WHO WAS THAT LOST GIRL I SAW YOU WITH LAST NIGHT?

HIS: JASON QUINN

How long would you wait? After over a 15-year gestation, Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s hardcore story of a meeting between Wendy (from J.M. Barrie’s PETER PAN), Dorothy (from F.L. Baum’s WIZARD OF OZ series) and Alice (from Lewis Carroll’s THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS and ALICE IN WONDERLAND) has arrived.

LOST GIRLS
By Alan Moore & Melinda Gebbie
with letters by Todd Klein
A Graphic Novel in three volumes
Top Shelf Productions
August 2006

The first chapters of Alan Moore’s LOST GIRLS were originally published in Steve Bissette’s TABOO issues 5-7 back in 1991/’92. These were reprinted and the story expanded through two collections in 1995 and 1996. Then the real wait began.

Every few years we’d hear that the entire complete run of LOST GIRLS was just on the horizon and would be in our hands soon. Trusted Moore-publisher Top Shelf would be handling the packaging and distribution, so sit tight and be patient.

The years roll by. Rumors of a 240-page, three-volume set begin to rustle in the wind… “You can’t rush quality”… More build-up and anticipation in comic stores… Patience, patience…

And then in 2006 it finally arrives. So the one element it must now contend with is “Was it worth the wait?”

Moore has made such an impact on the field of graphic novels –FROM HELL, Rorschach and the American Dream, LEAGUE OF EXTRODINARY GENTLEMEN, John Constantine, Promethea, V FOR VENDETTA, “The Rite of Spring,” “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” Ozymandias and one mustn’t forget… “The Fury” – that it begs the question of what can he do with an explicitly pornographic tale? How well can he bring a sense of class to a hard-core narrative concerning classic literary characters like Wendy, Dorothy and Alice?

It’s a difficult task to lend some legitimacy to “pornography.” Even the term “Erotica” sounds rather fey, so by attempting to bring some weight to this type of genre, by writing a pornographic or erotic tale giving it the weight of classic literature, Moore and Gebbie have set themselves up with an immense challenge. When was the last time this sort of thing was even attempted? Henry Miller? Nabokov?

(At this point, it seems almost redundant to split hairs over the terms “Erotica” and “Pornography.” Let’s not waste time dancing on the head of that pin. Moore’s latest isn’t the juvenile SCREW magazine or leering satirical Hustler variety of porn. This graphic novel isn’t only trying to appeal to our base, reptilian instincts the way so much pornography does these days. Rather, he’s attempting to do something other than merely conjure a dirty titillation which, in turn, begs the question “does he succeed?” Or better yet, “how well does he succeed?”) ----

By December 1914, there were 2 million dead in the trenches of Europe. Never had so many died so quickly for so little. War boundaries went back and forth with land gained and then lost in a tragic pattern. There had been nothing like it before, and it is on the eve of this world event that Moore sets the story of his three lost girls.

For those unaware of the story thus far, these “lost girls”are residents of the Hotel Himmelgarten on the Austrian border, and their tales evolve over the course of three volumes.

The story begins with reflections from a mirror, Alice’s famed looking glass which, in the past, had taken her into different realms. The entire episode is told through reflections. We see a bedroom and a conversation is taking place. It’s difficult at first to tell how many people are in the room or who is having the conversation.

As the story progresses, the context of this initial conversation becomes apparent and we’re able to get our bearings. Dorothy and Alice meet each other while Wendy spends the first couple of chapters with her rather stodgy husband Harold Potter (Moore’s comment on J.K. Rowling’s character and his comparative popularity?).

"The Girls" start to drift

Before long the three have met and begin to tell of their early lives and the adventures with which we’re all familiar. There’s an element of sexual awakening in each of the original tales, and LOST GIRLS brings this in the open.

The end chapter of the first volume sees the characters attending the debut of Stravinsky’s ballet “Le Sacre du Printemps” in Paris, which historically ended in a riot, and it is at this point where things really begin to heat up.

