LWIA 4.3: Lost Girls

I will of course get back to this in Volume 6 or 7.

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As if all of this wasn’t enough for the pages of one soon to be out of business horror anthology, Taboo #5 also contained the debut of a second serial by Alan Moore called Lost Girls. This is often grouped with From Hell and Big Numbers as a sort of triptych of ambitious creator-owned works to contrast his contemporaneous Image cash-ins. Lost Girls is the youngest of the triptych—Moore first mentions it in passing in a 1990 Comics Journal interview, although it’s unclear when he began playing with the idea. He had been chafing against the practical boundaries of how sexuality could be portrayed in comics for some time, whether via the psychedelic vegetable sex issue of Swamp Thing or the furor that erupted around his portrayal of childbirth in Miracleman. As he later put it, “it struck me that I’d written by then an awful lot of characters, and yet none of them had been able to have fully developed normal, human sex lives. They may have had quantum abilities, or been plant gods, but this most common field of human expression was something that couldn’t really be addressed, except in a very seamy, under the counter genre where there were no standards, and where there was a pervasive ugliness about almost every aspect of the material.”[1] He began playing with a half-formed idea of a Freudian take on Peter Pan, but found himself unable to come up with any angle that wasn’t just a pornographic parody of the work, and the idea floundered for some time until he met Melinda Gebbie.

Gebbie was a respected figure in the American Underground Comix scene who got her start in Trina Robbins’ Wimmen’s Comix anthology before branching out into her own work, most notably her solo comic Fresca Zizis. Moore was familiar with her, giving her a shout-out in his “Invisible Girls and Phantom Ladies” essay for The Daredevils in 1983, describing how she “uses her very delicate stippling technique to depict some of the most unnerving and violent psycho-sexual visions one is likely to come across anywhere.” Around the same time, Gebbie relocated to the UK to take a job on the 1986 animated adaptation of Raymond Briggs’ When the Wind Blows. They first met in 1988 at a launch party for a charity anthology called Strip AIDS that they’d both contributed to—Moore with a page of Maxwell the Magic Cat reprints and Gebbie a two page comic called “Test Patterns” about safe sex.

Their collaboration, on the other hand, came together some time around 1989 when both were invited to contribute to an erotic anthology that everybody but Alan Moore thinks was going to be called Tales of Shangri-La. (Moore recalls it as Lost Horizons of Shangri-La, although given that it never came out the point is rather moot.) Neil Gaiman suggested that they might find collaboration fruitful and put them in touch, and Gebbie proceeded to spend a couple of weekends in Northampton discussing their views on the erotic. Moore described his floundering Peter Pan concept, and Gebbie noted that “she’d always enjoyed doing stories that revolved around a dynamic of three women.”[2] From this Moore made the obvious jump to include the protagonists of two other major works from the golden age of children’s literature, namely Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz. Starting from the rough idea that each of the three books took place around the time of its publication, Moore and Gebbie quickly realized that “there was a kind of an optimum window of two or thre years where Alice would not be too old and Dorothy would not be too young. And it seemed that those years were around 1913 and 1914.”[3] As with From Hell, Moore was quickly taken by the historical possibilities of this, as it meant that the timeline would run right up against the outbreak of World War I.

As with Big Numbers and From Hell, much of this shape was in mind before Moore began the project. Bissette’s introduction to the first chapter highlights the looming presence of World War I, while his introduction to the two installments in Taboo #6 highlights Moore’s intended length of 240 pages. Indeed, this was exactly the length the comic ended up being some fifteen years later when it was finally finished. But only a sixth of those pages ended up appearing in Taboo. Like From Hell, these pages are slow to establish what’s going on. The first chapter—the one that appeared alongside “What Doth the Lord Require of Thee” in Taboo #5—only introduces Alice of its core cast, and doesn’t name her. The only substantive clue is the presence of a large mirror, which is used as the central image of each panel, with the action unfolding in its reflection. Things become clearer in subsequent chapters—it’s hard to miss what a character named Dottie Gale from Kansas might be referring to. But everything stays broadly in subtext for the first five chapters.

This is perhaps unexpected for a work that Moore repeatedly highlighted that he intended Lost Girls to be a work of pornography (“I insist on calling it that,”[4] he notes in one interview), a genre that’s not generally associated with allusive complexity. Moore talked plenty about his desire to “do some grand and ambitious work of humane pornography that would be beautiful and liberating,”[5] and even joked about “that sort of penis-brain blood ratio problem that you get when trying to write intelligent pornography,”[6] but there’s still an underlying disjunct between the expectations of the genre and the textual density that characterized Moore’s major projects of the period.

Which is not to say the comic does not have loads of explicit sex. Each of the five installments published in Taboo contain at least one sex scene, and Gebbie’s art is rarely invested in leaving much to the imagination. Instead it portrays everything in a lush and soft color palate achieved via a mixture of heavily layered colored pencils and occasional watercolors that Gebbie estimated “averaged to three days per panel.”[7] Moore, meanwhile, opts for a consistently joyous register for the sex, with the characters constantly seeming surprised and charmed by their own naughtiness. The result is a strangely innocent look at sex—one largely devoid of any particular fetish or desire for anything other than a sort of charmingly hippie free love.

The biggest legacy of Lost Girls, however, would prove to be the relationship between Moore and Gebbie, which quickly evolved from an artistic relationship to a sexual and romantic one, with the two marrying shortly after the publication of the complete Lost Girls. (Moore subsequently offered the perhaps overly specific advice to “anybody working on their relationship that they should try embarking on a sixteen year elaborate pornography together. I think they’ll find it works wonders.”[8] The relationship clearly evolved slowly, with the two maintaining separate households until around 2005; nevertheless, between Lost Girls and “What Doth the Lord Require of Thee,” it is difficult to come up with a single issue of comics more transformative for the life of Alan Moore than Taboo #5.

[1] Matt Brady, “Alan Moore on Lost Girls, Part One,” Newsarama, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20060814033943/http://www.newsarama.com/TopShelf/LostGirls/MooreLG_01.html

[2] Gwynne Watkins, “The Brothers Freud,” nerve.com, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20061114074500/http://www.nerve.com/screeningroom/books/interview_alanmoore

[3] Dorman T. Shindler, “Alan Moore Leaves Behind his Extraordinary Gentlemen to Dally with Lost Girls,” archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20060811174459/http://www.scifi.com/sfw/interviews/sfw13282.html

[4] Matt Brady, “Alan Moore on Lost Girls, Part One,” Newsarama, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20060814033943/http://www.newsarama.com/TopShelf/LostGirls/MooreLG_01.html

[5] Ismo Santala, untitled interview, Ready Steady Book, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20070220160434/https://www.readysteadybook.com/Article.aspx?page=alanmoore

[6] Peter Murphy, “Eroto-Graphic Mania, The New Review, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20130622182813/http://www.laurahird.com/newreview/alanmooreinterview.html

[7] Adi Tantimedh, “Finding the Lost Girls with Alan Moore & Melinda Gebbie: Part 2 of 3,” Comic Book Resources, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20080421102954/http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=7160

[8] Noel Murray, “Interview: Alan Moore,” The AV Club, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20060810173422/http://www.avclub.com/content/node/51180