Before I get into this review, after considering all the disparate recommendations for the next book club, I’ve decided that I want to go with Killing the Black Body by Dorothy Roberts. I’ve heard from so many various people that it’s just one of the most important books about reproductive rights you can read. Also, I saw Roberts speak at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women conference and she’s just amazing, and her voice needs more of a hearing. Book club date: July 2nd.
Of all the books I’ve decided to review on this site, this one has, by far, got to be the weirdest and most likely to cause me grief: Lost Girls by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie. I almost didn’t review it, because it’s hard to really do justice to the concept, but for those who’ve read it, I’m curious to have some kind of discussion about it.
The book is an experiment in taking erotica and trying to do something deeper with it, and how well Gebbie and Moore succeeded is certainly in the eyes of the beholder. To make things even more complicated, they’re trying to address the topic of the intersection between healthy sexuality and that of a person who’s suffered sexual abuse, which is, needless to say, a touchy topic. But upon finishing the books, I appreciated their perspective, if for no other reason than they offer a point of view people need to hear more, which is that suffering sexual abuse doesn’t break a woman for life, even though it leaves scars that do need to be dealt with. And this notion is controversial and threatening, and sometimes I think it scares people because without the “broken for life” myth about sexual abuse victims to fall back on, we’ll lose our argument that sex abuse is wrong. Which is just sad, but understandable in a culture that seeks reasons to blame the victims of rape and abuse on the thinnest of excuses.
The premise of the books is a pretty cool one, I thought, and the drawings are definitely atypical of most comic books. Three women converge in a hotel in switzerland and find that they feel drawn to each other, and end up spending most of the book in various states of undress, having sex with each other and swapping stories about their youths. In their childhood, it turns out, the three women were Dorothy from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Wendy from Peter Pan, and Alice from Alice’s Adventures in wonderland, but the premise is that their fantastical childhood tales were actually more mundane stories of real world sexual escapades. And the villians in their stories correspond to real life villians in their childhoods, adults in their young lives who exploit them sexually. But the sex abuse doesn’t actually dominate these stories, really, at least not Wendy’s or Dorothy’s, because as you’ll recall from the original stories, the characters don’t encounter malevolent characters for much of the book. Instead, a lot of the favorite set pieces (translated into erotic scenes in this book) have the girls monkeying around with friends. I thought it was fun and sexy, most of the time, with some really interesting imaginings of the intersections between the book fantasy and the sexual fantasy. And for being a pornographic comic book, it had some refreshingly realistic drawings of what people’s bodies actually look like—breasts on older women sag, some characters are chubbier than others, bodies are soft and move like real ones.
Alice, who in this book is past middle age compared to Dorothy’s youthfulness (probably in her early 20s), doesn’t fare as well and just as the original story shows Alice encountering one scary situation after another, in the eroticized version, it’s an endless stream of frightening stories about a young woman being loaded up on drugs and pushed into prostitution. (Even the White Rabbit is reimagined here as a pedophile.) But by the third book, the darkness in the original stories starts to butt into this orgiastic story-telling and it’s revealed that Wendy and Dorothy also encountered abuse at the hands of familiar characters in the original books. The act of the three of them whispering stories about their abuse to each other in the middle of some rather rowdy sexual antics is presented as freeing—while none of the three of them are completely broken at the beginning of the book, they all have some kind of tragic flaw that is eventually traced back to the adults who interrupted their juvenile development to exploit them, from Alice’s madness to Dorothy’s naivete to Wendy’s prudishness.
Does it work? I thought so, I really did. I can see why people might balk at reading a story about women who free themselves from the scars of sexual abuse by indulging themselves in orgiastic behaviors, particularly since the reader is clearly supposed to feel free to get off on the pornographic illustrations and fantasies in the book. But I liked it, because it was a clear-cut assault not only on the horrible and degradging myth that posits that sex abuse victims should shut themselves off sexually forevermore, but it’s also an assault on the idea that “stories that arouse” should be different that “stories that intrigue”, particularly when the subject at hand is sex. If a story is about sex itself, it sort of follows that the emotion it should bring up for the reader is horniness, just as a horror novel should make you scared and a sweet romance about non-American cultures that has a lot of cooking in it should make you hungry.
