Lost Girls

This has been a busy week for comics commentary, and now here's one more. The publicity machine surrounding the August release of Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's Lost Girls from Top Shelf, and the creators have started making the rounds of the comics news sites. The lost girls of the title are three of the most beloved characters from fantasy fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Alice, Wendy, and Dorothy, who meet up in Europe in 1913. Moore unapologetically calls the work--sixteen years in the making--pornography, and like his work in most genres, by all accounts he revels in the possibilities it presents. In his most recent column, Rich Johnston examines how retailers are reacting, and it's pretty much what you'd expect. Retailers on the U.S. coasts are intending to carry it, while retailers in the middle of the country and the South are either taking it on a case-by-case basis among long-time customers or not ordering it at all. I believe Rich only reports on two international shops, one in Hull and one in Montreal. The Hull shop is expecting no problems, while the Montreal shop owner prefers not to carry porn (although he makes it clear that it's a personal preference and not a reaction to any potential legal trouble because he doesn't expect he'd get any).

The Montreal shop's decision is somewhat academic, because my understanding (though I couldn't quickly find a link to confirm it) is that Diamond has decided that it's afraid of Canadian customs and isn't going to distribute it there. There's always the worry about what a zealous prosecutor (or political candidate--don't forget election day in November) might do with pornography in what's perceived to be a "children's medium," but I talked briefly with Top Shelf publisher Chris Staros at BEA, and he seems to have set up a fairly well-coordinated publicity barrage within the national media that will be unveiled at the appropriate time. (It's also worth remembering that he's president of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, a charitable organization designed to defend against comics censorship and to help comic book professionals defend their First Amendment rights, so he has some idea of what he's walking into.)

But until that national media campaign gets into high gear, you can look at the Moore and Gebbie interviews in the comics press. Both Newsarama and Comic Book Resources featured the pair over Memorial Day weekend. Newsarama gave two parts (One and Two) to Moore and one to Gebbie. Here's a snatch of the second part from Moore:

One of the things that I'm thinking will prove to be possibly more controversial than the pro-sexuality nature of the book is the book's equally strong anti-war stance, which against, in the current context is perhaps every bit as unpopular as a pro-sexuality stance. That is basically what Lost Girls is about - that's why it builds up to this crescendo of the First World War, with all these ominous prefigurings of The Rite of Spring and the death of the Archduke. It is all leading up to the last few pages where you've got the destruction of everything beautiful and sensual and imaginative in European culture - something that Europe will probably never recover from. It's all dashed off of the map like a handful of dust all for the advent of this senseless, bestial, First World War. All of the symbols of elegance and intimacy and sexuality, and art and imagination are just crushed under the rolling juggernaut of the Great War.

That is the primary message of Lost Girls, and I should imagine that, in the current climate is every bit as likely to prove controversial.

Comic Book Resources gives its Part One to Moore, allows each creator to have half of Part Two to each of the creators, and then let's them share Part Three in what seems to be a joint interview. Here's more of Moore from CBR Part One:

One of the other quotes from 'Lost Girls' is from the scene with Monsieur de Rogeur, which he talks about reality or fantasy, it's only magistrates or madmen who cannot tell the difference. That's a simplification of it, but I think it's a good point that it's perhaps more than magistrates and madmen that have difficulty in telling the difference between the imagination and the act. And why should this only be in terms of sex? Nobody during the course of my writing 'From Hell' ever would have suggested I was either somebody who enjoyed the idea of disemboweling prostitutes, or somebody who was recommending that people should disembowel prostitutes. We don't seem to have much of a problem in distinguishing between fact and fantasy except when it comes to sex, and I'm not entirely sure why that is, why we make a special case for sexuality. It's okay to show murders in most of our great art, it's perfectly okay to show how life can be ended, but there is something suspect in showing the ways in which life can be begun, or just showing people enjoying themselves. That, it seems, has a deeper connection for us than violence does. I don't quite understand why we make that distinction, and it's probably because most of our sex lives are imaginary, and that makes it more difficult for us to distinguish between sexual fantasy and sexual reality. We've got this entire mental construct that we bring to every act of sex. It's about how we are looking, how our partner is looking. It gets very self-conscious. Mostly, we have learned our sexual moves from books, the pages that our dads' paperbacks fell open at, and we learnt it from mild softcore sex films that we happened to see while we were growing up, and bad Harold Robbins novels. That is probably the only place where we learn our sexual manners and sexual behaviour. Pornography has always been with us and always will be with us, and nothing's going to change that. The only question is, 'Is it going to be good pornography or is it going to be bad pornography?' And given that most pornography is very bad indeed, it would seem that it's probably about time that people make a serious effort to reclaim this despised genre. It's not like there's been any great shortage of artist who made great pornography, but they didn't sign their name to it.

Moore and Gebbie each seem to have their talking points down, so there seems to be some repetition between the two series, but if you're interested in the project, both are worth a look.