Review: Lost Girls

Alan Moore is no stranger to gay-friendly comics (his latest being the Top Ten graphic novel). With Lost Girls, he’s managed to write a gay/lesbian/straight-inclusive erotic story, which is no small feat in our times.
Drawn by Melinda Gebbie, who’s now Moore’s companion, Lost Girls is a monster project: it took about 15 years to finish what now comprises three oversized 112-pages hardcovers in a slipcase, with very high production values, and a price to match them¹. It is, on the surface, a reinterpretation of Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz and Peter Pan in a very sexual way. But as usual with Moore, there’s far more.

A gay meeting, with Schiele-like art

1913. In an Swiss hotel near the French border, three women meet and get to know each other. Alice Fairchild is an aristocratic British Lesbian in her 60s, Dorothy Gale a young American woman, and Wendy Potter a slightly older, but not much, British woman married to a pompous jerk 20 years older than she is. They will tell each other important episodes of their lives, which we’ll understand to be realistic (albeit pornographic) versions of the happenings in the three books mentioned above. So, lots of sex depicted, and with a few other secondary characters, mostly male, we (almost) get the full range of human sexuality. There’s a lot of lesbian sex in there, and even the straight sex is seen from a female point of view, which is what sets Lost Girls apart from a lot of modern porn.

Another fun aspect is the way stories are told within the main story, purportedly excerpted from a White Book (I’d like to know if Moore cribbed that title from the erotic autobiography written and drawn by Jean Cocteau) commissioned by the hotel manager, a big pornography amateur, from various well-known artists. For example, during a male-on-male encounter, we get an Oscar Wilder-penned Dorian Gray story illustrated by Egon Schiele. Gebbie and Moore obviously had a lot of fun imitating the artists’ styles, and it shows.

Peter Pan and Captain Hook, all swords out

Apart from all that, Moore makes a few very good points regarding the essential difference between imagination and reality: drawing a sex act (or writing about it) is not the same as performing it, or forcing someone to perform it. That’s why in Lost Girls, we see kids involved in sex, following the XIXth-century tradition (or the De Sade tradition) of breaking as many taboos as one can. I’ll be clear on that: For what it’s worth, I complete agree with Moore. As off-putting or disgusting as some of the stories told there are to me, there were no human beings involved, and these drawings are “victimless crimes”. After all, nobody would think there’s a crime committed in comics when someone is killed… but in some part of our societies, that difference is not clear. We quickly get into the realm of thought crimes, if we can’t make that difference.
There’s also a strong anti-war stream in the whole book, with Moore calling war a “failure of the imagination” in various interviews.

With its lush art, strong (and often funny) writing and high ethics, Lost Girls is a book that can be enjoyed by all manners of readers, straight or not, male or female, but you definitely need to have an open mind regarding sexual mores and their representation. But then, you wouldn’t be reading this site if you were prudes, would you?