I know there was some controversy about this comic series when it came out, and even if I hadn’t known that, I would have guessed it from a particularly long and disturbing section in the third book that’s clearly a rebuke to critics who are overly literal about the idea of Dorothy, Alice, and Wendy being sexual beings meaning that it must be somehow a book commending the sexual exploitation of children. That part I didn’t like so much, because the over-the-top porn-inside-porn that recollects Victorian porn that often showed family members have sex with each other, even as children, is neither hot nor thought-provoking and the whole section just comes off as embittered towards Gebbie and Moore’s critics. It’s almost a shame, too, because the obsession with incest in Victorian porn is certainly something worth having in a book, but just hitting your critics over the head with it just because you can is not the way to go about addressing that subject. Once over that hill, though, I found the final sections where the women confront their inner demons and their anger about being exploited when younger to be moving and it pulled together all the threads of desire and memory and anger and fear together nicely. Alice’s denouement especially hits all the right notes, and draws on the original text in a fun way. Overall, recommended.
Has anyone else read these books? What did you think?
56 Responses to “Review: Lost Girls”
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Did you ever read my post about how damaging the “fate worse than death” myth can be? I was raped as a teenager, and didn’t even consider that I could use the term “rape” to describe what happened - because it didn’t break me, it didn’t kill my soul. It did suck, and especially coupled with the aftermath was the worst experience I’ve ever had in my life, but because it wasn’t what I’d expected from rape, I didn’t name it as such.
I’ve read the books, and I pretty much had the same reaction to them that you did. I think perhaps my favorite scene in the book is one of the women (I believe it is Dorothy, but I can’t remember….it’s been a little while) confronts an abuser with her own sexuality. The strength of that scene struck me, and really drove home the idea of taking hold of one’s own sexuality as a healing method. I loved it.
Woohoo! I love Dorothy Roberts, and “Killing the Black Body” is excellent. Looking forward to the next book club.
Dorothy as victim of sexual abuse was already explored in Geoff Ryman’s Was, but where Ryman’s tone is bittersweet, Moore’s is dry and wry.
It’s Wendy. It’s a neat take on the fact that Wendy’s role in the original Peter Pan was to be the adult. Captain Hook is a pedophile who rapes Tinkerbell, and Wendy confronts him by making him face up to the fact that he fears adult women and is only comfortable being sexual if he can be predatory.
It’s Melinda Gebbie, not Gable.
Only got through most of the first book of this one. Partially it was all the graphic sex, which kind of went over the edge for me, but mostly it was just Moore’s extreme formalism, which just makes it almost impossible to breath while reading it, since I spent all my time trying to figure out what visual patterns he was lacing through the book. (And though Gebbie’s the artist, I think we can credit Moore with most of that stuff, since he has done it before, like in Watchmen and Promethea.)
Love Gebbie’s art though. There are colors layered on top of colors layered on top of colors.
Thanks, corvus. I have no idea what caused me to write that, outside of the fact that I was dealing with server outages while writing this post and was distracted.
I’m not sure what to think. I haven’t read the books, but…for me personally, I do feel that the sexual abuse I suffered in childhood took something away from my life. It could be because of how extremely young I was when it happened (3 years old, then again at five years old, both offenders over a period of many months), but I’ve always kind of felt like it crippled me in that it interrupted my normal development at a very formative time. Kind of like being disabled, but on the inside. I’ve more or less moved past it, have a happy relationship and healthy sexuality, but there’s still a sense of unfairness and of being abnormal on the inside.
Sigh, they don’t make like it has no effect at all—they just don’t buy into the idea that you’re broken forever. The three characters all suffer on one level or another from their fucked-up lives, but it’s just one part of them, not everything by any means. And they have to recover the parts shut off in them, but it’s not like they’re the complete emotional cripples that people are supposed to be after being raped or abuse. I love Sara’s post on it. Check it out.
