Lost Girls, vol. 1

Alan Moore

I find it endlessly amusing that my library refuses to lend Ice-T's The Ice Opinion: Who Gives a Fuck? with its dust jacket (for one cannot have a printed profanity defaming the eyes of the kiddies!), and yet lends Lost Girls in all its glory. We don't have the collected edition, in its tasteful, plain-blue case; no, we have the individual volumes. The back cover of volume 1 will probably do more damage to the library's reputation than will Ice-T's f-word, if any of the busybodies who worry about such things ever get their hands on it.

The controversial contents of said book are just as illicitly titillating, concerning the meeting of three well-known female stars of fairy tale-dom at a posh hotel. There is great lasciviousness all around as the three of them meet for the first time, telling the tales of how they got to be the disgraced fairy-tale figures they are. (There's a bit of dalliance among them, but you'll have to wait till later in the series to get to the meat of that; this is a story of beginnings.)

Moore is, of course, one of the finest writers of graphic novels going today, having given us such lights as Watchmen and V for Vendetta. It would be ludicrous to assume, as many seem to have, that when turning his attention to more adult material, Moore would lose his incisive gaze and immediately assume horny-fourteen-year-old status. Pish-posh. Artist Melinda Gebbie, probably best-known (previous to this, anyway) for being one of the principal animators on the 1986 film When the Wind Blows (as a side note, if you've never seen it, you must-- one of the best, if most neglected, pieces of art to emerge from the nuclear hysteria of the eighties), contributes lush, erotic drawings that mesh well with Moore's prose. The characters have personalities, and Gebbie transmits them through minor drawing quirks in a lovely way; Dorothy's innocence is tempered with red cheeks that speak more of hard drinking than the stereotypical apple-freshness, while Alice's aristocratic demeanor is presented with an air of defeat, a slight stoop in the shoulders that even Alice is loath to admit.

This is amazing work. Buy, beg, borrow, or steal a copy. The first real evidence since the death of Georges Bataille that "pornography" and "literature" can walk hand in hand and look each other in the eye.