Lost Girls

As a fancier of all things erotic, comic books, or graphic novels, are on the list. There was a time I bought quite a few of them, and they ran the gamut from the silly (Cherry Pop-Tart) to the more classy and intricately drawn. When I heard that Alan Moore, who is arguably the premier comic book writer of all time (V for Vendetta, Watchmen, From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentleman) was writing a book concerning the erotic adventures of three of children's literature most famous heroines, I had to get a copy.

Lost Girls is a three-volume graphic novel, handsomely slip-cased and retailing for $75 (Amazon offers it as a discount). The story is set at a hotel in Vienna in 1914. Among the guests are Lady Alice Fairchild, a woman of a certain age who has a fixation on her mirror; Dorothy Gale, a woman in her twenties, who grew up on a farm in Kansas, and Wendy Potter, nee Durling, a conservative Englishwoman of about 30. Needless to say, these are the grown-up versions of Alice from Alice in Wonderland, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, and Wendy from Peter Pan.

Alice is a lesbian who seduces the other two women, and they come to realize that they all share a past that involves a certain kind of dream world. As they engage in sexual delights, they recall their stories: Alice grew up in opium-hazed debauchery, engaging in wild tea parties and sucking on hookahs; Dorothy experimented with the farm workers--a sweet but dumb guy, a cold, heartless man, and a big lumbering coward. Wendy meets a boy named Peter who introduces her to orgies in the forest, where she mothers other boys (mothering here involves bringing them to climax).

Of course what Moore has done has found the sexual undercurrents of all three stories (not very difficult to do) and skillfully retold them as more realistic, pornographic tales. And boy are they pornographic. The pages are brimming with explicit sex. There's heterosexual sex, male and female homosexuality, lots of incest, buggering, pedophilia, and even a dash of bestiality, when Dorothy touches the member of a horse. Anyone who holds these characters as sacrosanct may well faint.

However, if you have an open mind, and a taste for the explicit, this is fantastic stuff, and ties in to period pornography of the time. The art work, by Melissa Gebbie, recalls illustrations of fairy tale collections. Often she draws in the style of other artists of the period, such as Schiele, Beardsley and Tenniel. The drawings are not uniformly detailed, but there is enough detail to understand what is going on at all times.

The books are also an incredible turn-on for someone as perverted as I am. Reading this book was reading Penthouse letters.