Gaiman on Moore
Neil Gaiman has published a great article in his journal about Alan Moore’s and Melinda Gebbie’s graphic novel Lost Girls:
Lost Girls Redux
When I first started writing comics for adults, I found myself forever needing to explain that, no, I wasn’t writing those kind of adult stories.
The boundary between pornography and erotica is an ambiguous one, and it changes depending on where you’re standing. For some, perhaps, it’s a matter of whatever turns you on (my erotica, your pornography), for some the distinction occurs in class (i.e. erotica is pornography for rich people). Perhaps it’s also something to do with the means of distribution – internet pornography is unquestionably porn, while an Edwardian publication, on creamy paper, bought by connoisseurs, part works bound into expensive volumes, must be erotica.
Alan Moore knows his words.
Moore has always championed underdog media: his work in superhero comics exemplifies this. That Watchmen was on Time Magazine’s list of the greatest novels of the 20th Century is less surprising than its existence (it is a masterful superhero comic about time, mortality, age and nuclear fear, amongst other things) in the first place.
Almost ten years before Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, (a story that took many of the figures of Victorian popular fiction, including Alan Quatermain, Mr Hyde, the Invisible Man, and combined them in one huge romp), Moore, in collaboration with expat San Franciscan underground artist Melinda Gebbie, began Lost Girls, with a similar, although less fantastical, conceit – that the three women whose adventures in girlhood may have inspired respectively, Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Peter Pan and Wendy, and The Wizard of Oz, now grown, meet in a Swiss hotel before the first World War. Wendy, Dorothy and Alice, three very different women, one jaded and old, one trapped in a frigid adulthood, one a spunky but innocent young American good-time girl, provide each other with the liberation they need, while also providing very different (and, needless to say, sexual) versions of the stories we associate with them – we go with the girls, in memory, down the Rabbit Hole, to Oz, and to Neverland. Read on here…