There’s a forward motion to the explicitness of sexual situations. The scenarios become more explicit, more hard-core as the story progresses. What we see in the first volume seems slightly tame compared to what’s in the third. Much of Book 2 is a retelling of the classic stories with a hypersexual edge to them.

What’s taboo for you? What’s erotic? What goes too far over the line? Sodomy? Orgies? Homosexuality? Incest? Bestiality? LOST GIRLS could give any hard-core porn site a run for its money but having said that, there’s something about it that rises above any ‘net site or any other type of porn currently on the market.

At one point in Volume 3 Chapter 22, an orgy has begun while the hotel manager, Monsieur Rougeur, reads a work detailing a story of incest involving a husband, wife and their two young children (“I thank God for the institution of the Family, found on nothing save for fucking, and its endless consequences!” pg.7).

Moore is (overly?) careful to state and restate the difference between fantasy and reality throughout this section. It may be said that one can’t be too careful when dealing with such material in this day and age. To illustrate the point, while Monsieur Rougeur mentions “[the children] are fictions, as old as the page they appear upon, no less, no more. Fiction and fact: only madmen and magistrates cannot discriminate between them… You see, if this [tale of incest] were real, it would be horrible. Children raped by their trusted parents. Horrible. But they are fictions.”

Fiction and fact, fantasy and actuality. The imagination and reality… and therein lies the immense power of LOST GIRLS. It is a fantasy using familiar, fictional characters who Moore conjures into our imaginations with the use of words and art, in order to produce an actual physical response. Moore and Gebbie combine their talents to become sexual shamen.

In order for this graphic novel to succeed at being erotic, Moore’s writing must work alongside the illustrations. There are too many examples in the field of graphic novels where the art manages to outshine the writing, or vice versa. For LOST GIRLS to work, the visuals and narrative are equally important—probably more than in other graphic novels because, on one level anyway, it’s dealing with the depiction of physical sensations while attempting to create physical sensations in the reader. The art must compliment the writing all the more since Moore isn’t merely telling a story here.

Melinda Gebbie’s art is powerful in ways which most comic illustrations fail to achieve. Her characters look human without being exaggerated. Her characters’ body shapes suggest reality, almost as if they came right out of a life-drawing studio. This helps to bring them a step closer to reality and out of the usual comic book cartoonishness. They’re the types of figures you want to touch or better yet, have them touch you. Gebbie’s artwork doesn’t alienate the reader the way other pornographic comics might.

Gebbie’s illustrations do a marvelous job at bringing out the humor of the story. There are a couple of times between Wendy and Potter where the art highlights a sense of humor; particularly their shadow scenes in Chapter 3’s “Missing Shadows” and the images created by listening to Alice and Dorothy fucking through the wall in Chapter 5’s “Straight on ‘Til Morning.”

As mentioned before, history is the background of this story. The events of WWI rise up (particularly Chapter 20 at the end of Volume 2) throughout, and when our heroines are finally leaving the hotel one of them makes the point “I’m afraid lots of boys will be dying in mud when they should be fucking in bed. War’s such a frightful perversion.” War is the perversion here, not the usual suspects of incest, sodomy or bestiality.

Wendy says, “I suppose that’s what war destroys. All the art and architecture, the fields of flowers and young people’s dreams… all the imagination.” And Alice responds “My dear, beautiful and imaginative things can be destroyed. Beauty and imagination cannot. They blossom, even in wartime.” The story then concludes when German soldiers destroy Alice’s looking glass. The view then takes us up over the body of a young soldier lying on his back, with a blurry mass of red spilling from his abdomen. A red poppy sits in the foreground.

The subtitle of the last chapter “Who Dreamed It?” leaves us with the gentle suggestion that the whole story may have come from the mind of the young soldier as he lies dying in the mud rather than fucking in bed… But saying all this really does the work little justice. Obviously it’s got to been seen to be fully experienced. To take it out of context just won’t cut it. Moore and Gebbie’s beautifully rendered graphic novel does a better job attaining what it set out to do than most others currently being published. It was worth the wait.

