Lost Girls

Supercbbox| title = Lost Girls
comic_color = background:#c0c0c0


caption = Cover of "Lost Girls" collected volume, by Melinda Gebbie.
schedule =
format = graphic novel
(partially serialized)
publisher = Top Shelf Productions
(previously Steve Bissette and Tundra)
date = 1991–1992 (partial)
2006
issues =
past_current_color = background:#5be85b
main_char_team = Lady Fairchild (Alice)
Dorothy Gale
Wendy Durling-Potter (Wendy "Darling")
writers =
artists =
pencillers =
inkers =
colorists =
creative_team_month =
creative_team_year =
creators = Alan Moore
Melinda Gebbie
TPB = 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).

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.

Literary significance and reception

Moore is one of the most critically acclaimed writers in the field of comic books, and the release of this work received widespread coverage in the 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. [ [http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/9848.html ICv2 News - 'Lost Girls' at 35k ] ]

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. [cite web|author=Rich Johnston|work=Comic Book Resources|title=Lying in the Gutter Volume 2 Column 54|url=http://www.comicbookresources.com/columns/index.cgi?column=litg&article=2475|accessmonthday=May 31 |accessyear=2006]

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, [Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 http://www.politechbot.com/docs/cppa.text.html] 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.

Moore states that the storm of criticism which he and Gebbie expected did not materialize, which he attributes in part to his design of "Lost Girls" as a "benign" form of pornography (he cites "people like Angela Carter who, in her book "The Sadeian Women"... admitted... the possibility [of] a form of pornography that was benign, that was imaginative, was beautiful, and which didn’t have the problems that she saw in a lot of other pornography"The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log: "We’re off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Northampton: Part 1" Interview with Alan Moore by Pádraig Ó Méalóid, June 13th, 2008] as inspirations for the work). He has also said that his own description of "Lost Girls" as "pornography" has "wrong-footed a lot of... people." Moore speculates that "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 realise quite what they've said."

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. [ [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2238812,00.html "Comic row over graphic Peter Pan"] , "The Times", June 23, 2006. Accessed 2 June 2008.] 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. [cite web|author=MattBrady|work=Newsarama|title=Top Shelf, Ormond Street Hospital Settle Over Peter Pan in Lost Girls|url=http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=88979|accessmonthday=October 27 |accessyear=2006]

Allusions and references

The title of the work is a play on the name for Peter Pan's followers, the Lost Boys.

The individual sections dealing with the three titular "girls" all have distinct visual layouts and themes used for their chapters. Alice's sections feature ovals reminiscent of her looking-glass; Wendy's are shrouded in tall, dark rectangles reminiscent of the shadowy Victorian-architecture of her time, and Dorothy has wide panels in imitation of the flat landscape of Kansas and prominently featured silver shoes. [ [http://stuyoung.blogspot.com/2008/02/lost-girls.html Stuart Young's review of Moore & Gebbie in conversation with Stewart Lee, London, October 12, 2006] . Accessed June 13, 2008]

Moore attempts to tailor the dialogue to each character's previous experiences and stories. Dorothy Gale, raised on a farm 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 briefly been made queen (in "Through The Looking-Glass And What Alice Found There"), is more authoritarian in her upper-class English speech patterns and formal manner. Lewis Carroll's nonsense-words also make allusory appearances in Alice's dialogue, including phrases such as "to jab", "bandersnatch" and "contrarywise" as well as more overt references to her adventures in phrases like "the reflection is the real thing" and "I made pretence". [See [http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v3_3/lost_girls/kidd.shtml "ImageSexT: A Roundtable on "Lost Girls": Down the Rabbit Hole" by Kenneth Kidd, 2007] . Accessed June 13, 2008]

Each of the three "Lost Girls" volumes opens 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 volume: Older Children ("We are but older children, dear, who fret to find our bedtime near," Caroll.)
#Second volume: Neverlands ("Of course, the Neverlands vary a good deal," Barrie.)
#Third volume: The Great And Terrible ("I am Oz, the great and terrible. Who are you and why do you seek me?," Baum.)Equally, the titles of each chapter naturally point towards 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", etc.

Each chapter contains eight pages. This format initially derived from its original serialized publication in Stephen R. Bissette's anthology "Taboo", but it also reflects Carroll's multi-layered usage of mathematical allusions and links as there are 8 squares in the length of a chess board (a prominent feature of "Through The Looking-Glass", and the key to becoming a queen in both game and book) as well as his poem "The Hunting Of The Snark" being "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. [ [http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/08/30/moore/ "Lost Girls" reviewd by Douglas Wolk for "Salon", August 30, 2006] . Accessed June 13, 2008] [ [http://www.metroactive.com/metro/08.23.06/lost-girls-0634.html "E is for Erotica" review by Richard von Busack for "metroactive", August 23-29, 2006] . Accessed June 13, 2008] [ [http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v3_3/lost_girls/hatfield.shtml "ImageSexT: A Roundtable on "Lost Girls": A Review and response" by Charles Hatfield, 2007] . Accessed June 13, 2008]

Literary Themes

ex

Moore describes the work as "pornography",cite web
url = http://www.scifi.com/sfw/interviews/sfw13282.html
title = Alan Moore leaves behind his "Extraordinary Gentlemen" to dally with "Lost Girls"
accessdate = 2006-08-08
last = Schindler
first = Dorman T.
date = 2006-08-07
work = Science Fiction Weekly] a genre whose literary and artistic quality he and Gebbie hope to raise:

hared 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".

helter 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 draws heavily on themes and tropes from such books as the Marquis de Sade's "120 Days of Sodom", and Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain"Fact|date=June 2007, the latter of which sees a young German man staying 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.

