Lost Girls review

Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie, Top Shelf, 2006

So, Lost Girls. Oh my. i actually finished this a few days ago and i am pretty sure that i have shied away from reviewing it. I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to come anywhere near a proper review simply because, like all of Uncle Alan's work, it is incredibly dense. nevertheless, here we go.

i've seen a lot of pornography. probably too much. it's all over the interweb, sure. but i'd seen a good bit long before it was downloadable. i suppose i say this just so that i can make the distinction between smut (everything out there today) and pornography (as a genre). now as soon as i typed that i felt pretentious but there it is.

Lost Girls is an stunningly beautiful book. Beautiful. it just happens to be filled to the gills with naughty bits. very naughty bits. i don't think it leaves a legitimate fetish or fantasy behind. it is pretty thorough in its titillation. i will quickly admit that it is more arousing than anything that passes for mainstream pornography (if there is such a thing). The fact is, that none of that stuff we're beating off to, is art. Lost Girls is an art book.

Moore uses the device of public domain characters from literature brought together in a shared universe. the same device he uses in his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen books. and if there is a literary term for this device i'd love to know it so please send that along to me. our "lost girls" are Alice, Wendy, and Dorothy, from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and The Wizard of Oz respectively.

I don't think i will go into the actual plot of the story as this is covered in many other places better than i would be able to do. What i would like to talk about is the brilliant way that Moore weaves the source material into something that seems so very natural to the characters, that one must wonder which story is the original. which is "real"? Moore's genius is his ability to make fiction, marvelous fiction, seem so very possible, so tangible. the voices of his characters sound like people we know. the emotions scripted across the page feel so...obvious. His greatest talent is imagining a character so completely, that they may actually exist. albeit in his mind, his "ideaspace" as he calls it, but they absolutely exist there. and there, they are perfect.

Characters and key plot points form the source material become lovers and secret rendezvous' for our girls. Dorothy's twister brings her into sexual maturity. the scarecrow, tin man, lion and Oz himself, are sexual partners along her "golden-bricked road".

Alice becomes involved in a nonsense world of exploitation and abuse. while all the while she becomes the queen of her own realm.

And motherly Wendy nourishes her lost boys, out grows Peter, and swallows The Captain.

The book is structured, as most Moore books are, with unending symmetry and resonating themes. Each of the girls tells her stories to the others. In these stories-within-the-story there styles that define character and mood with intimate subtlety.

Gebbie's art is dazzling. line and color choices are as powerful as Moore's words. it is obvious that these two know each other as intimately as their characters.

i might return to Lost Girls later. but for now it's late and i think i've written a sweet enough love letter to this beautiful book. so if u don't have it, go out and get it. and let me know what u think.