I think the myth that sexually abused girls need to spend the rest of their lives as damaged, broken beings is one of the most tragic things in the world that young women must confront, often on their own. To this day, my own mother thinks I lied about being raped because I never acted “sufficiently broken enough” to have actually been raped. Apparently we victims are supposed to surrender not just our bodies to our abusers, but our entire lives. I am not the only one who lost her credit of integrity the day she stood up and declared that “Yes, I have been raped. But that is not who I am. It was something that happened to me. It is not who I am”
Yes, how dare we take back what we have left. How dare we, indeed.
I’m really glad to see a review that’s not just “OMG MY CHILDHOOD WHY GOD WHY.” Because that’s basically the only reaction I’ve heard, which… yes, but also not quite the entire point. Other than that I don’t have anything to add because I haven’t read it yet.
Amanda, I love these books. My girlfriend picked them up a few months ago on an expensive whim, having never heard of them, and my eyebrows hit my hairline when I recognised them as those books I’d heard so much about. I was prepared for them to make me feel uncomfortable, and they did, but after reading them I adore them completely. I think they are visually one of the most beautiful illustrated stories I’ve ever read and I loved the complexity of the storylines.
My main critique is that the way the stories are layed out (the multiple story-within-story-within-story layers and the additional panels everywhere picking up pages from books left lying around the hotel, for instance) could get pretty distracting. Then again, it definitely added to the depth and sense of immersion in the story, and it’s provided plenty of material for second and third readings, so I can forgive that.
I think what I loved most was how all the way through the push-pull of darkness/hurt and playful joy are contrasted- not just “oh, that’s terrible! Here, have an orgasm” (which I’ve unfortantely encountered in a few pieces of erotica) but with real depth. This stayed with me most towards the end of the third book, as war looms and the sexual adventures take on a fantastic desperation.
Hmmm. Apparently I could bubble on about Lost Girlsfor hours. I’ll stop now.
i think most of the controversy over the original publication was regarding the use of Wendy, because the copyright to Peter Pan (and all associated characters) rests with a hospital in Britain, and they are very careful and control very closely who is allowed to reproduce the characters. It didn’t help that the subject matter was erotic.
i didn’t get through the first one - so i don’t feel qualified to review. but, for what it’s worth, i’ll say this: i loved the artistry; i wasn’t that interested in the remaking of supposedly iconic childhood characters; and i found the sexuality somewhat troubling. i felt it was either directed towards lesbians or men, the former because it is very much about women making love to women and the latter because it was also about power and young girls, and the ways that men exploit both.
i realize i missed a lot, never having finished the set, but it didn’t hold me (and alan moore’s other work has held me).
i’ve mostly found men wholeheartedly love it.
Moore addressed this same issue–the notion of sexual abuse “ruining” women (always women)–somewhat in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with Mina Murray. Ever notice how hints about Dracula’s “ravaging” of her and her divorce from Jonathan inevitably come up at the same time, over and over again?
I also really liked the way Moore approached Mina’s tryst with Alan Quatermain in the second volume–she frankly explains her childhood fantasies about his adventures and her desire to satisfy those fantasies by having sex with him, old man though he may now be. No love, just mutual lust and fantasy fulfillment
sara, yeah, i read that post of yours quite a while ago and it has always made sense to me. same thing with me. i was raped and didn’t have a name for it for years, or a name for the feeling violated or abused, and so on and so forth, because it didn’t fit the definitions. partly because rape is something that happens between strangers, not lovers (so i always was told), and partly because afterward i didn’t experience flashbacks or stop functioning sexually (so i thought). and it’s weird how alienating it can be to not have a name for your experience. it seems like “a name” shouldn’t matter, but it did.
The other day I was reading “Jacqueline Ess: Her Last Will And Testament” in Clive Barker’s Books of Blood Volume 2, and it seemed like the kind of thing you might enjoy Amanda.