Publication history

The first six chapters of "Lost Girls" were initially published in the "Taboo" anthology magazine, beginning in 1991 with "Taboo" #5.comicbookdb|type=issue|id=122231|title="Taboo" #5] comicbookdb|type=issue|id=105265|title="Taboo" #6] comicbookdb|type=issue|id=122255|title="Taboo" #7] Kitchen Sink Press's Tundra imprint later reprinted the "Taboo" chapters as two separate volumes, containing all of the previously-published chapters. [comicbookdb|type=title|id=7567|title="Lost Girls" (1995)] 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." [ [http://www.avclub.com/content/node/51180 Alan Moore | The A.V. Club ] ]

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." [ [http://www.readysteadybook.com/Article.aspx?page=alanmoore Alan Moore « Interview « ReadySteadyBook - a literary site ] ] 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. [ [http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/25910,life,lost-girls Lost Girls | Life | The First Post ] ]

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.

References

External links

* [http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/25910,life,lost-girls Read the comic Lost Girls online at The First Post]
* [http://www.topshelfcomix.com/catalog.php?type=12&title=219 Top Shelf page for Lost Girls]
* [http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6329599.html?display=current Alan Moore's 'Literary' Pornography] , "Publishers Weekly", May 1, 2006
* [http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v3_3/lost_girls/ ImageSexT: A Roundtable on Lost Girls] , "ImageTexT" vol. 3 (3), Spring 2007
* [http://villagevoice.com/books/0652,books,75374,10.html The Village Voice - Top 25 of Year]
* [http://www.edrants.com/?p=4467 Edrants.com - Top 10 of Year]

Reviews

* [http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2006/06/lost-girls-redux.html Neil Gaiman] , June 19, 2006
* [http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/07/10/020259.php Blog Critics] , July 10, 2006
* [http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=24140 Aintitcool.com] , August 10, 2006
* [http://www.brokenfrontier.com/columns/details.php?id=498 Broken Frontier] , August 11, 2006
* [http://www.villagevoice.com/books/0634,gehr,74247,10.html Alan Moore's Girls Gone Wilde] , "Village Voice", August 15, 2006
* [http://weblogs.variety.com/bags_and_boards/2006/09/guest_review_lo.html Variety.com] , September 6, 2006

Interviews

* [http://www.cinescape.com/0/editorial.asp?aff_id=0&this_cat=Comics&action=page&obj_id=50999# The Virtues of Vice: The Alan Moore Interview, Part One] and [http://www.cinescape.com/0/editorial.asp?aff_id=0&this_cat=Comics&action=page&obj_id=51044 Part Two] , Cinescape, April, 2006
* [http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=7151 Find the Lost Girls with Alan Moore, Part 1 of 3] , [http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=7420 Part 2] , [http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=7433 Part 3] , Comic Book Resources, May 2006
* [http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/Alan+Moore+co-creator+of+Lost+Girls/ Suicide Girls Part 1] and [http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/Lost%20Girls%20artist%20Melinda%20Gebbie/ Part 2] , July 2006
* [http://www.avclub.com/content/node/51180 The Onion] , August 2, 2006
* [http://www.brokenfrontier.com/lowdown/details.php?id=463 Lost Girl Found - Part 1] and [http://www.brokenfrontier.com/lowdown/details.php?id=467 Part 2] , interview with Melinda Gebbie, August 8, 2006
* [http://villagevoice.com/books/0634,singer,74261,10.html Panel Discussions: A talk with Lost Girls artist Melinda Gebbie] , "Village Voice", August 15, 2006
* [http://susiebright.blogs.com/susie_brights_journal_/2006/08/what_if_dorothy.html Susie Bright Journal] , August 26, 2008
* [http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=8094 Gauging Lost Girls Reaction with] Chris Staros, Comic Book Resources, September, 2006
* [http://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A17257 Charleston City Paper] , September 6, 2006
* [http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/Content?oid=68878&category=34029 Portland Mercury] , October, 2006
* [http://fanboyradio.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=152083 Fanboy Radio Podcast] , November 15, 2006
* [http://www.playboy.com/arts-entertainment/dotcomversation/alan-moore/index.html Playboy Interview]
* [http://www.nerve.com/screeningroom/books/interview_alanmoore/ Nerve.com]
* [http://www.newsarama.com/TopShelf/LostGirls/MooreLG_01.html Alan Moore on Lost Girls, Part 1] , [http://www.newsarama.com/TopShelf/LostGirls/MooreLG_02.html Part 2] , [http://www.newsarama.com/TopShelf/LostGirls/Gebbie_LG.html Part 3] , [http://www.newsarama.com/TopShelf/LostGirls/Staros_LostGirls.html Part 4] and [http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=83081 Part 5] , Newsarama