to the material, which is to reinterpret the fairy tales as parables for adolescent sexuality. So the Lost Boys from Peter Pan represent a rich girl’s view of the unbridled lust of the working classes; the wonderful wizard of Oz (who of course turned out to be a foolish old man) here becomes an examination of how a daughter outgrows her psychological attraction to her father.
The wish to make all this fucking somehow more meaningful sometimes leads to some fairly ridiculous prose. Here’s Alice describing an encounter during the famous first night of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring:
I lanced my tongue in Mrs. Potter’s anus, up and fast between the tropic lips into her beast-peach hole. Crowned hot with bronze, American girl heat rubbed shameless as a cat against my thigh. The smash of wet cymbals inside me as the maid surrendered to the sacrifice. I’m weeping.
It’s like a letter to Penthouse written by Sir Walter Scott. And the sex itself, however beautifully drawn, can get a bit fatiguing after three volumes of it.
But that aside, you have to give Lost Girls full marks for ambition. Time and again it deliberately throws up challenges to you as a reader, prompting you to question every response you have to the material. Wendy, for instance, worries about the incest which characterises a book they’re reading: isn’t it wrong to be turned on by stuff which is legally and morally reprehensible?
‘It’s an…unngh…exciting story, but the children, doing things with…ungh…with their own Mother! I mean, I have…unngh…a son myself, and I’d never dream…unngh…never dream of…’
‘But of course you would not, dear Madam,’ interrupts the hotelier. ‘Your child is real.’ This book is in part a defence of sexual fantasy, in whatever forms it comes. Perhaps some people might find that disingenuous, but I thought for the most part it was a rare blast of common sense.
Moore also makes the most of the historical context. As well as Stravinsky, we have references to Freud (whose ideas are important to the book), and the imminent war is also significant. At the end of volume three, Moore shows us the trenches, and the stupidity of vilifying sex as compared to violence is left hanging with devastating effect.
Particularly notable is the absence, or at any rate the dismissal, of the guilt which is such a conspicuous aspect of American treatments of sexuality these days. Wendy’s story is particularly satisfying from this point of view. She has guilty fantasies about being kidnapped and raped by a strange claw-handed man who preys on local children (the ‘Captain Hook’ figure). When he finally confronts her in reality, she’s initially terrified. But the downfall of Hook in the original story is here transformed into a kind of triumphant moment of self-acceptance on the part of his intended victim, as she stops running and turns on him:
‘There was a moment when I suddenly saw everything, myself, the whole terrible situation, with perfect clarity. I could think about what I liked. That didn’t mean I wanted it to really happen to me. That didn’t mean that anyone could force it on me.’
The worries, the excitement, the moral questioning, the confrontation with guilt: all of these things are experienced as much by you when you read Lost Girls as by the characters you’re reading about. The Soltenberg quote I opened with has the following subtext: if you find porn sexy you ought to be ashamed of yourself. This is also the subtext of everything else anyone ever says about it. Isn’t it nice for a change to read something whose message is “fuck guilt”?
And if the subject matter bothers you, just remember: it’s only a story. ‘Fact and fiction,’ reflects M. Rougeur, as he’s being acrobatically fellated: ‘only madmen and magistrates cannot discriminate between them.’
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.
Although there is a ton of sex in this series of books, they are not about sex, in the same way that Moby Dick is not about whaling.
Moore and Gebbie essentially assault you with
I heartily recommend reading volume III in one sitting. It makes the ending that much more poignant.
by Alan Moore & Melinda Gebbie
**NSFW**
Ever wonder what happened after the fairy tales?
Alice is back through the looking glass, Dorothy has returned from Oz and Wendy is home from Neverland. They find themselves together in an Austrian hotel in 1913. They
The (VERY) adult adventures of three are illustrated in styles particular to each character; Alice’s through her journal entries and ‘looking glass’ view, Dorothy’s with the wide-open perspective of Kansas farmland, Wendy’s through the tall narrow windows of Victorian England.
Alan Moore (of The Watchman and V for Vendetta) and Melinda Gebbie spent 16 years in the production of Lost Girls, originally published in three graphic novel editions, now available in a single hardbound volume. The artwork is elegant, the production value extremely high and the tales engaging. There is some controversy around the volume because of the accounts of the girls’ underage sexual experiences. If that is a concern – even though it has been ruled not to be child pornography – this is not a book for you.
Truly a unique labor of love that by its art transcends the genre, providing a substantial, and at times
Lost Girls doesn't always make for comfortable reading, but a lot of it is very... enjoyable. The rest is thought-provoking. The art is gorgeous.
I should probably add that I haven't read any of the three works it's based on. I probably
I really didn't enjoy this book very much because it was hard to follow. Honestly with this book, I am not sure how I would incorporate it into a classroom.
I found the constant frottage and sexual activity between the protaganists a bit annoying after a while. It seemed that every imaginable scenario described (and there were a lot) by one of the women was incredibly titillating to the others. This background of incessant sexual play seemed unlikely and detracted from the story for me.
Some of the episodes were just silly. There was a scene with Wendy and her boring husband, who have no sex life. Although they are merely conversing distantly, their shadows appear to be engaged in sexual activity -- but only through Austin Powers-like coincidences of lighting and movement. It just didn't work.
Gebbie and Moore have chosen to portray mostly consensual sexual acts (with Alice sometimes the exception) and generally ascribe little moral judgment to those acts. Rape, torture and bondage are mostly excluded. In fact it is through sex that the women are able to re-integrate their lost childhoods. Of the three, Alice is the most damaged, a child abuse victim who embraces a life of lascivious addiction and becomes (at times) an abuser herself.
What I did really enjoy was Melinda Gebbie's simulation of various artists of the time, especially in the 'White Book', the lurid and blatantly pornographic tome which was in every room of Monsieur Rogeur's hotel.
Overall, a very interesting experiment. Not really pornography even though it tried quite hard. Hard to classify quite what it was instead though.
I think that if you prefer your girlish icons unsullied, you'd best stay as far away from this as possible. On the other hand, if Shel Silverstein's song "Polly in a porny with a pony" makes you giggle madly, you might want to pick this up.
Includes most every taboo sexual act you can think of, and some you can't.
My quibble is with the drawings- the women aren't consistently shaped, nor are their faces the same from panel to panel. Odd little lumps grow out of their sides and then disappear, proportions seem... off somehow. Perhaps it's intentional, to add to the dreamlike feeling. I don't read a lot of graphic-novel porn, so I don't know what the conventions are.
I thought it was fun, and the ending managed to be poignant and lovely, and that surprised me too.
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 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.
The interpretation that the catalysts for Wendy Darling's, Dorothy Gale's, and Alice's adventures were results of some form of sexual
Huh.
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.
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.
Where the book lost me, though, was its lack of a plot through the first book, the lack of a coherent ending, and the insistence that the only way to get comfortable with one's sexuality is All Orgy All The Time. As a storytelling experiment (giving another side to these established characters), it's been done so many times before, albeit never in such filthy ways.
It's hard to review this book in any context other than good porn vs crappy porn, good messages vs bad. I agree with many of the points he's making, however clumsily he's making them, but he leaves little room for non-fetishized, positive sexuality, and the "Lost Girls" of the title seem more an excuse to insert one more fetish (beloved childhood characters) than a necessary element to the story.