Hi, Amanda. I appreciated Pandagon’s recent linking of the “MJ statuette” controversy. If you’re interested, I recently made a post on my livejournal about an upcoming Marvel comic that works pretty well as a follow-up:
http://liviapenn.livejournal.com/466141.html
When I first heard that these books were coming out, I was thrilled. Because Alan Moore! Doing erotica! In a graphic novel! With Victorian literary characters!
So I pre-ordered it from my Friendly Local Comic Book Store (the one where they don’t stare at you creepily just because you’re a girl) and very carefully carried it home on the train.
It was not what I had expected, and not in a good way. The first time I read it, there was quite a bit that I a) didn’t like and/or b) didn’t understand. After reading some reviews and some thoughtful insights online, I went back and re-read it. I can still see why it’s not some people’s cup of tea. There’s defintely stuff in there that can really squick people out, and if one of those things is a major squick factor for you, then it’s going to be really hard to see LG as a work of art. But I like the layering of the characters, I like the almost sonnet-like formality of the books, and I still like the concept.
I’d almost put it in a category with Frank Miller’s 300 and/or Sin City. There’s grace and artistry in both, but if you don’t like the underlying message, you aren’t going to be in much shape to appreciate said artistry.
I won’t buy these (and I’ve collected comics and graphic novels for a long, long time) because I can’t stand the idea of taking heroines from stories I loved in my childhood and turning them into victims. I do not want those images in my head.
oh, i so have to get this…
the idea of rape/abuse not permanently breaking us is an important one, i think. after being in a sexually abusive relationship, i sometimes still feel broken, as if i am incapable of loving anyone or being loved by anyone, in a functional and not fucked up way. the weird thing is that i think this came, not only from the abuse itself, but my own awareness of the rest of the world’s view of what i went through, including the reactions of friends and subsequent lovers. this one terrible and scarring relationship that, in the eyes of the world, Will Never Go Away. even now that it’s been more than 5 years, even now that i’ve obviously had scads of perfectly functional relationships, and never come across another abuser. even though i feel more agency and control over my own body and sexuality than i have ever felt.
the weirdest thing is now that i have moved on, now that i can feel power and control in my own skin, sometimes i question whether it really happened, or whether it could have been “that bad”, simply because i have triumphed over it. which is like a whole new level of fucked up. what’s the point of The Power To Heal, if the ability to assume that power causes you to question whether there was a wound in the first placee?
so, yeah, amazon here i come…
I might have to check this out. I like Alan Moore, though I also like to say it’s a bad sign that a follower of Aleister Crowley seems feminist.
the obsession with incest in Victorian porn
You mean in category three?
I’ve only read one part of the books (I got my hands on one of the single issues years and years ago, but got rid of it in a stuff purge during a move). I remember liking it but not quite connecting with the art style (and since it was in the middle, I didn’t quite know what was going on). I’m glad it’s been reprinted. I’m hoping for a less expensive edition.
I may have to borrow a friend’s copy until then though…
I’ve never heard of these, but now I’m intrigued.
After all, the re-imagining of these three as victims isn’t completely new. The Alice-and-drugs meme has been around since before Go Ask Alice, and I’m sure I’ve read a Peter-Pan-as-allegory-for-child-sex-abuse analysis before. And then there’s Was.
In fact, does the subversion of old/children’s/fairy tales for an adult audience constitute a genre of writing in and of itself by now? I mean, is there a name for it? I’m assuming there’s no specific term for ’subversion of children’s stories and films via an intersection of graphic novelling and erotica’ quite yet.
rainne: I’ve heard the term ‘adult fairy tales’ for quite a while. There’s even a few short story/novella collections floating around going on the 4th or 5th book.
In fact, does the subversion of old/children’s/fairy tales for an adult audience constitute a genre of writing in and of itself by now?
I dunno, but the interesting thing about most of the fairy tales is that they were originally pretty adult, and then repeatedly bowlderized from about the 17th C onwards. They now bear almost no resemblance to their original versions.
Anyway, very interesting review, makes me want to read the books. Moore isn’t usually my favourite writer, and I was kinda nervous about the direction he’d take with this sort of project, but it does sound interesting.
