Alan Moore co-creator of Lost Girls

No, that’s great. I’m finding all this to be an incredible novelty. It’s not everyday that you hear “Let’s talk about my new porn book.”

Well that’s good.

A lot of people have told me that with From Hell they had to take a break from reading that a couple of times. With Lost Girls I presume it was probably for different reasons. But if it can exhaust you that’s the mark of a decent book.

That’s a funny one actually. I remember one of the old Chinese brush artists saying that most of his day’s work was spent in preparing the brush, grinding the pigment and then after sitting and contemplating for hours he would do one single stroke that would somehow be the perfect depiction of a wild boar or something like that. He was saying that the secret was that when you’ve made your single line, you have to be excited about it because if you were not excited about it, how would the viewer ever be excited about it. That’s the principle that I’ve tried to bring more or less to everything that I’ve done. If you’re writing a scene that is ostensibly funny, but isn’t making you laugh, then you can’t really expect the readers to laugh. The same goes for a frightening scene or a sad scene. The readers are not going to cry unless you do. When it comes to something like sex, which is uncharted territory in terms of the arts. Yes, there has been quite a lengthy tradition of people dabbling with erotica but the depiction of sex is still very new territory. At least it was to me. So if your audience is going to find an idea exciting you have to, on some level, find it exciting yourself. At the same time in most pornography that I’ve read, there is a clear indication that the writer was perhaps out of control a lot of the time. Now being out of control is something that we do associate with sex but it’s not something that we associate with writing or drawing. There’s a peculiar tension because you’ve got a situation where you have to ground each of the things in the book in something where there is a genuine sexual feeling of some kind. But at the same time you have to do that in a very precise and structured way, which is almost the exact opposite of the spirit of the material that you’re actually describing. We tried to find everything that we were writing about arousing. That is my experience with the better pornography. I’m talking probably about Victorian, Edwardian written pornography which is polymorphous and imaginative. It doesn’t seem afraid to explore the most remote boundaries of the sexual imagination. That’s all we’re talking about here. We’re not talking about sex, we’re not talking about anything that has ever involved real mammals. We’re talking about the sexual imagination and there’s a really clear distinction between those two things. We have had to find bits of ourselves that were aroused by this scene or that scene in order to make the scene work as genuine erotica or pornography. It is best summed up by how Johnny Rotten said that sex is “four minutes of squelching noises.” Four minutes seems a little bit austere to me, but I understand that that is probably the average length of human coitus. It’s a bit depressing to think of it like that, but I believe that that is roughly the length of the average human sexual strength. Lost Girls took us 16 years.

Which is [laughs] a very different pace to the actual sex that it’s describing. It’s this funny tension between having to do something very wild in a very precise and measured way.

Melinda has done it almost like a wonderful children’s book that you can remember from your childhood and never saw again. It’s got that golden glow that the best children’s book illustration has. I think that we wanted people to approach these images without trying to predispose them to any particular reaction. That single shot of Dorothy with the Cowardly Lion is funny and sweet and a bit startling. Sex generally is a mixture of very different reactions. A couple of the funniest bits in the book are the two of the set pieces in the last book. It’s the picture of the Jabberwock and there’s also the picture of Captain Hook and the alligator. Those are very startling images which make you jump a bit. When I was coming up with the alligator one I remember thinking that a lot of people talk about vagina detata but nobody ever does anything about it so you don’t very often see one. So we put those grotesque images in as a symbol of the most extreme vision of what each gender is frightened of regarding the other. So yes they are a little bit scary, but above all they’re funny. The ideas that we attach, as humans, to these perfectly ordinary parts of our anatomy born of fear desire and everything else; there is a point at which they are quite funny. Certainly that was always meant to be an element of Lost Girls. But we were mindful at the start that we didn’t want Lost Girls to be a sexual comedy any more than we wanted it to be a sexual horror story.

It struck me that a lot of the times when I see sex being approached in the arts, it’s generally in a humorous or a horrific context. It’s ok to do a story about sex if it’s funny or if the sex is being used to make the horror more powerful. I think both of these are perfectly valid but it struck me that there didn’t seem to be many people attempting to just talk about sex. We wanted to allow the sex to show all of the dimensions that the subject obviously has. It’s got an aesthetic dimension. It’s got an uneasy and scary aspect to it. It’s got a very comical aspect to it. But real life isn’t divided up into genres.

Our real life is a sex comedy horror western detective mystery love story. Every aspect of human expression tends to meet in each of us as a collision and that’s how we wanted to present Lost Girls. If there were scary things or if there were sad things we wanted to meet them head on. It’s best to play all the notes on the piano. If you’re talking about quite big things like the First World War or the first performance of The Rite of Spring, these are quite dark, dramatic chords. It is good to have them there in the mix, but you’ve got to have a bit of humor so that everything is balanced nicely and everything can be appreciated in its own right. There is no one element that is overwhelming the composition so the humor and the horror and the tragedy all feed off each other nicely so they all achieve their full effect.