HERS: K.A. LAITY

The lust of the goat is the bounty of God…
The nakedness of woman is the work of God…
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
—William Blake

While waiting for my copy of this gorgeous three-book set, I spent some of my time reading reviews by various well-known comics creators and other interested folk (mostly guys). While flatteringly complimentary, they often seemed to come to the conclusion that while Gebbie’s art work was lovely and Moore’s explorations in form, as always, intriguing, the collection failed in its avowed mission as pornography. In other words, it was not arousing. I found that interesting—particularly after receiving the box and poring through its contents (albeit slowly and lingeringly). Porn tends to be ugly. Although the bad lighting and poor acting has been addressed with increasing skill over the years, the primary problem remains the same for most women. As Laura Mulvey wrote many years back about film in general, it is still dominated by the hegemony of the male gaze (I promise not to use too many of those 50-cent words but that’s an important one). While critics have revisited and challenged Mulvey’s conclusions in her influential essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (including Mulvey herself), the basic idea—that the gaze of the camera is assumed to be a heterosexual male—remains prevalent in cinema and visual narratives, perhaps even more so in pornography. This dominant paradigm is part of why a movie without women is a movie, but a movie without men is a chick flick.

Pornography is still largely made with men in mind, filmed with men in mind and sold to men. The selling is an important part—we’re now told that pornography is “empowering” to women, who need to “own” their sexuality. The problem remains that it is still largely men who profit from it. If it were really empowering to “Go Wild,” women would be seeing some of the multimillion dollar profits. Sex in this country is a commercial product, to be marketed, bought and sold. Sex sells anything—just add a naked or soon-to-be-naked female body. We understand the female body to be equivalent to sex, as in “if I buy this product, I will have sex” and “spending makes me happy” (so to speak). The increasing exposure of men’s bodies as marketing tools is not the equalizer it seems, but the continued commodification of what should be an instrument of joy—our bodies shouldn’t be product, but pleasure.

Which is the long way around, but one of the reasons I really enjoyed this collection is because Moore and Gebbie try to subvert those tendencies. They don’t entirely dispense with the male gaze, but they do metaphorically take it from behind and force it onto the floor for their pleasure. In the complex narrative, sex and gender prove to be multivalent categories—strap one on to become male, open up to show your feminine side, or do both at once and anything else you can imagine at the same time. The couplings (though rarely involving a mere couple) are chock full of slippage and play. Gebbie’s drawings and paintings splash across the page with wild abandon, the colored pencils rich as sweet pastries and just as inviting of a bite. The austere black ink passages incisively whip the reader through stark images with speed, yet invite a protracted scrutiny of the intricate details. Moore’s imaginative orchestrations of events and characters whirl from the sublime to the ridiculous, evoking laughter one minute and a sharp intake of breath upon turning the page.

The reason I suspect so many reviewers claimed not to find the project arousing is because the story winds through just about any possible sexual combination that occurs to Moore’s fertile (and febrile) mind. That means they run the gamut, from heterosexual to homosexual, from singles to groups, and from incest to bestiality and most other forms of sex (although light on BDSM scenarios). Few people want to admit that such scenarios could be arousing to someone who does not practice pedophilia nor zoophilia, but Moore sees this freedom as essential to fictional pleasure. There are all kinds of things we enjoy reading (says the avid reader of hair-raising horror stories) that would horrify, annoy or embarrass us in real life, and most people are more than willing to read stories about people they would never like to meet and places they never hope to go. Somehow, when it comes to sex, we lose that sense of play. It must be mimesis or nothing.

The stories Moore and Gebbie present here do not allow that detachment, insisting we follow without judgment all manner of vivid encounters laid out before us in sumptuous images. Playful, aping styles of fin-de-siècle and Edwardian artists, Lost Girls tells the story of three well-known “lost girls”: J. M. Barrie’s Wendy, Lewis Carroll’s Alice and L. Frank Baum’s Dorothy. The conceit is that they meet on the verge of World War I in a small hotel in Austria. The “fictions” we all know turn out to be truth, albeit somewhat distorted, about the singular experiences that shaped their childhoods and sexuality. Moore and Gebbie passionately convey that these childhood experiences, stunted by secrecy about sex, denial of emotions, and in the case of Alice, abuse by an adult, leave these women mere shadows as adults, drifting through life half alive until the chance meeting at the appropriately-named Hotel Himmelgarten allows them to share the stories they have borne like crushing burdens since those early years.