The “forever broekn” myth is not only damaging to women. Men who were abused as children are also supposed to be broken forever by it.
Also, I am thinking now about the “forever broken” thing in the context of “honor killings”. It seems to me that the concept of “forever broken” gives permission to perform honor killings. The whole notion of “damaged goods” grows out of it because there is no concept of “once damaged but subsequently whole”. So I think the consequences of “forever broken” are more far-reaching and damaging than just the psychological damage. Real people are being killed because of the belief in “forever broken”.
Coming into summertime… wouldn’t you rather go with something ligh-’n'-lively by, say, Janet Evanovich?
Lost Girls is a “graphic novel”? What’s a graphic novel, anyway - a really long, really expensive comic book?
“I dunno, but the interesting thing about most of the fairy tales is that they were originally pretty adult”
Yup. They were originally a lot closer to the old myths than they are to modern fairy tales. Murder, incest, rape, madness, monsters, and all manner of things completely unfair. And you still get the sense from some of those that they’ve been expurgated or tweaked to tack on a “happy” ending.
Susan, that’s rather insultingly reductive. They aren’t “victims”, as in that’s their whole identity. That’s the point. To be victimized isn’t to mean that you are turned from a human being to a victim. You stay a human being, which is the point.
But I’d point out that in the original books, the girls are in fact victims. Wendy is terrorized by Captain Hook, Alice by various amoral kooks, and Dorothy is victimized by the Wicked Witch and misused by the Wizard of Oz. All they do in these books is put a sexual twist to it, so the fun the girls have are pleasant sexual experiences and the terror they suffer is sexual abuse. It’s weird, for sure, but I think they make it work.
Onlooker: Eh. Basically. It’s not so much about being long or expensive, so much as it’s about being bound like a book.
In the comic community there’s debate about it, but in the publishing industry a comic book is in magazine form. If it’s bound like a book, it’s a graphic novel. Some people think that it should be limited to publications of a limited nature- collections of old X-Men issues shouldn’t count as a graphic novel, because they’re not a novel, they’re a serial. Something like this, though, would be a graphic novel, because it was created as a single work.
Amanda - I’m glad you and Sara read and reviewed these books. Your persepctives and mine are so widely different.
I think one of the first things to acknowledge is that Vertigo’s Fables has also been exploring the much larger picture on sexual and complex fable characters. They’re now on year 5, issue 64 or something. Since Lost Girls was published however, they’ve steered away from storylines with outright sexual themes and focused more on conflict and violence. Recently, the story line advocated the acceptability of disproportionate response by a smaller country on a much larger one, citing (and justifying) Israel’s defense policies. I’m not thrilled with where writer Bill Willingham is going, but the first 50 issues have been refreshingly fun to read.
Now let’s talk about some of the other themes within Lost Girls - - War is a major to-minor character. A male protagonist is convalescing in the hotel from a combat injury in the book. It’s never specified what his injury is, but he seems to be quite healthy for most activities. I have to admit that I expected him to have issues with impotence or another injury that made sex more challenging - but the man shags with the best of them, even seducing an older man.
At the end of book 2, the event that starts WWI, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand takes place. (It may be book 1) Under this, the book’s idyllic state becomes more and more threatened by by authorities and forces outside the hotel, which until now, have passed a blind eye over the owner and his property. Eventually, war comes after the patrons have had a final night’s orgy and moved on back into their lives - including the induction of several of the protagonist men into the armed forces of their countries. Book 3 ends with men, including the first male protagonist introduced, laying dying in a battlefield.
Essentially - if Moore’s (and Gebbie as co-creator) essential point is that if sexual abuse shouldn’t shatter one forever, what does? And they provide it in painful, gory detail. At it’s heart, Lost Girls is a book that has an explicitly anti-war second theme.
I think Moore made one serious overlook - When the first male protagonist seduced the older man, I was hoping that we’d find that he was in effect, lost of himself as well - Jack and the Beanstalk, maybe? I can easily imagine Jack’s story re-interpreted as a sexually themed story on par with Alice, Dorothy and Wendy. It would have been a fascinating contrast with the stories of the women.
