Lost Girls, Art and Pornography
May 7, 2006
Cinescape’s Comiscsape has an interesting interview with Alan Moore, one of the artists involved in making Lost Girls. (The other artist is Melinda Gebbie.) Lost Girls is an adult comic. It will be selling for $75.00 starting in August this year. In Lost Girls, Alice of Alice in Wonderland, Wendy of Peter Pan, and Dorothy of The Wizard of Oz explore their sexuality. This is not intended to be a smutty joke making fun of the original characters, like Barbie and Ken or Smurfette porn. It’s intended as a work of erotic art in which these fairytale heroines guide us through sexual awakening, just as they guided us through other areas of our psyches. Some may call it pornography, but if so, it has the same relationship to most pornography that literature has to pulp romance or western novels. Kurt Amacker puts it like this in the introduction to his interview with Alan Moore:
Make no mistake — LOST GIRLS is a work of pornography. It is not the dainty erotica you might find in your mother’s nightstand. Moore and Gebbie unflinchingly present all manner of sex acts, both pleasant and, at times, shocking. However, no one can argue that LOST GIRLS belongs on the same shelf as a tattered issue of JUGGS. It is a work of art, as beautiful in its execution as it is defiant in its subject matter. Place it next to the KAMA SUTRA or De Sade’s PHILOSOPHY IN THE BEDROOM on your shelf.
Alan Moore had this to say about it, himself:
I think it struck me that it was kind of unusual that there are all these relatively rarified areas of human experience that very few of us are actually involved in, such as being private detectives, space explorers, or vampire hunters. There are whole shelves full of books that are devoted to all of those exploits in every major city. However, we all have a sexuality, even if we’re celibate – that’s sexuality. And yet, the only medium – the only genre – that deals with sexuality is this grubby, under-the-counter genre in which there are absolutely no standards. It struck me that even though there have been many artists who’ve dabbled in the erotic and the pornographic in the past, most of them have done so anonymously, even if the work they’ve produced has been absolutely wonderful. They have not wished to associate that work with themselves, which means that there’s a whole area of art that is more or less completely ignored. And I wouldn’t have thought that we’d have that much culture that we could completely ignore this huge treasure trove of art and literature.
At $75.00, it’s going to be hard for me to find out for myself what I think of Lost Girls, but I find it refreshing in concept.
Other Posts Categorized as Comics:
- March Issue of Sequential Tart - March 1st, 2007
- What Came True in V for Vendetta? - February 25th, 2007
- Review of Oz/Wonderland Chronicles #1 - January 1st, 2007
- January Issue of Sequential Tart - January 1st, 2007
- I've Been Martened, Tarted and Torqued - November 18th, 2006
- SuicideGirls Interviews Lost Girls Artist Melinda Gebbie - July 26th, 2006
- Webcomics Examiner Interviews Scott McCloud - July 2nd, 2006
- Zak Smith's Illustrations For Each Page of Gravity's Rainbow - March 20th, 2006
- Science of Superheroes Exhibition - March 19th, 2006
- Timing (in Comics) by Joanna Estep - February 28th, 2006