Customer Reviews

Lost Girls Hardcover Edition

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Just about the oddest preconceived notion in literature is that sex--generally a positive experience in real life--is widely considered dirty, low brow, and smutty (to list very few adjectives), whereas violence--generally a negative experience in real life--is considered exciting, entertaining, and, in some form or another, a remarkably suitable metaphor for the human condition.

I'm sure this puzzles lots of us, but thankfully Alan Moore was puzzled enough to write something about it. Melinda Gebbie nudged the grizzly author into just the right position, and together they got down to business. After sixteen years in production, the world is presented with the fruits of their efforts: Lost Girls.

Lost Girls, you've no doubt heard, is a 240-page, 3 volume story about Lewis Carroll's Alice, L. Frank Baum's Dorothy, and J.M. Barrie's Wendy meeting in 1913 in a curious hotel in Austria near the borders of Switzerland, Germany, and France. To any interested student in European history, this time and place should ring a bell as a geographical ground zero for World War I. Not coincidentally, Moore works with the relationship between sex and violence throughout Lost Girls, arguing beautifully that sex is just a reliable a tool in fiction as anything else.

As always, Moore's writing is beautiful and new. He's one of the great formalists of our time. Lost Girls is told in 30 chapters of eight pages apiece, with intelligent panel work that Moore fans have come to expect. Gebbie's art is gorgeous and colored without computers--you won't see coloring like this in any other comic. To be fair though, there are a few instances in the story where it's noticeable that Gebbie was drawing in overtop of older drawings: in chapter 30 specifically you can see the outline of Alice's mirror through all foreground objects, making the foreground look translucent and ghostlike.

Overlooking that, the art is warm and colorful like a children's book, which gives the narrative a unique (and I mean unique--not better or worse) personality among its graphic novel peers. This book isn't comparable to other comics because it's unlike other comics. Nobody tries to compare Citizen Kane and Eraserhead, after all. It's not even comparable to Moore's other work, because the literary merits of a pornography and of an occult look at the Jack the Ripper story, or a Cold War-era superhero murder mystery, are completely different. At any rate, I like the book.

As a last bit of reviewer's advice: this book is (again, as you know) an unabashed pornography, not a story with some nudity in it. Moore and Gebbie delivered on their promise in every way they could. Men with men, women with women, men with women, masturbation, anal sex, oral sex, pedophilic sex, bestiality, orgies, and more besides. Even if you're ready for this, as I thought I was, be prepared. It's quite a ride. And it's quite a step for Moore, who has enough mainstream popularity to send his idea of free sexual expression in literature straight on til morning.

When I first heard about Lost Girls several months ago, I was almost immediately turned off. Alan Moore, I thought, has more important things to do than show readers underage, make-believe boobies. But as he and his partner gave more and more interviews, I found their enthusiasm for the project infectious and anticipated the release for weeks.

I read the entire tome in one, four-hour sitting and was not disappointed, but I don't know if I'm ready to call this Moore's masterpiece.

The elements of fact, traditional fiction (the fairy tales and folk stories the work draws on) and Moore's own story are blended together seamlessly. You are challenged to examine your own concepts of that which is truly beautiful, that which is truly perverse, and what is just plain sexy.

While the story is smart and unique, I found that often the dialogue was outshone by the art on the page, and not just because of its explicit nature. The artwork is so beautiful and lovingly crafted that the dialogue seems flat and inadequate in comparison, instead of working with the pictures. I wanted what the characters were saying to match the sparkle and humanity of the overall plot and art.

The greatest testament to the strength of the book, however, is the fact that it stays with you - the parts that didn't excite you, but that challenged, offended or made you feel funny keep coming back to visit you. I will probably be rereading it very soon, after I've had some time to chew on it.

I can understand if you're not willing to pay $75 for a massive porno you're not sure if you'll dig, but I consider this a sound investment. Highly reccomended for anyone willing to put their inhibitions aside for just a moment to learn something new about sex, lying, trust, love and fantasy.

Just keep it away from the kids.

I have waited almost 15 years for this book and I have not been disappointed. A beautiful work for book lovers and important work as erotica for women. Lost Girls boldly looks at the lines between fantasy and reality, desire and fear, the essential honesty of stories and the hypocrisy of social reality. This is a story about all the horrible and wonderful things that we (especially women) are told we mustn't think about "for our own good".
Melinda Gebbie's artwork, using bright pastels and occasional collage, is lush, warm and inviting. As always, Alan Moore's story is incredibly multilayered with literature, history, and rich characters. A particularly beautiful chapter involves the women watching the performance of Stravinsky's ballet "Rite of Spring". The scene alternates between phantasmagoric images of the ballet itself and the erotic excitement it inspires in the viewers. My favorite aspect of the story is the intertwined accounts of Alice, Wendy, and Dorothy's sexual awakenings. Couched in references to the more well known versions of their tales, each woman recalls the curiosity, terror, ecstasy, and violence of the loss of innocence. By sharing their similar adventures they help each other and allow their selves to become free and whole, free from being victims and whole as sexual women.
My only wish would be for an edition with notes on all the references, but that could easily double the size of the box. I will be content with doing my own research.

I read this whole thing as soon as I got it, which was weeks ago now. And yet, I still can't decide if I like it. The whole work was beautifully done, though the dialogue just didn't match with the illustrations. It felt flat and stilted. The illustrations could have told the whole story probably without words and they were beautifully crafted.

But... I realized what truly bothered me later. I enjoy comics and graphic novels. Not too many people actually bother collecting or reading them. When I mentioned to a friend during conversation what I had been reading recently the obvious question "what's it about" came up. I couldn't decide how to answer. Admitting to reading a comic book about orgies, childhood sex, and all sorts of other interesting topics just isn't the best thing to talk about over dinner. How do you explain something like this to people not 'in the know' with comic books? This question has bugged me enough that I truly question whether it will go on my shelf with other great comics or be hidden away like the pornography that Moore claims it to be.

If nothing else, it defintely makes you think.

I had some high expectations for this book because it was written by
Alan Moore, and he had all the freedom he wanted to tell any kind of
story. Despite all that the book was a bit of a let down.

The concept of the story is interesting. Three legendary heroines:
Dorothy, Alice and Wendy all meet up in a hotel in Austria, on the eve
of World War I. The hotel is called the Himmelgarten (himmel= sky,
heaven; garten=garden heavenly garden? ) and is a place of earthly
pleasures. The staff is VERY friendly and each room has the same
white book, a collection of erotic pictures and stories. The setting
brings out certain qualities in the three protagonists, so that they
grow a special bond, also brought on by the recounting of their
childhood.


Their stories, as told by Moore are of course quite different than the
cherished childhood tales we all know. Instead of the "fairy tale"
magic the readers expect the characters to encounter, they have their
first sexual experiences. The original stories inspire these new
imaginings, and the old characters and themes are eluded to in clever
ways. For example, each boy that Dorothy came across echoed the same
failings her friends had in the original story. The first boy was
like the scarecrow (no brains), the second was like the cowardly lion,
and the third was like the tin woodman (no heart.) (I don't want to
give away to many of these allusions to someone who hasn't read the
story, because it's part of the fun of reading the book.) The story has a lot clever humor, visually and in wordplay. One example is the way the shadow play between Wendy and her husband, which constrasts their intense sexual desires with their proper but lifeless, loveless relationship.

The story is set on the eve of WWI. In the middle of the story, the cataylismic event of the Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand's assination occurs. The discovery of the three women is set in a backdrop of this coming unease, a metaphorical storm that will change the world. People weathering a storm by telling stories is the frame for other works of literature: Magic Mountain, Canterbury Tales, etc. It's also siginificant to note that the end of WWI is the beginning of the pessimistic period of Modernism in fiction, and Moore frames the story with this in mind. There is a sense that innocence is lost and things will never be the same.

The art served to tell the tale, even if it wasn't overly impressive.
If the reader is familiar with erotica, you could tell that the illustrator was eluding to certain styles of erotica, particularly from the 1920's. Overall, the art seems "cartoonish" and falls short of this design, but it still works. Each girl's story had it's own style, mostly apparent by the way the panels were set up: Dorothy had window panes, Alice had ovals like a mirror and Wendy had a story book pattern. The way Dorothy story was illustrated was my favorite, a more impressionist sort of composition, and the most pleasing to my eye.

Thematically, Moore was interested in the validity of erotica as an
art form, and that is one of the main themes of the book. I would say
that the book is erotica and therefore art or literature due to the clever elusions, and well-crafted framework of the story. I don't see the subject matter as trashy or exploitative, but rather bold. Many people have strong objections to the age of many of the characters involved in sexual exploits, but Lost Girls supposedly passed the acid test for not being child pornography. Most people will take it at face value and enjoy the aesthetic value instead of seeing the pictures/situations as titillating.

However, overal I wouldn't say Lost Girls was great art or overly entertaining however. It is a good read, but it is relatively forgettable, and certainly did not live up to expectations. If Moore's goal for the book was a defense of erotica, I think that it fell a little short. I thought it succeed instead as a celebration of erotica, and elegiac look at time when that type of art was more appreciated. I base this reading in part to the frame story it was set in and the historical back drop. The ending fits with this theme, even if many of the other readers I talked to didn't like it.

While the art style may not appeal to everyone, "Lost Girls" is certainly worth a look if you like erotic fiction with a little more substance. The books provide an amusing interpretation of the "real" events behind "Alice in Wonderland", "Peter Pan" and "The Wizard of Oz". While the first two books do not appear to be particularily thought-provoking at first, they set the stage for some potent character development in the third book, when the formerly frivolous stories are cast in a harsh, new light.

Of note is that while events take on a darker tone in the third book, "Lost Girls" does not contain any particularily violent scenes. Unlike in most adult media, the focus of these three books is not the gratuitous depiction of extreme sexual acts, but raising questions and telling a solid story with believable characters. Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie have done a great job, showing that pornography doesn't necessarily belong in the gutter.

All things said, "Lost Girls" is a charming, bittersweet tale about saying goodbye to your childhood, leaving your make-believe world and growing up, and well worth the price.

I am forever disappointed with the artists Mr. Moore pairs up with. I really wanted to like this book, I'm always thrilled when sex, especially female sex, gets the treatment it deserves as an acceptable, some would say necessary, part of fiction. But I've really had it with the artwork. Time and time again I've suffered through the graphic novels touted as filled with high literary standards but third grade artwork. I sincerely wish Mr. Moore would just write a prose novel as the artwork in this particular collection is so astoundingly bad that I could barely read it.

I believe that good graphic novels are a mutually beneficial pairing between good text AND good art; but what passes for good graphic novels, the ones that college professors feel comfortable regarding as art and literature, tend to be ONLY good text. Where are the standards? I wish I could say I'm astounded that hardly anyone else has mentioned how bad the art is but it has been my experience that, for some reason, the masses cannot tell good art from bad. Or perhaps people are just so eager to flatter the V for Vendetta writer that they don't care what the art is like just so they appear avant garde and deep.

If you're looking for an interesting story and have no artistic bone in your body, then sure, buy it. But if bad art makes you cringe and weep, then you'd better leave the Lost Girls on the shelf.

OK, some will balk at the premise. We all know Dodgson's Alice, Baum's Dorothy, and Barrie's Wendy as little girls, in the familiar fictions built around them. This takes the fiction a step beyond, imagining the girls as grown women, thrown together in an isolated resort on the eve of the first world war. Alice, the grande dame, stands aloof from political unpleasantness. Wendy is wed to an industrialist more interested in armored boat hulls than in breakfast (or in her). Dorothy appears as a plain old farm girl, who can't imagine that grand duke Ferdinand might affect her little life. Geographically isolated at this odd resort and culturally isolated by their individual circumstance, they break their personal isolation in each others' company.

They succeed, and break each others' inhibitions as well. With Moore's script and Gebbie's delicate colors, we follow a delightful debauch. Alice takes the two younger ladies under her opium-scented wing, for languidly choreographed affections of the sapphic kind. Dorothy brings her farm-girl awareness of livestock breeding to her human relations, male and female. Wendy, the ignored housewife, blossoms under any attention at all. Other characters round out the goings-on with straight, gay, and solo loving. The happy and consensual tone could appeal to readers who've been turned off by harsher kinds of erotica, and Gebbie's delicate artwork treats it all with lucious respect.

Make no mistake, this is smut. Decide whether that's what you want. It's good smut, though, of a female-friendly kind - the kind that also appeals to men tired of all that negative imagery. If you often find your genitals requesting the company and comfort of your hands, this could be a story for them to read to each other.

-- wiredweird

"Beautifully illustrated and intelligently scripted, this odyssey avoids many of the traps of obvious plot points that other reinterpretations of classic stories have fallen into. Thought provoking and dreamlike this collection is an excellent experience for anyone on either side of the looking glass"

This 3-volume set is an antidote to the imagination-free pornography that saturates the internet and the video market. While it's plenty explicit and free of cuteness and prudish euphemism, its retro art style reflects the undercurrents of suppressed passion in the characters, and the story-line evokes a sense of mystery and reticence that are far more erotic than the close-ups of genitalia and sweaty circus-sex that comprise most sexual literature these days. It reminds us that the most erotic device is, and will always be, the imagination.