Lost Girls
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| Lost Girls | |
 Cover of Lost Girls collected volume, by Melinda Gebbie. |
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| Publisher | Top Shelf Productions (previously Steve Bissette and Tundra) |
|---|---|
| Format | graphic novel (partially serialized) |
| Publication date | 1991–1992 (partial) 2006 |
| Main character(s) | Lady Fairchild (Alice) Dorothy Gale Wendy Durling-Potter (Wendy "Darling") |
| Creative team | |
| Creator(s) | Alan Moore Melinda Gebbie |
| Collected editions | |
| Lost Girls | ISBN 1-891830-74-0 |
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: 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, and 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).
Contents |
[edit] Plot summary
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) 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, his sister and the lost boys in a park for sexual encounters one summer, she was sixteen.
- Dorothy Gale having sexual encounters with three farm hands and later her father at the age of sixteen after a cyclone came to Kansas; it was while trapped in her house during this cyclone that she experienced her first orgasm.
- Alice Fairchild having sex, first with a man and then with several girls and women while attending an all girls school, 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] Literary significance and reception
Moore is one of the most critically acclaimed writers in the field of sequential art, and the release of this work received widespread coverage in the comic book industry media. Despite the price of US$75, the book's first two print runs of 10,000 each sold out at the distributor level on the day of their release, with the U.S. sales at the end of 2007 reaching 35,000 copies.[1]
[edit] Controversy about child sexuality
Lost Girls 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 possession and/or trafficking in child pornography. Many retailers have stated that they will not stock the book out of fear of possible obscenity prosecution, though some said they might make the book available to their customers via special order and simply not stock the book.[2]
In the United States prosecution for production or sale of "obscene" material would require failing the Miller test. Although child pornography is classified as obscene, that requires the involvement of a child in its production,[3] which the book did not include. The legal situation in other countries is less clear: some countries forbid any images of nude children in a sexual context, regardless of how they were produced. French publisher Delcourt temporarily suspended their plans to publish a translated edition in 2008, citing concerns about the legality of the depictions of minors under French law.
[edit] Disputed copyright status
On June 23, 2006, officials for Great Ormond Street Hospital—which was given the copyright to Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie in 1929—asserted that Moore would need their permission to publish the book in the UK (and by implication, elsewhere in the European Union). Moore indicated that he would not be seeking their licence, claiming that he had not expected his work to be "banned" and that the hospital only holds the rights to performances of the original play, not to the individual characters.[4] On 11 October 2006, Top Shelf signed an agreement with GOSH that did not concede copyright infringement, but delayed publication of Lost Girls in the UK until after the copyright lapsed at the end of 2007.[5]
[edit] Allusions and references
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This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims. Please improve the article by adding references. See the talk page for details. (March 2008) |
The title of the work is a play on the name for Peter Pan's followers, the Lost Boys.
Each of the three titular "girls" has a distinct visual layout that is used for her chapters: Alice has ovals reminiscent of her looking-glass, Wendy has very dark, tall, shadowy rectangles reminiscent of the Victorian-architecture window Peter Pan flew through, and Dorothy has wide panels in imitation of the flat landscape of Kansas.
Being raised in a farm, Dorothy speaks in a casual Midwestern American dialect. Wendy's speeches are heavy with timidity and clumsiness as a result of the repressive nature of her middle-class upbringing. 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 frequently includes hints to her past adventures in her speeches ("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 (Lewis Carroll, 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." Caroll). 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" authors' 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", ...
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] Literary Themes
[edit] Sex
Moore describes the work as "pornography",[6] 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. | ” |
[edit] Shared universe
A fictional crossover placing the protagonists of unconnected stories in a shared universe is a standard trope of superhero comics, a genre that Moore has written in fairly extensively. Philip José Farmer's works featuring the Wold Newton family is a previous example of taking established classic characters and retroactively placing them in continuity with each other. While working on Lost Girls, Moore also used this concept as the basis for his series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
[edit] Shelter from the Storm
The plot device of a group of people being sequestered together in a hotel or similar place telling stories or committing otherwise decadent acts while the outside world is falling apart or in chaos is an old one in Western storytelling. Moore borrows heavily from the themes of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain,[citation needed] in which a young German man stays in a mountain hotel/sanatorium for seven years just prior to World War I. This novel, like Lost Girls, sees that war as a major turning point in world history.