Of course, but at the same time it’s a girl with a humanized lion. [laughs]

It’s perhaps not startling in a comic, but certainly if you came across it in the street outside your apartment you’d probably look twice.

That is quite possible. The original germ of the idea was one that I’d had a couple of decades ago with relation to Sigmund Freud’s comments about how dreams of flying were expressions of sex. There were flying sequences in Peter Pan so I wondered if you could do a sexual decoding of something like Peter Pan. But I couldn’t think of how to do it without it becoming a smutty parody. I think that is what most of the things that you’re talking about have probably turned out to be. I wasn’t sure of how to avoid that because the world certainly didn’t need another comic strip pointing out how sexy Tinkerbell looked in the Disney version of Peter Pan. I know that the late, great Wally Wood certainly got a lot of mileage out of that erotic imagery. We’ve got the greatest of reverence for those three authors and those three books so we didn’t want to do anything that would actually travesty the characters. I know that’s probably going to sound strange given that we’re talking about a pornographic book that involves Dorothy, Alice and Wendy. But I think we have tried to approach each of these characters with absolute love and sympathy. At the trial of Alice for example, it does still retain a lot of that quirky thinking, strange intelligence and curiosity that is in Lewis Carroll’s Alice. I think treating the characters with respect, even in their most undignified moments which all of us have, is what elevates it above the mere saucy parodies, which are perfectly worthwhile in their own terms, but that wasn’t quite what we were going for.

When I was dealing superhero characters or licensed superhero characters, that other people had created but I’d been given there was a set of problems in redefining them. When it came to approaching characters from the wider world of literature, that was a far different proposition because there is a world of difference. No disrespect to Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson’s Swamp Thing, but there was a world of difference between redefining Swamp Thing and redefining Lewis Carroll’s Alice. What’s the worst that can happen if you mess up your revival of Swamp Thing? You’ll just join the legion of other people who’ve done exactly the same thing and outside of comics no one is bothered by that. Whereas when you’ve got somebody like Alice or Wendy or Dorothy which are characters beloved by generations of readers the literate world over so there’s much more at risk. If you mess up characters such as those, it’s a much bigger disgrace than if your revival of Superman doesn’t go according to plan or whatever. I think that it was probably working on the Lost Girls characters that gave me the confidence to attempt something like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen which in many ways grew out of it. It was, “hey the act of taking fictional characters for the purposes of pornography seems to be working out marvelously” and I think somewhere along the line I thought, “hey, you could do an adventure book along the same premise.” I think that led to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. But it was Lost Girls where I found myself having to go back and read the original works to try and decode them and see how that could fit into the new narrative that I was putting together. It was very painstaking.

Yeah and that is to say not very often because most pornography is really boring which was ok because otherwise we probably wouldn’t have done Lost Girls. If there was great pornography out there, there wouldn’t have been such a yawning hole in the field for Lost Girls to fill. But obviously we’ve paid a lot of attention to the history of pornography because that, as much as anything, is what Lost Girls is. At least that is an important layer in that we have this series of tributes to the giants of erotica that we present through the stages of the whole book. We had to look at a lot of erotica and pornography and make up our mind with what we thought about it, what our take on it was, which bits of it worked and which didn’t. The late Victorian and Edwardian pornography was certainly some of the best. Some bits of it are cruel, unpleasant and probably deserving of the bad reputation that it gets. But there were other bits of it which were surprisingly liberal and progressive where characters would break off halfway through a heated orgy to discuss sexual politics and sexual manners. That’s not exactly what you’d expect. Also there was this unashamed polymorphous quality to the sexuality that seemed a lot healthier than a lot of our latter day expressions of pornography. There was a period at the turn of the century that was inventive and decadent. It was often very well written and beautifully drawn. Aubrey Beardsley who was an artist and a writer at the time who did some really interesting things, on his deathbed at age 26 asked for his drawings for Lysistrata and all obscene works to be burnt. There’s no reason why he should have had to feel that obvious shame and guilt because of some wonderful, witty, playful writing and some exquisite rude drawing. There’s no reason why the well meaning William Blake who attended the poet’s death, should have destroyed his many erotic drawings and writings. But they thought that it would bring disgrace upon an otherwise spotless and visionary poet. I think that’s misguided. Blake’s sexuality and Beardsley’s sexual imagination were a really important part of them as men and artists. There’s no reason for that just because the social atmosphere of the times happened to be blowing one way or the other. No artist should have to feel ashamed of his or her erotic urges. I doubt that there’s a serious artist or writer in human history who hasn’t dabbled in the pornographic. It’s just because of the pressures of their times they had to cower behind the veil of anonymity.