If you can find a copy to read - it’s well-worth it, both in literary terms and for erotica. Malinda Gebbie’s watercolours are absolutely gorgeous. At the face price of $50 for the entire volume set - whhhhoooofff! Man it’s expensive, but it’s not going to be available at the public library, either. Most comic stores are also not experimenting with the lending library format.
DAMMIT.
I had this huge great comment about the secondary theme of war in the book to the counter-point the sexuality, and something’s eaten it. And i can’t afford to retype it.
I’m sorry. It was getting close to lunch time, and I your post looked so delicious.
Alan Moore is one of the reasons I still read graphic novels. Sure, he’s a touch crazy sometimes, and he’s far from perfect, but he’s a consistently good writer, and I really appreciate his work. Also, part of me loves how passionate he is about his work, and how thoroughly uncompromising he is about it. Look through some of the disputes on his wiki page… it’s great!
Roy, I’ve heard collections of serial comics called trade paperbacks (or ‘trades’) at the comic shop.
My local comic shop has a copy of LG in stock. It’s so expensive, but I want to read it. I hope it comes out in a less-expensive format.
“…Captain Hook is a pedophile who rapes Tinkerbell, and Wendy confronts him by making him face up to the fact that he fears adult women and is only comfortable being sexual if he can be predatory.”
I didn’t know these were connected.
And now I wonder about “Finding Neverland” and J.M. Barrie
It explains in a really dismal way…a suspect friend.
So, good thing to have this kind of disappointing insight.
As a way of dealing or maybe even helping a little.
But, shi*t!
And back to the book, reviewed in Salon, I think.
Love comics, wanted to get this.
Last priced at about $40..so hesitated.
Now I’ll do.
C.Diane: It depends on who you ask. In the publishing industry “Trade Paperback” covers a lot more than collections of serials. Any book can be released as a trade paperback. There are some graphic novels that are released in both hardcover and trade paperback formats.
There are some comic creators who are completely opposed to the term “graphic novel.” They reject it as pretentious and snobby.
*shrug*
Maybe I’ll write about it on my own blog (where it’d be more appropriate!) =)
Yay - my previous post survived!
If anyone did rescuing, thank you! Send me a bill!
LALALA fingers in ears LALALA
I guess I have to read it now, so that I can discuss it with esteemed peers. It’s been sitting on my shelf since January waiting for an appropriate moment.
I haven’t read this, but I have to say, as an incest survivor, that embracing and relishing one’s own sexuality is so important. It was so hard for me to realize I was going there and enjoying it. There was sort of a tide in the survivor groups that everyone else was interested in being celibate and giving the hell up on sexuality. Ultimately, there were a minority of women I met who were getting sexual and getting healthy. Those of us who were abused less violently seemed to get there earlier, but that’s not a judgement on my experience or anyone else’s; we all go through what we need to go through in order to heal.
But the point is that I am excited about the possibilities of a book like this.
Moore can either thrill me or leave me cold. A bit too much of his recent work has read a bit like a Fan Wank in which Moore geeks out by piling on the trivia. But then he pulls off something like Top 10 which is one of the few comics with lgbt characters that don’t annoy me.
Not to mention the vampire myth that we all become abusers.
But I really want a middle ground between the “forever broken” and the other extreme in which healing is considered to be another form of denial. I don’t want to “get over it” and pretend that it never happened. I want the ability to express what I need from a relationship without those needs being dismissed as just crazy-talk.
