anderswolleck

Melinda Gebbie is the San Francisco born artist previously best known for her work in the 1970s on Wimmen's Comix, the all-female underground comics anthology and her collaboration with fianc Alan Moore on Cobweb in Tomorrow Stories. But all that will change when Top Shelf Comix releases Lost Girls, her second collaboration with Moore. The 16 years in the waiting pornographic graphic novel takes three classic female literary characters Alice of Alice in Wonderland, Dorothy of The Wizard of Oz and Wendy of Peter Pan and puts them in erotic situations with one another as they tell the group of their previous sexual exploits.

Also Top Shelf Comix is offering a limited 500 signed and numbered edition of the book to be autographed by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie.

Buy Lost Girls

Daniel Robert Epstein: What was the reason for Lost Girls taking 16 years to get finished?

Melinda Gebbie: I worked it out one day after it was all over and it came out to three days per panel for the book. So thats not too long actually considering theres eight to ten layers of colored pencils in the panels and mixed media and stuff like that. I had to make sure that everything I put into the book was the best that I could manage and that takes an awful lot of sublimation with going through my own personal life and trying to concentrate on the most memorable and exquisite moments of everything. It was exhausting. I had to make sure that I was in a happy mood and doing the absolute best I could. For the first two years I was very self-conscious, because I thought, Oh my God, everybody who reads this is going to know exactly what my sex drive is like and whether its crap or not. Most of the people whove done sex art in the past have either not signed it or signed it under a different name. So I thought, Well, if Im going to be brave, the first thing I have to do is get rid of my self-consciousness. That was long psychological and a physical process of gearing up. Also because Alan was working here, long hours and working on five or six projects at a time, we only got to see each other about three times a week. It wasnt like we were living together and could feed off each others energy. We each had to feed off our own energy and be quite isolated most of the week. I wanted it to be joyous and ecstatic and everything that I thought sex would be about when I was a kid. Back then I thought there must be some great book somewhere where sex is explained and its beautiful which encourages you to learn so you dont have to be scared. Of course, there was no book like that.

DRE: No, definitely not [laughs].

MG: [laughs] I remember my Mom saying to my Dad every month when Playboy Magazine would arrive, You have two weeks to look at it and then it goes in the bin. I always thought God, why does Mom always get so cross when these magazines come? Id look through them and think These pictures are really pretty and I can see why he likes them. I lived the age when my Dad had original Bettie Page books which he kept in his dresser drawer. I didnt know who she was. I just thought she was this really pretty lady who liked to sit on busted furniture and seemed to be happy no matter what she was doing. I just wanted to bring the princessy, joyous, luxurious, Knights of Scheherazade thing back into it, all my fantasies which include, 30s and 40s musicals and any love story Ive ever enjoyed. I always thought sex and love should be together with a little bit of Ginger and Fred but nobody ever seems to see it like that [laughs].

DRE: Was the average of three days a panel always how you worked?

MG: Well I didnt really do color comics before. Since I was allowed to do all the processes by hand, which meant I could use any materials that I wanted to instead of coloring by computer or just drawing it in pencil and then inking it and having somebody else do it by computer, I took a lot longer because it was all handmade. But Ive never actually been given that freedom by anybody before. Ive always worked in pen and ink before. Pen and ink is always a lot faster for me.

DRE: How did you select the color palette for the book?

MG: Ive loved color for a long time and I used to paint more sporadically. I paint regularly now but I always really wanted to work in color because I love working with skin tones and colors of flowers. For me, color was part of the whole emotional landscape. With some stuff you can look at it and you can almost hear music. With Lost Girls I wanted to be able to feel the emotional music of the people coming together and everything that was going on. Whether they were walking or talking, fucking or whatever they were doing. But there was an emotional palette of color, supporting them and giving the reader information about the feelings that were going on in the story.

DRE: Alan told me that it was Neil Gaiman who put the two of you together.

MG: Yes, thats true. I had met Alan at comic book conventions and we liked each other. Then I was working for a little comics publisher in England as a PA and Neil came in and said, Oh my God, Melinda what are you doing here? I said, Well, its a job, somebodys got to do it. He said, Listen, Ive just been visiting with Alan Moore. But Neil said, Alan gave me his phone number to give to you to see if you two would like to get together and chat. So this little eight page erotic comic came up with Alan and we talked about it. Then I and started coming up and visiting him. This is obviously after he was gone from his marriage and everything. It wasnt as if he was still with his wife. As we worked on the story, it just got bigger and bigger and completely changed and became Lost Girls.

