Readers will recognize that they have even more in common than that. each is a heroine from a beloved work of children's literature—The Wizard of Oz, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Peter Pan, respectively. Oh, and did I mention it's a self-identified work of pornography? In interviews, Moore has preferred that charged word over the more apropos term erotica, because the latter seems to be a euphemism born of the same sort of shame and repression that Lost Girls (Top Shelf Productions) successfully challenges.
As for the controversy, not only are Moore and Gebbie turning nursery heroines into porn stars, but the tales they recount are also from their youth, and include a wide, wide catalogue of sexual situations, including incest, bestiality and, most shockingly, sex involving what we refer to today as minors.
It's the sort of story you could easily see short-circuiting our increasingly conservative culture (it wasn't that long ago that a flash of semi-nudity at the Super Bowl drove America's pundits and broadcast regulators insane). Yet, despite how incredibly vague our legal definitions of pornography ("I'll know it when I see it") and even child pornography are, anyone actually reading Lost Girls would have a hard time defining it as such.
Three oversized hardcover books in an ornate slipcase retailing for $75, it's certainly not something that would fit under a mattress.
And the content, though graphic and arousing, is hardly merely prurient—what kind of porn uses the word "Ouroboros" instead of "daisy chain," after all?
Like the best of Moore's work, Lost Girls is an effort that anything short of the word genius seems inadequate to describe.
It shares with From Hell rigorous historical research, and with The League of extraordinary Gentleman a meticulous inter-textual alchemy that unites various fictive worlds into one seamless one. Like the similarly bomb-throwing Watchmen, it uses rigid comic-book storytelling conceits to deconstruct the medium and reconstruct it in a subtle yet fascinating new way.
Gebbie matches Moore's shifts in form and format with different styles. The default one is a soft, painterly, picture-book sort of illustration, but the style shifts both subtly and dramatically throughout, most notably in her pastiches of period artists like Aubrey Beardsley.
In one such sequence, during one last hotel-wide bacchanalia before the invading German army forces evacuation, Moore and Gebbie address their potential critics and critics of pornographic fantasy in general. A character reads from a period story about a family demonstrating decidedly unfamilial love.
"If this were real, it would be horrible," he says when someone reacts with repulsion. "But they are fictions. "They are uncontaminated by effect and consequence.
"Why, they are almost innocent. I, of course, am real ... I am very guilty."
Of course, he's just a character in a book of ours, just as the incestuous family are characters in a book of his. Thus Moore and Gebbie have hit upon the ideal form of pornography, one that is entirely fictitious, constructed completely from the realm of fantasy. And, unlike so much of the lesser forms of pornography, those created with real people and thus tainted by some level of exploitation, this is pornography with a point. Lurid fantasies should be acknowledged and played out, at least in the imagination if not always in real life, and thus exhausted, ended.
The book must eventually be closed on the Neverlands of our fantasies—sexual and otherwise. Though there's no harm in taking it off the shelf and reopening it again some other day, is there?