I got this the day it came out, i worked at a comic store and even with the discount it was a hefty price tag. I’m an avid Alan Moore fan, especially of his lesser known work like Hypothetical Lizard and this one did not disappoint me. It took him and Melinda Gebbie 16 years to complete the whole thing. The three characters were some of my favorite in childhood and I thought the interpretation of their stories was heartbreaking and honest. I’ve read a few interviews with him and a lot of what you pointed out almost mirrors what he said. In case anyone is interested…
one with The Onion AV Club - http://www.avclub.com/content/node/51180
And a two parter with Newsarama
http://www.newsarama.com/TopShelf/LostGirls/MooreLG_01.html
http://www.newsarama.com/TopShelf/LostGirls/MooreLG_02.html
If we still extend to Moore’s examples from other work, like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 2, Mina Murray (Harker) shows an interesting fascination with being bitten on the neck. Certainly not broken, and certainly not pretending it never happened. You can read what you want about her keeping her scarred neck covered at all other times, however.
I’m sad to say, I haven’t read Top Ten. I really need to, but I’m poor and the lending comic shop in my neck of the woods doesn’t have them available.
The thing is, there really wasn’t much controversy. Clearly, they desperately wanted it. Alan Moore’s nothing if not an obnoxious, self-congratulatory old hippie, and he seemed all set up to freak out the squares. The squares didn’t seem to really give a shit.
Now I’m wondering whether “forever broken” versus “completely over it” is just another rendition of the virgin/whore false dichotomy. The idea that a really bad experience breaks you forever seems implicitly to presuppose that only a tiny minority — let’s call them the “abnormals” — ever have really bad experiences, and that everyone else has a nice, pure, blemish-free psyche, preferably surrounded by frilly white lace. (Or crisply laundered shirt and blue jeans if you’re a manly man.)
We all have scars, so the “forever broken” thing is just another way of fetishizing the airbrushed, plucked cap-toothed teenager in comparison to whom all reality falls short. And “completely over it” is just the psychic equivalent of way too much plastic surgery…
(Yes, some experiences scar people worse than other experiences. It’s just that the ideal of no scars at all seems to imply someone who hasn’t actually lived.)
the weirdest thing is now that i have moved on, now that i can feel power and control in my own skin, sometimes i question whether it really happened, or whether it could have been “that bad�, simply because i have triumphed over it. which is like a whole new level of fucked up.
that’s really interesting and i think describes pretty well how i have felt for a while. it’s yet another way that it feels like conventional definitions casually obliterate your experience. because if it really happened then you “don’t” get better. which is all part and parcel of sara’s post, which touched on people’s responses to some women that “she didn’t ACT raped” so it must not have really happened. but what was that pain, then, and what was all that work i did to name the pain and heal it?
Alan Moore is a terrific writer. He’s used Alice In Wonderland characters in Captain Britain before, actually.
[…] Amanda Marcotte reviews Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls. (Link via When Fangirls Attack!) […]
I’m sad to say, I haven’t read Top Ten. I really need to, but I’m poor and the lending comic shop in my neck of the woods doesn’t have them available.
Top Ten is fucking amazing. I’m going to commit an act of INTARWEB PIRACY just for you, because Top Ten #8 is a fantastic fucking issue rated Number 1 in the weighted-towards-mainstream-but-pretty-damn-accurate list of “Wizard’s 100 best single issues of all time.”
the list is pretty good, though. Moore is pretty heavily represented, especially toward the low end.
[…] Pandagon also has an interesting review of Lost Girls by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie. My husband is a huge Alan Moore fan, but he hasn’t mentioned this collection at all. […]
I haven’t heard of these, but I’ll check them out. I wanted to add my 2 cents about this topic, though. Up until a couple of years ago, when I got into my early 40s, I was always frustrated, thinking I was not making progress towards becoming a normal, healthy person that was not filled with hatred for myself, as a result of childhood abuse.
I started reading a couple of books about the philosophy of Taoism, especially one called “A Path and a Practice” by William Martin. I found it really helpful reading about the practice of accepting yourself exactly where you are, how you are and who you are, not waiting you are improved or even trying to improve yourself. I can’t explain it very well, but somehow it helped break an impasse, and things DID improve then.
I always had a picture in my mind of two equally-strong wrestlers locked in a fighting embrace and getting nowhere. Somehow, I gave up in a way and said, “Yes, Ok, maybe I AM a permanently damaged person who hates myself, so what?” And it felt like I drew a big breath and was able to start liking myself more that way. And I started to get a little less afraid of other people seeing me for what I am.
