Alan Moore is taking stick for Lost Girls, which is not so much of a take on various old stories as a take on old characters that you’ll recognise. Borders isn’t stocking it, no mainstream supplier is other than Amazon (wow Amazon did something right), even comic book stores are odering very few copies. This is Alan Moore, right? One of the biggest selling comic book authors going. So you have to be asking what’s going on here. Well, Wendy of Peter Pan, Dorothy of OZ and Alice of Wonderland all coincidentally meet up in an adult oriented comic book.

Neil Gaiman has chipped in here.

Wow, a comic with nudity all about love and sex, I hear you say, like that’s not been done before. Omaha BTW is probably my favorite comic book series. So if it’s not just the nudity that has riled folks up, it’s the mix of nudity with known charecters, others intellectual property and Alan Moore’s name.

Lost Girls is the mutual love-child of mainstream comics veteran Alan Moore, and myself. Thought up over several consecutive brain-storming sessions, it grew and grew from a one-shot to a monster. From my original desire to work with three female characters, Alan partnered his desire to come up with a fresh erotic idea for Peter Pan, and so mad e the gargantuan but beautifully simple leap to include not only Peter’s and Wendy’s world, but the worlds of Dorothy from Oz and Alice from Wonderland as well.

He calculated that, had the three actually met in real time, their age difference might work out quite satisfyingly. In the year 1913 Alice would be say, in her late 50s, Wendy 35 and Dorothy in her early 20s. The three ages of women tied up neatly in a pink bow. Next, where and how do they meet?

Well, since 1914 was the starting year of the First World War, what better place than Europe? What could draw them together? Rest, relaxation, rehabilitation, perhaps? How about the beautiful surroundings of Lake Constance, near the Swiss border? A sanatorium where Alice can get away from troubling memories, Wendy can escape briefly from the confines of a loveless marriage and Dorothy can attempt to unravel a haunting secret’s mighty pull.

It came together magnificently, like a chandelier lying broken and fragmented that has been drawn gracefully back up into the air, its twinkling teardrops reuniting with each tiny hook to form a tiered symphony of rainbow-fractured sparklings.

Interview with artist Melinda Gebbie over at Suicide Girls.

Alan Moore talks about the comic over on Tiny Nibbles:

“It presents this material in a way which is every bit as sensual and beautiful and at times, startling, as the actual sexual act itself can be. I think that was probably why we did it. The sexual imagination, which is the biggest part of sexuality, is not well served in our culture, and I really don’t understand why that should be. The only way that we can talk about or refer to sex — we have two choices: we can either do it in grubby works of pornography that will be read by people who are desperately ashamed of what they are reading, or we can discuss sex in the clinical manner of sex manuals or The Joy of Sex. Neither of these things have got anything that I, or probably most other normal people actually associate with our sexuality. I doubt that many of us are clinical about our sexuality, or wish to be sleazy about our sexuality either, but these seem to be the only two options where this material can even be discussed — where the sexual imagination can even be talked about. That startling omission in culture was probably the biggest impetus behind Lost Girls — we felt that there ought to be something like that.”

Link

You can buy Lost Girls over on Amazon.

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