Comic Info
Comic Name: Lost Girls
Publisher: Top Shelf Productions
Writer: Alan Moore
Artist: Melinda Gebbie
Release Date: 2006
Lost Girls: Book 1
At the Hotel Himmelgarten in Austria in 1913, three women meet: a young woman named Dorothy Gale from Kansas, an older English woman named Alice Fairchild, and a woman in her thirties named Wendy Durling. While at the Hotel Himmelgarten, all three characters and their significant others recall their sexual pasts and explore their sexual futures.
Written by famed comic book writer Alan Moore and illustrated by Melinda Gebbie, Lost Girls is an illustrated “sex book” which takes the classic characters from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan and Wendy, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and puts them in a real world setting. The themes of the book were met with high controversy but big sales. The story first appeared in a magazine called Taboo beginning in 1991 then later was published by Top Shelf in a collected edition.
Lost Girls follows along the lines of other “real world” fairy tales like Fables and Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. In fact, I could see Lost Girls actually being part of the League’s reality. What does start out as an interesting concept does kind of lose its spark and begins to get dull…you find yourself wanting to get past the sex portions and back to the back stories.
Lost Girls: Book 2
The book does have a lot of classical roots. The story is a throwback to old cartoon nudie-books that depicted sexual acts as illustrated by artists. Moore combines these with the standard “strangers meet” storyline which was used in books like The Canterbury Tales and even closer in the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom which featured characters exploring sexually in an isolated castle.
This obviously raises a lot of questions and did stir controversy, but with this classical background, it is hard to argue that Moore can be criticized for doing something that has been done before. Critics objected to the some of the characters’ ages during the sex acts and were concerned it would be labeled as child pornography…in addition to the objects, the owners of the Peter Pan estate objected to the use the characters.
The art is explicit, and it does present lots of sex…almost to a boring point (like Cronenberg’s Crash). I was more interested in seeing how the original stories of the characters were visually retold as sexual tales than the actual sex. It is however a sight to be seen.
Lost Girls is out of print right now and I don’t know when it might return to print. The original had a very limited run but sold well by banking on Moore’s name. I do think it is a valid piece of work and an interesting piece of work. It is something you can read and debate the merits of and to me, that is something that is more interesting than a simple quick read.
