"I Ain't Got No Preventions"
Lost Girls. Well, well, well. What can we say about Lost Girls?
My affaire with Lost Girls started months ago, when Mike linked me to an article about Alan Moore's (Watchmen, V for Vendetta) new project, which would be the product of 15 years of l'amour with his business partner cum lover Melinda. It happens to be about Alice (of Wonderland), Dorothy (of Oz) and Wendy ( of Neverland) fucking each other and everything else that moves, while recanting stories of their torrid initiations into the world of grown-up sexuality.
At first, I was appalled. Moore, I said, has to be better than this. This man surely has better things to do and more important things to say then "Titties."
But after reading a few more interviews, you could really tell that this guy is passionate about his work. Yeah, it's explicit, it goes there, he said, but ultimately it's about more than sex. And his wife said that it was designed to be, first and foremost, erotica that women and men could enjoy equally. I became intrigued. And when Amazon had a special preorder price that was almost half off, I couldn't resist. And I waited for a month and a half to get it.
So I read the entire, three volume tome last night, for four hours straight. And it's strange.
First, the concepts behind the idea are very, very solid and interesting, and they're a credit to more as a storyteller. Fact, traditional fiction (the familiar storylines of the three characters) and Moore's own story are weaved together seamlessly and to great effect. What the book does with Art is absolutely stunning. Some of the stuff in there is pretty hot, a lot of it is pretty gross - there was a little too much incest and one too many golden showers for my tastes - but it is introduced gradually and you can tell they worked very hard to avoid a sort of "porn ennui." The pictures are consistently interesting - I looked at titties for four hours and did not once yawn -and the story is well paced, thoughtful, and keeps your brain going. It was never hot enough for me to jerk off to, though.
The work's weakest point is that, I think, the art outshines the words on the page nearly every single time. The artist said she worked for an average of eight days on each panel, and it shows. The colors are amazing and they do some really interesting stuff - for example, the first and last chapters are viewed entirely through a looking glass, so you only catch a little bit of what is going on. There are also sample of porn throughout history, and she emulates the style of the period perfectly every time (and so does Moore's prose. You can tell they really did their homework). I am also pretty sure this book contains the greatest panel in comic history: SPOILER SPOILER DON'T READ IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW when Alice takes a good look at Dorothy's vagina while she's on opium and the girl's labia looks like the Catapillar with his hookah END SPOILER YOU CAN READ NOW. Hillarious.
But as interesting as the story is and the characters are, the dialogue was just not up to par, particularly for Moore. Women don't talk to each other that way. They were sharing really intimate things, but talking as if they were strangers. Dorothy (the only American in the book)'s dialect is a fucking charicature. I just really wanted the dialogue to live up to the grandeur, sparkle and humanity of the art and story.
Basically, the story is about how we all enter our own "wonderlands" when we discover sex in our teens, and though everybody's little sex world is different, the journey is the same. It's also about how those wonderlands can become nightmares if we're introduced to sex in a negative, repressed or scary way ( like rape) and how we can never ever go back to Kansas, so to speak, if we don't deal with that shit.
It's also about honor, consequences, fluidity, innocence, real beauty and real perversion.
Ultimately, the book's success is in that it stays with you. I can't get it out of my head - and not really in a fap fap fap way. I've spent all day mulling over some of it's themes, being disgusted by some of the acts depicted, and marveling at some of the really fantastic sex art. And that's the exact opposite of modern, conventional porn, which is designed by its very nature to be disposable. You look at it, you get off, you forget about it until the next time you want to rub one out. No consequences, no thought. This is all about thought and fantasy and its correlation to sex.
So even though there are parts of the book I would rather not revisit, I will probably be reading it again, because most of it is stuff that I want to think about more.
Definitely worth checking out, but I can understand you not wanting to pay the retail price of $75. So maybe give it a go when scans are available and then decide if its worth your money. Part of the fun is the fact that it's been put together like those "Treasured Fairy Tales" collections you get for your three year old daughter as a fairly heirloom and look all sweet and innocent. They even scented the pages.
