Moore Gone Wild and Girls Follow Suit

Acclaimed graphic novelist Alan Moore single-handedly changed the way people view graphic literature. Through widely recognizable works such as The Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Moore managed to imbue the "comic book" medium, once dismissed as childish and irrelevant, with a mature literary conscience and an acute, if often controversial, sense of political acumen. His shockingly pornographic new work, Lost Girls, boldly twists the stories of Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz into lurid tales of sexual awakening and fulfillment- and has been garnering anticipation from fans, as well as attack for its sexual content involving children, since its foreign release this past August.

Sixteen years in the making, Lost Girls was ironically intended by Moore, and his illustrator-turned-fiancée, Melinda Gebbie, to be a response to what Moore called in an interview the "unhealthy, unproductive, unbeautiful approach to sex" in British and American cultures. This moral pedantry is certainly not a new theme for Moore novels; neither is the controversy. And though the genre this time is not detective, or superhero, but sex, Moore brings somewhat the same sensibility to Lost Girls that allows his other work to be so popular among hardcore fans while remaining largely respected by critics and the general public. Like in most of his works, for example, Moore delineates the main plotline of Lost Girls by interweaving past works of literature- this time, the Edwardian erotica of Aubrey Beardsley- to give his own story more dimension and to draw the reader further, intellectually, into the world that Melinda Gebbie brings to visual life with her whimsical, pastel-toned crayon illustrations.

Sadly, Lost Girls also fiercely pushes the reader away. For the most part, it is excruciating to read and could not be more full of unnecessarily obscene and pornographic imagery. It opens in 1913, with Lady "Alice" Fairchild, an aged spinster with a taste for young girls, fleeing to a private hotel in the countryside of Austria to escape the judgment of her aristocratic family. At the hotel, the Himmelgarten, she meets Wendy Darling and Dorothy Gale, grown women themselves, both involved in perfunctory relationships with the men that accompany them. The women proceed to fuck their way through the next two hundred pages- they fuck their companions, each other, the prepubescent hotel staff, even their chamber doorknobs. Every possible sexual permutation is explored; there are multiple orgies, upwards of five cum-shots, and plenty of foreign objects jammed into various bodily orifices. Through the sounds of their grunts and moans- literally- the three women bond as they recount the stories of their first sexual encounters, stories they each have been suppressing for one reason or another. What ensues is horrible, and understandably has been condemned by many critics as borderline child pornography: in Wendy's tale, for example, "Peter Pan" is a young male prostitute who seduces not only Wendy but her two brothers, and fucks Wendy while her brothers masturbate each other to a climax over the foot of her bed. Dorothy and Alice recount similarly disturbing tales.

Against this backdrop, Gebbie's innocent and wispy illustrative styleis almost terrifying, taunting in its insinuation that Lost Girls is not a far cry from the children's tales it draws upon. Worst of all, the characters are all portrayed as being deliriously happy- they literally get off on these memories- and Moore shows no signs of acknowledging that any of their activity- in their memories or in the current of the main story- is perverse. The Hotel Himmelgarten, like an island, seems insanely disconnected from the rest of the world; and at this point so does Moore's tale, in its passive absurdity. It tempts the reader to side with critics in wondering why exactly Moore chose to undertake the genre of sex if he was going to do nothing more than glorify pornography.

However, Alan Moore is the last person on earth who would leave it at that; and appropriately, the last one hundred pages of Lost Girls elegantly turns the entire book on its head. Not so far from the Himmelgarten, an archduke is assassinated, hurling the story at once into the political context of World War 1. Furthermore, Moore lets sex take a backseat to social commentary from this point through careful manipulation of the dialogue and the depersonalization of sex between the individual characters. Instead, he smoothly shifts the focus on deconstructing why it is that perfect childhood sexual fantasies, like pornography, can be innocent until they are forced into the realm of ugly reality. "Pornographies are the enchanted parklands where the most secret and vulnerable of all our many selves can safely play," asserts Mr. Rougeur, the owner of the Himmelgarten, while masturbating to the incestuous Beardsley erotica he keeps in stock at his hotel. But life and porn, he asserts, are like "fact and fiction: only madmen and magistrates cannot discriminate between them." This is exactly the point that Moore, who in an interview attributed sex crimes to "the repression of society's sexual imagination into dark corners by shame and embarrassment," wants his novel to explore.

In this philosophical sense, Lost Girls is not so different from Moore's other works after all. What distinguishes it is the puddle of smut and shit that once must shift through, perhaps necessarily, in order to gleam any wisdom from it.