I know it’s very different for everyone and they will find different ways to integrate the experiences they had. It’s very hard because you want to be that whole person, not just a victim or a damaged person, but you have spent your whole life fighting against an internalized stigma and being ashamed of who you are.
I don’t know if I’m saying this well, but I guess I am saying, do what works. Fight it, and be that healthy whole person, if you can, or do the opposite, and accept the damage and work around it, if that is what is necessary. I tell my husband, who is always being a perfectionist, that saying, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
The idea of being “broken” reminds me of the fate of some of the protagonists of H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction, who either end up
dead
insane from their experience
unable to tell the world the whole truth, which is why the tale ends up in a 10-cent pulp magazine instead of the front page of every newspaper in existance.
A, you remind me of this quote by Dr. Christian Barnaard:
“Suffering doesn’t ennoble. Healing does.”
Whoa. Your review is right on, Amanda.
I got Lost Girls in the mail on a Friday and, instead of going out, read it from cover to cover. The thing that kind of sparked an epiphany in me was the concept of sublimating your sexuality and replacing it with fantasyland while coming of age. I think it really hit home for me in a way that I imagine a lot of other women who withdrew into a world of books while growing up would also experience.
I’m glad you explained the context for the victorian incest porn, I was kind of ignoring it- it made me pause for a bit but I’m glad I kept going because the end of the book is fantastic.
Also, I don’t like the wizard of oz musical/hollywood movie but love the oz books, and I thought Dorothy was spot on. And I actually respected Wendy for the first time ever- never understood that whole ‘mother’ thing where she is the lost boys’ ‘mother’- it always weirded me out. Liked that bit much better in Lost Girls, it made more intuitive sense than the original (to me, anyway).
Stopping at volume 1 of the set is kind of like putting down Lord of the Rings after The Fellowship of the Ring. The story has a definite arc that needs to be read to its conclusion. It’s in the final book where the characters stop running away from their past and start to heal and become whole, even as the world around them is descending into madness.
In fact, the trajectory of the characters is in direct opposition to the world around them (a mirror image, as it were). As the book opens, the world is ordered and sane, but the characters are troubled and broken. As they move towards sanity, the world outside begins to break down.
One of the little touches in the story that I really like is the fact that Moore has created a maiden-mother-crone triad with the characters, even though he never explicitly says so.
Since no one’s mentioned it yet, I’ll note that there’s an interesting erotica/mysticism sequence in Moore’s Promethea (his response to Gaiman’s Sandman, so far as I can tell, but also an attempt to create a female superhero in an alternate “science fantasy” present). I still like Gaiman better, but if you like literature, mythology, and pop culture, you’ll probably like Promethea a lot. I did.
At the risk of being fannish and gossipy, I don’t have anything much to add to the discussion except to say that Moore and Gebbie have created a remarkable work here. I look forward to reading it over and over, especially fueled by some of the thoughts here.
Also, the two creators recently got married. Neil Gaiman has wedding pix up on his blog for those interested. Those are some truly fabulous wedding duds.
[…] Amanda Marcotte Reviews Lost Girls (Pandagon): Lost Girls is a shamelessly pornographic comic by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie that features three characters from Victorian literature: Alice, from Alice in Wonderland; Dorothy Gale, of The Wizard of Oz; and Wendy Darling, of Peter Pan. I think it’s one of the best fucking pieces of comic art or pornography that I’ve seen for a long time. Knowing Amanda Marcotte’s views on pornography, when I saw that she had done a review for Pandagon, I was concerned that she’d just rip it to shreds. Instead, she has a real appreciation for the work’s complexity, and calls it a “clear-cut assault… on the horrible and degradging myth that posits that sex abuse victims should shut themselves off sexually forevermore.” Bonus Link: Pictures of Moore and Gebbie’s recent wedding, courtesy of Neil Gaiman. These are two people who can not only write and draw, but know how to dress. […]