Moore has always been interested in form, and most of the chapters follow a similar pattern, allowing each woman in turn to rehearse a little more of her story, in between various erotic adventures in the hotel, on a nearby island, and even in the Théatre des Champs-Elysées at the premiere of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” where a wild orgy erupts. The “original” narratives supply chapter titles and scenarios. The style of each woman’s story captures the feel of her well-known story, and the narratives bring the lingering subtexts to the forefront of the tale. Who can miss the sexual undercurrents of Peter Pan or the unvoiced passion evident in the unsettling photographs of Alice Liddell and her sisters by Carroll? Each story is usually crowned by a full-page image that offers a kind of Jungian tarot card as erotic frieze, like Wendy surrounded by her pirate lovers and Dorothy consumed by the whirlwind of sexual discovery. The images are rich and Gebbie’s lines admirably flexible whether she draws like herself or Beardsley or von Bayros. Her characters are likewise flexible, mobile and curvy—even the most contemptuous of characters seem to easily succumb to the right invitation usually delivered out of the blue, like Wendy’s smugly superior husband when faced with the insistently cheerful demands of Captain Bauer. It’s hard to imagine a more elegant compendium of erotic stories and images largely because it’s also suffused with wit and humor as well as a gripping interlace of intriguing stories.

Not that the book is without drawbacks—Dorothy’s bizarre accent sounds like a corn-pone huckster rejected from Hee Haw for being too broad. I don’t understand why all Britons seem to think they do a great American accent that inevitably sounds like Boss Hogg on a particularly damaged day—which is as insulting to Americans as Dick van Dyke’s notorious “Cockney” accent in Mary Poppins is to every resident of Britain living or dead. I have harangued friends there repeatedly to no avail; they blame television (why the hell not?). I really don’t understand why Gebbie didn’t at least attempt to alter the “dialect” (perhaps she did), but it’s also possible that she didn’t find anything odd about it. I recall living in Los Angeles and hearing people refer to Colorado as “back East” without a trace of irony, so it’s easy to believe that someone raised in San Francisco might think people in Kansas really do talk like a brain-damaged parody of a Southern sheriff. As a Midwesterner who has lived in the north, south, west and east of this large country, I find this kind of parochialism as distressing as it is prevalent, but enough about me.

Additionally, there’s more than a touch of didacticism (I promise, it’s the very last of my sesquipedalian tendencies) about its purpose, particularly in the persona of hotelier M. Rougeur who waxes a little too persnickety about the distinction between fiction and reality when it comes to sex, sniffing, “only madmen and magistrates cannot discriminate between them.” Moore seems too intent on getting the point across to be subtle, but it violates the cardinal rule of storytelling—show, don’t tell. It can perhaps be forgiven because it also addresses an all-too-real problem for comics creators in recent years. The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (http://www.cbldf.org/) has been very busy since its inception in 1986, fighting for people like Mike Diana who run afoul of such failures to discriminate between what is real and what imagined.

And it is that distinction which is the key issue for Moore. In the end, all the sumptuous flesh and intricate eroticism really serves as an elaborate smokescreen for the real lesson—the awesome power of the story. While the sex is pleasurable and vigorously enjoyed, it is the Scheherazade roles that really free the women from the damages of their pasts and give them, as Alice says while they prepare to depart, “Frankly anything seems possible now.” By sharing their bodies and then their stories, the women have exposed the demons that bedeviled them for so long and kept them lost. Unchained from the damage of those early secrets, their bodies are free for the excesses of pleasure, but more significantly, their minds escape the endless cycles of fear and humiliation. Even Wendy, clearly the most repressed of the three, declares a similar sense of heady abandon, saying it is “as if my imagination can wander where it likes…” (emphasis in the original). Moore and Gebbie invite us to step through the looking glass to the other side, stopping to admire our own lovely flesh, and putting our own fears and doubts on the next tornado out of town.