We probably got together over this book. When the idea was first suggested we weren’t in a relationship. But as our collaboration developed, so did our relationship develop. Both of them have endured marvelously over the past 16 years. It’s the first time that I’d ever worked with anybody that long and the first time that I’d ever worked on any extensive and lengthy project with a woman. That is to the shame of the comic book industry and probably to my own shame as well. There were women artists out there but the way that my comic book career had gone, I’d never been presented with them. It wasn’t until I’d been thinking about the idea of “Why wasn’t it possible for a work to be both pornography and art?” Because of habit, I was thinking, “alright, so which male artist should I collaborate with on this one?” I suddenly thought of Melinda and I was put in touch with her by Neil Gaiman. Neil knew that I had been a fan of Melinda’s work since long before I got into comics professionally myself. One of the first essays that I wrote was for one of the British Marvel comics back in 1980 or 1981. It was a big piece about women in comics called Invisible Girls and Phantom Ladies. It talked about women as creators in comics and women as characters in comics and how on both accounts, comics were really badly degrading to women. I mentioned Melinda because her early underground work was exquisite. Knowing that, Neil put us in touch and we got together and we talked about maybe doing an eight page erotic comic strip. It was while we were casting around for that I think I brought up my old idea of maybe we could do something with Peter Pan. But it was a lame idea and didn’t really go anywhere. Melinda said that she had always enjoyed stories with three women characters in the main roles. That idea bumped into mine and I thought, “Ooh, if Wendy from Peter Pan was one of the women characters, who would the two others be?” At that point Alice and Dorothy immediately suggested themselves. Lost Girls exploded into existence over a weekend and we got the whole story in place. But of course we didn’t know it would take 16 years.

No, it would be better if he didn’t do that. I’ve told the producer that I want nothing to do with this film. If they had listened to me when I first said it, then I wouldn’t have had to spit poison at the various media regarding the film. It could have just come out without my name in it and there would have been no problem. I would never have watched it and I would never have had to say anything nasty about it. Certainly it was bad enough having the producer contact me by phone asking me if I wouldn’t reconsider and at least watch the movie even though I had expressly said that I didn’t want any further contact of any kind from Hollywood. He was saying, “Won’t you at least watch the movie?” I was saying, “Look, I didn’t want you to contact me.” This was after he had told lies about me in press releases and things like that. I didn’t want to talk to any of those people and from everything that I’ve heard about the movie, I think that I made, as usual, the right decision.

But I do have a DVD player. I use it to watch mostly foreign films recently. Very, very low budget films and British comedy.

Yeah, I keep up with new comedy. Not so much with new drama or anything because that looks like it cost too much to produce. Melinda got me a set of Georges Méliès’ original short experimental pieces. Now there is magic and cinema brought together and it probably cost very little. Also she got me a collection of the Fantomas short films, which must have been one of the very first dramatic serials ever made. They were inventing the visual storytelling as they went along. Certainly it was much more exciting to me than two million Orcs coming over the hill in the latest CGI spectacular. I’m sure that you can make marvelous fantasy landscapes if you’ve got that many millions of dollars to throw at them. I’m sure that anybody could do it. I’m sure if you gave my dear departed mother several million dollars, she could have come up with something spectacular. There seems to be an inverse proportion in the ratio between money and imagination and it seems to hold up. John Waters’ early films are brilliant and they look like they cost five dollars to make. I’m sure that you could probably come up with your own list of indie directors who were brilliant until people started giving them a big budget and ruined everything.

I was. I don’t know where I was going with that one, really. That one betrayed me and let me down.

I started off with hope in my heart regarding The Sopranos and I was saying lots of things about its Shakespearean qualities. That was when I still thought that it was going to end with series five, which was what they had originally promised. I thought, “Well, this means that it won’t just be a soap opera then. That it will be a something that has a beginning, middle and end. A proper dramatic structure. When it was announced that because the show was doing so well they were going to stick another season on it, that was when I stopped watching it. I think that was providing a pattern, which an awful lot of very promising American drama series have tended to follow. You get the impression that there isn’t an end in sight because they’re waiting to see how well it does. They’ve come up with a vehicle that could be extended, potentially forever and they’re making it up as they go along. The fascinating elements seem to be forgotten by the writer a couple of weeks later if they’re ever referred to again. It doesn’t have a satisfying dramatic shape. What I am enjoying now, which avoids all these problems is HBO’s The Wire.

It’s very good because it’s restrained. It’s only talking about one specific case but it goes into incredible detail. I was even more impressed when I found out that the very convincing Baltimore black street gangs that were present in the first series were actors. I was proud and amazed when I found out that a good number of them are actually from England. There’s some very good writing and George Pelecanos is one of the writers and he is certainly the best of the modern American crime writers. He’s certainly more stylish and probably has more range than a number of the others. They’re good in their way but they don’t quite have the range that he has. It’s a lot tighter and things do get resolved. Of course I could be horribly disappointed by the third season and reviling it in a year’s time, but I hope not.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

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