All in all, it is the kind of quirky classy thing I am proud to have in my collection. So there.
My affaire with Lost Girls started months ago, when Mike linked me to an article about Alan Moore's (Watchmen, V for Vendetta) new project, which would be the product of 15 years of l'amour with his business partner cum lover Melinda. It happens to be about Alice (of Wonderland), Dorothy (of Oz) and Wendy ( of Neverland) fucking each other and everything else that moves, while recanting stories of their torrid initiations into the world of grown-up sexuality.
At first, I was appalled. Moore, I said, has to be better than this. This man surely has better things to do and more important things to say then "Titties."
But after reading a few more interviews, you could really tell that this guy is passionate about his work. Yeah, it's explicit, it goes there, he said, but ultimately it's about more than sex. And his wife said that it was designed to be, first and foremost, erotica that women and men could enjoy equally. I became intrigued. And when Amazon had a special preorder price that was almost half off, I couldn't resist. And I waited for a month and a half to get it.
So I read the entire, three volume tome last night, for four hours straight. And it's strange.
First, the concepts behind the idea are very, very solid and interesting, and they're a credit to more as a storyteller. Fact, traditional fiction (the familiar storylines of the three characters) and Moore's own story are weaved together seamlessly and to great effect. What the book does with Art is absolutely stunning. Some of the stuff in there is pretty hot, a lot of it is pretty gross - there was a little too much incest and one too many golden showers for my tastes - but it is introduced gradually and you can tell they worked very hard to avoid a sort of "porn ennui." The pictures are consistently interesting - I looked at titties for four hours and did not once yawn -and the story is well paced, thoughtful, and keeps your brain going. It was never hot enough for me to jerk off to, though.
The work's weakest point is that, I think, the art outshines the words on the page nearly every single time. The artist said she worked for an average of eight days on each panel, and it shows. The colors are amazing and they do some really interesting stuff - for example, the first and last chapters are viewed entirely through a looking glass, so you only catch a little bit of what is going on. There are also sample of porn throughout history, and she emulates the style of the period perfectly every time (and so does Moore's prose. You can tell they really did their homework). I am also pretty sure this book contains the greatest panel in comic history: SPOILER SPOILER DON'T READ IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW when Alice takes a good look at Dorothy's vagina while she's on opium and the girl's labia looks like the Catapillar with his hookah END SPOILER YOU CAN READ NOW. Hillarious.
But as interesting as the story is and the characters are, the dialogue was just not up to par, particularly for Moore. Women don't talk to each other that way. They were sharing really intimate things, but talking as if they were strangers. Dorothy (the only American in the book)'s dialect is a fucking charicature. I just really wanted the dialogue to live up to the grandeur, sparkle and humanity of the art and story.
Basically, the story is about how we all enter our own "wonderlands" when we discover sex in our teens, and though everybody's little sex world is different, the journey is the same. It's also about how those wonderlands can become nightmares if we're introduced to sex in a negative, repressed or scary way ( like rape) and how we can never ever go back to Kansas, so to speak, if we don't deal with that shit.
It's also about honor, consequences, fluidity, innocence, real beauty and real perversion.
Ultimately, the book's success is in that it stays with you. I can't get it out of my head - and not really in a fap fap fap way. I've spent all day mulling over some of it's themes, being disgusted by some of the acts depicted, and marveling at some of the really fantastic sex art. And that's the exact opposite of modern, conventional porn, which is designed by its very nature to be disposable. You look at it, you get off, you forget about it until the next time you want to rub one out. No consequences, no thought. This is all about thought and fantasy and its correlation to sex.
So even though there are parts of the book I would rather not revisit, I will probably be reading it again, because most of it is stuff that I want to think about more.
Definitely worth checking out, but I can understand you not wanting to pay the retail price of $75. So maybe give it a go when scans are available and then decide if its worth your money. Part of the fun is the fact that it's been put together like those "Treasured Fairy Tales" collections you get for your three year old daughter as a fairly heirloom and look all sweet and innocent. They even scented the pages.
All in all, it is the kind of quirky classy thing I am proud to have in my collection. So there.