Growing Pleasures and Pains
Super villians and hardened antiheroes aside, Alan Moore may be one of the most menacing presences in the comics world. A cross between Dr. Strange and Rick Rubin, the long-haired, dark-bearded, stony-eyed author is a self-professed practitioner of the occult and is notoriously candid about his feelings for the comics industry and Hollywood, which has so far adapted his books V for Vendetta, From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen into big budget blockbusters. A proposed big screen version of the author's Hugo Award-winning Watchmen is also lurking in the wings.
The prospect of interviewing Moore is a touch intimidating, but the opportunity is one too good to pass up. The man has reimagined the comics medium countless times, both with the aforementioned books as well as his distinctly "adult" (read: gritty) takes on such established licenses as Batman, Superman and pulp-favorite, Swamp Thing. When publishers Top Shelf began claiming that Moore's forthcoming Lost Girls was destined to repeat the feat once again, taking the even more taboo subject of pornography along for the ride, I scheduled an interview with Moore, heeded a few preemptive suggestions ("Alan doesn't want to talk about Hollywood"), dialed his number in Northampton, U.K., and upon issuing the standard interviewer greeting of, "Is now a good time?" was met with, "This is great. I'm all settled with a cup of tea, and perfectly relaxed." Alan Moore, it turns out, is a rather nice bloke.
Whether his new book is destined to revolutionize its medium in the way that Watchmen redefined the superhero story, or is simply the victim of a bit of publishing hyperbole, is a question left to future comic writers and fans. For the moment, however, one thing is for sure: Lost Girls is an extremely ambitious undertaking in just about every way imaginable. The set of three 112-page hardbound books is the product of a 15-year collaboration between Moore and artist Melinda Gebbie. The creators have invested their heart and soul and perhaps a touch of prurience into the project.
"We wanted with Lost Girls to redress a balance that I think has gone unchecked for far too long," begins Moore on the subject he appears more than happy to discuss at length. "We've got a culture in which even the remote areas of human experience have whole genres of fiction that are based upon them. Very few of us are detectives. Very few of us are space-patrol men, and even fewer of us are zombies back from the dead, and yet all of those areas of human experience have full shelves in all of the major book chains dedicated to that subject matter."
The "lost girls" in question are Alice, Dorothy and Wendy-three women of varying ages and backgrounds-who converge on a Parisian hotel just shortly before the beginning of World War I. Aside from the setting and their rather sordid sexual histories, the three characters have one thing in common: Like the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen before them, they are all figures ingrained in our collective psyche; in this case, by way of three of the best known children's stories of the last two centuries.
"You've got these three characters that sort of represent our childhood. Now, one of the things about sex is that, almost by definition, sex is one of the landmarks that divides being a child from being an adult," says Moore of recreating the protagonists of the Oz, Wonderland and Peter Pan books. "That is why the characters seemed so useful, and also that, to a certain degree, with any story about a child-unless it ends with them dying horribly-there is the implicit assumption that they're going to grow up."
Growing up, as it's defined by Lost Girls, involves a number of increasingly graphic situations-almost every sex act imaginable, and among other things, corruption at the hands of the Red Queen, a Freudian flying boy in green tights and a renegade tornado, all either recounted or played out as an army of tanks descend upon their hotel.
"The shadow of war is the exact opposite of all of the things that we are celebrating in Lost Girls. If we are celebrating the human imagination, including and especially the human sexual imagination in Lost Girls, then war in a sense is the ultimate failure of the human imagination," says Moore. "Admittedly, when we started all of this, if we had realized that statement was 'Make Love, Not War,' then we could have just gotten ourselves a button-making machine and saved ourselves a great deal of time and effort, but of course, on the other hand, having 240 intricately drawn and written pages means that we are able to explore a lot of the ramifications of that simple statement that we probably could not have fit onto the badge, really."
Lost Girls is the sort of grand undertaking that makes it difficult to go home again, and while Moore has plans for new Extraordinary Gentlemen books on the horizon, his next turn at the helm of some spandex-clad mega franchise seems a bit less likely.
"I despise the comic industry, but I will always love the comic medium," says Moore. "The sun will have turned into a dull red ember before I am doing any licensed characters for anybody." ¦