Lost and Found
Issue #29
Nearly two decades in the making, comic artist Melinda Gebbie and writer Alan Moore release Lost Girls, one of the year’s most impressive graphic novels
By Joseph McCabe
Published: September 1st, 2006 | 12:00am
As only the most hardcore creative types do, comic-book artist Melinda Gebbie knows the true meaning of the word “patience.”
For the past 16 years, Gebbie has toiled away on Lost Girls, her graphic-novel masterpiece. Written by her fiancé, comic-book legend Alan Moore (author of V for Vendetta, Watchmen, and From Hell), Lost Girls details a first meeting of the grown-up Alice (from Wonderland), Wendy (of Peter Pan fame), and Dorothy (from Oz). The three meet on the eve of World War I, at a resort hotel on the Austrian border, and proceed to share tales of the erotic fantasy worlds they created as children.
Lost Girls’ long gestation proved fortuitous — it’s the year’s most gorgeous graphic novel. Surprisingly, Lost Girls is the first of Moore’s books to be illustrated by a woman, though the role it plays — that of the first intelligent pornographic comic for both men and women — would have hardly worked without a male-female partnership.
“I think that’s exactly what it needed,” Gebbie says. “And I think it’s hard to find two people who can work together with that kind of chemistry. Because they both need to be absolutely single-minded about what they want to do and have a really strong feeling for what they’re trying to do. But they also have to be hyper-aware of what their partner can bring to it that they can’t.
“Alan did the thumbnail sketches for Lost Girls, and that was very important to me because he knew exactly how much space needed to be taken up in each panel in order for the reader’s eye to move through the picture and pick up all the information they need and travel out again. So he actually worked on it artistically as well. … I’ve always really loved portraiture, so I pay a lot of attention to the expressions on people’s faces, and I can draw people from memory and I’ve gotten much better at using the hands as added symbols in sort of getting ideas across. So there were these particular sensibilities that both of us brought to it.”
Gebbie explains that part of Lost Girls’ aim is to show a more joyful side of pornography than is typically portrayed in pop culture. “I know that one thing pornography’s always been short of is joy,” she says. “It’s pretty unique, that we both had such a strong feeling about what could be done with pornography, what should be done with it, and what never has been done with it.”
Having witnessed firsthand the change in comics’ portrayal of sex since an often violent early period, Gebbie, who began her career in the American undergrounds of the ’70s (before moving to the U.K.), knows from whence she speaks.
“Y’know, a lot of the guys in the underground comics, a lot of the material that they worked on was specifically sexual,” she says. “And though they were interesting and dynamic artists, each in their own way, what I saw a lack of was any kind of tenderness or fun, sexually, between any of their characters. Their things were about kinds of obsession and laceration and rape, drunkenness, and a lot of dysfunctional sexuality. And that was quite prevalent in porn as well.”
With its “make love, not war” subtext, Lost Girls almost serves to comment on the roots of such violence. But both Gebbie and Moore hope readers can discern this subtext for the boldness with which the book explores society’s taboos. To say Lost Girls pushes buttons is putting it mildly: some retailers are bracing themselves for child pornography charges. Gebbie admits to being somewhat apprehensive.
“That’s why I insisted that the book be wrapped in cellophane in the stores, and that no one could look at it until they bought it,” Gebbie says. “Because if people do come up and have a problem with the book they will have had to have bought it in order to come up and complain.”
No matter what response it gets from readers, Lost Girls already has proven its worth in bringing Gebbie and Moore together as both artists and partners.
“By deciding that we were going to get in our little submarine together and just take an encyclopedic journey through the human libido … you kind of need to cling to somebody when you’re doing that, and the only person you can really cling to is the person who’s going through it with you. I mean, I don’t know how either of us would have coped with having anybody else to go home to. ‘Well, we did this stuff on oral sex today.’ And you’re partner’s looking at you like, ‘Oh, really? And was it fun?’”
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