[edit] Publication history
The first six chapters of Lost Girls were initially published in the Taboo anthology magazine, beginning in 1991 with Taboo #5.[7] [8] [9]Kitchen Sink Press's Tundra imprint later reprinted the Taboo chapters as two separate volumes, containing all of the previously-published chapters.[10] 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. Top Shelf later planned to debut it in the U.S. 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. In the U.K. the book was published on 1 January 2008, and launched by Moore and Gebbie at a book launch in London on 2 January.
- Lost Girls Collected (by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie, Top Shelf, 26 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." [11]
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."[12] Such a collaboration is known in comic book circles as writing Marvel style.
Lost Girls was published on online magazine on The First Post in 2008.[13]
[edit] Interviews
The DVD of the documentary feature film The Mindscape of Alan Moore contains an exclusive bonus interview with Gebbie, elaborately detailing the origin of the book and the collaboration with Moore.
[edit] References
- ^ ICv2 News - 'Lost Girls' at 35k
- ^ Rich Johnston. Lying in the Gutter Volume 2 Column 54. Comic Book Resources. Retrieved on May 31, 2006.
- ^ Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 http://www.politechbot.com/docs/cppa.text.html
- ^ "Comic row over graphic Peter Pan", The Times, June 23, 2006. Accessed 2 June 2008.
- ^ MattBrady. Top Shelf, Ormond Street Hospital Settle Over Peter Pan in Lost Girls. Newsarama. Retrieved on October 27, 2006.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Taboo #5 at the Comic Book DB
- ^ Taboo #6 at the Comic Book DB
- ^ Taboo #7 at the Comic Book DB
- ^ Lost Girls (1995) at the Comic Book DB
- ^ Alan Moore | The A.V. Club
- ^ Alan Moore « Interview « ReadySteadyBook - a literary site
- ^ Lost Girls | Life | The First Post
[edit] External links
- Read the comic Lost Girls online at The First Post
- Top Shelf page for Lost Girls
- Alan Moore's 'Literary' Pornography, Publishers Weekly, May 1, 2006
- ImageSexT: A Roundtable on Lost Girls, ImageTexT vol. 3 (3), Spring 2007
- The Village Voice - Top 25 of Year
- Edrants.com - Top 10 of Year
[edit] Reviews
- Neil Gaiman, June 19, 2006
- Blog Critics, July 10, 2006
- Aintitcool.com, August 10, 2006
- Broken Frontier, August 11, 2006
- Alan Moore's Girls Gone Wilde, Village Voice, August 15, 2006
- Variety.com, September 6, 2006
[edit] Interviews
- The Virtues of Vice: The Alan Moore Interview, Part One and Part Two, Cinescape, April, 2006
- Find the Lost Gorls with Alan Moore, Part 1 of 3, Part 2, Part 3, Comic Book Resources, May 2006
- Suicide Girls Part 1 and Part 2, July 2006
- The Onion, August 2, 2006
- Lost Girl Found - Part 1 and Part 2, interview with Melinda Gebbie, August 8, 2006
- Panel Discussions: A talk with Lost Girls artist Melinda Gebbie, Village Voice, August 15, 2006
- Susie Bright Journal, August 26, 2008
- Gauging Lost Girls Reaction with Chris Staros, Comic Book Resources, September, 2006
- Charleston City Paper, September 6, 2006
- Portland Mercury, October, 2006
- Fanboy Radio Podcast, November 15, 2006
- Playboy Interview
- Nerve.com
- Alan Moore on Lost Girls, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5, Newsarama
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