DRE: How much of a collaboration was it between the two of you?

MG: For a long time, what happened was I would come up on weekends and we would just sit and talk about this project, which was still this eight page comic story. But in the process of talking about it, because it was an erotic comic, we just started talking about all sorts of things having to do with our personal philosophies about life. We both had a lot of the same opinions about what a poor field pornography is, how joyless it is, how the photography always makes the models look cold and uncomfortable. Most of the porn magazines Ive seen might as well have been plumbing manuals.

DRE: [laughs] Thats true.

What I also liked about Lost Girls is that it is very erotic but in a gentle way. Would the book have been much different to you if there had been S & M qualities to it?

MG: We talked a lot about that. Ive flirted around with the S & M scene here in London for a couple of years. I loved the outfits. Theres emotional manipulation and theres dark things in Lost Girls but we just didnt end up doing very much in that realm. I think the Red Queen and Alice and the little coterie of helpers that the Red Queen had was like emotional sadism, but not really much like physical S & M. That has been done a bit with the Story of O and all that. We didnt want to dwell too much on power relationships and though S & M is more of a vestigial power relationship or shall we say ornamental power relationship or ritualized. But still it didnt really end up getting in the book much because we felt that was more about one person having power or being given power for an evening by another person. We really wanted Lost Girls to be more about spontaneity and about yearning and about release and joy and self, finding oneself rather than giving oneself to someone else in a ritualized way.

DRE: Would these sessions with Alan, talking about the book or doing sketches lead to sex?

MG: I think the answer is, yeah as often as not. It was exciting for us and we were very pleased by it so we did have a physical response to it. We didnt always because its only within the last year or so that Alan has become not under a huge burden of pressure. Hes not someone who has had as much leisure time as most normal human beings. But relationship-wise, both personally and physically, I think weve come through this brilliantly. I dont think most people could do what we did because the book is very self-revealing. If you have any problems, if you have any shadows, if you have any self-consciousness about your psychological relationship with sex or your emotional or physical relationship with it, then these things will be patently clear to the public. I think were hoping that the public will have the same response to it that we had. As we worked through these things, we laughed or were amazed or a bit spooked by the story because weve been really open with who we are about it on a personal level. You have to be, because if you dont show what it is you enjoy and what you like and what you revel in, this thing is not going to have any juice is it.

DRE: You did work for Wimmen's Comix, right?

MG: Yeah I was an underground cartoonist, back with Crumb and all those people.

DRE: I dont know how many of your old colleagues you speak to from back then. What do they think of the book?

MG: None of the public has seen it. They probably wont see it until the San Diego convention in July and even then theres only going to be 400 copies for sale to the public. But if they do see it, I dont know if Ill hear from them because I dont really keep in contact with them. Since Alan and I are not on the internet we dont have email so we have to keep in contact with people by letter or phone. So unless somebody calls me and says, Oh, I saw your book and I hate it Im not really going to know what people think of it actually.

DRE: I think I understand why Lost Girls is so personal for Alan. How did it become personal for you?

MG: The book was everything to me. I have a cat but I dont have any children so everything I am, everything Ive done, everything I feel, everything I think, to some extent has been drained into this book. It didnt matter whether I was out walking or doing things with friends or just by myself, the book was always going through my head. The pages that I was doing, the pages that Id done, the chapters wed done, the things we had yet to do. I didnt go traveling very far from my workplace partly because I was afraid that if I got on a plane I might fall into the ocean and the book might never get finished. I couldnt have been more involved in it had been an actual human baby.

DRE: I spoke with Alan a couple of years ago about the new edition of Mirror of Love and we got onto the subject of all the movie stuff that was going on with his books and he said this great thing to me If its worth reacting to, its worth overreacting to. I would imagine on your end that would make him very difficult to have an argument with.

MG: [laughs] Alan is a sensitive instrument and so am I. Hes a verbal person, first and foremost and Im a visual person first and foremost. So each of us has a little bit different way of seeing things but we can both completely appreciate what the other person does. If something means a lot to him, I dont go near that territory unless I can come up with a way of conversing about it so that real information can be shared and some little bit of progress can be made in our conversation and he does the same with me. We treat each other very carefully because were both very sensitive. I think its a nice rule of thumb generally, when possible. Not every couples the same, but because Lost Girls was our baby and he had a lot of other babies to bring up, as well as two daughters of his own, Alan has had an awful lot on his plate. We dont really argue like a lot of couples might because theres too much at stake.

DRE: Oh thats very interesting. Ill have to bring that up with my wife.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck