The British equivalent was the Oz obscenity trial, which ran for six weeks over the summer of 1971. The underground magazine was routinely full of lewd images and swear words, but the trial somehow came to centre on the inclusion of an image of Rupert the Bear with an erection. This led to memorable exchanges in court: the prosecution claimed that as Rupert was a child, the images therefore qualified as obscene images of children – a far more serious charge than doodling a cock onto a cartoon bear. The defence was led by barrister John Mortimer (author of the Rumpole novels), who called the psychologist Dr Michael Schofield to offer expert opinion that the images were not harmful and would not corrupt the intended audience, leading to the following memorable exchange under cross-examination:
BRIAN LEARY (prosecution): What sort of age would you think Rupert is, to your mind? What sort of aged bear?
SCHOFIELD: Oh, I’m very sorry. I’m not up to date with bears.
LEARY: You don’t have to be, because he doesn’t change, Rupert, does he?
JUDGE ARGYLE (interrupting): I think the question is ‘what age do you think Rupert is intended to be: a child, an adult or what?’
SCHOFIELD: It is an unreal question, you might as well ask me ‘how old is Jupiter?’
Moore has alluded to this a couple of times in stories – a flashback image in Big Numbers #2 that shows baffled parents discovering a teenager’s copy of Oz, complete with the offending image of Rupert, feels at least semi-autobiographical. And towards the end of Lost Girls, Wendy is horrified to find a book containing a story in which a pair of young children have sex with their parents – we see the illustrations. The man who gave her the book offers a defence that’s a clear allusion to the Oz trial, but he soon sort-of snatches away the get-out clause he’s just drafted:
Incest, c’est vrai, it is a crime, but this? This is the idea of incest, no? And these children: how outrageous! How old can they be? Eleven? Twelve? It is quite monstrous … except that they are fictions, as old as the page they appear on, no less, no more. Fiction and fact: only madmen and magistrates can not discriminate between them … I, of course, am real and since Helena, who I just fucked, is only thirteen, I am very guilty. Ah well, it can’t be helped.
In the early nineties, Lost Girls had been one of many forthcoming projects from Moore, who described it as ‘almost symmetrical’ with From Hell: ‘In some ways From Hell – what I hope it to be – is a painfully meticulous examination of the disease, whereas Lost Girls offers some tentative suggestions towards a possible cure.’ Unfortunately, the parallels didn’t end there, the two series also sharing a patchy publication history. Like From Hell, the opening chapters of Lost Girls appeared in Taboo in 1991–2, and Kitchen Sink published two magazine-sized volumes of the series in 1995–6. Even without a publisher, though, Moore and Gebbie continued to work on the project. Moore remained ‘sure that a major work of mine is going to be published sooner or later. I’ve been able to maintain my sangfroid concerning the various ups and downs in the publishing status of the books. I’m convinced that the work is the main thing to concentrate on, and when it’s ready to be published there’ll be a publisher there to do it.’
It would take over ten years, but Lost Girls did find its publisher. This was Chris Staros at Top Shelf, who announced in September 2002 that he was committed to publishing the book exactly to Moore and Gebbie’s specifications. Top Shelf pulled out all the stops to make the final product as lavish as possible. Lost Girls was to be a slab-like slipcased set containing three volumes, each one a hardback with its own dust jacket, on thick paper that Moore said ‘to my mind smells better than the finest Chanel, you can really bury your face in Lost Girls, and it’s such a great quality paper, it adds to the experience’. The delays in completing the book only improved the quality of the final product: ‘If we’d finished it a little earlier there would not yet have been the reproduction techniques that would have been capable of reproducing Melinda’s artwork with the kind of fidelity that we see in the Top Shelf volume.’ The original art was photographed at a specialist printer’s in London, the only place in the country they could find which was up to the technical challenge of duplicating Gebbie’s delicate pastels. The finished product would retail for $75 at a time when a standard comic book cost $2.95.
Not only did the printing and other costs represent a commitment of around $350,000 for Top Shelf – an immense financial risk under any circumstance for a small press – but Lost Girls presented a whole new set of potential problems. Due to its content, it was unclear that consignments of the book would be allowed through customs in a number of countries (as it was printed in Hong Kong, there was no guarantee it would even leave the printers’ warehouse). There are places where any depiction of underage sex, even in drawings, is banned and merely possessing a copy of a book containing them is a serious criminal offence. And in the UK there came another challenge: London’s Great Ormond Street children’s hospital, who were bequeathed the rights to Peter Pan by its creator J.M. Barrie, blocked sales in Moore and O’Neill’s home country on more straightforward copyright grounds. The initial print run of 10,000 looked extremely optimistic. When asked ‘are you worried about bankrupting Top Shelf?’ Moore’s answer didn’t rule out the possibility:
I’m incredibly proud of the way Chris is standing behind this book. Chris knew what the book was when he decided to do it, and we’ve been completely honest about what this book contains during the whole sixteen years we’ve been working upon it. Of course we don’t want anybody to be disadvantaged or bankrupted by this book. At the same time, what are our alternatives? If you’re living in a politically repressive time where you have this seemingly fundamentalist-directed agenda percolating down not only through America but through all of those countries who are fortunate enough be in the shadow of America, you’ve really got no option other than to make your statement as you see fit, or shut up.
As the publication date approached, Staros began a careful marketing campaign: ‘We really worked the press hard on this book, for several reasons. One, it’s such an expensive book to produce, it had to launch big or it would have killed us financially. Secondly, it was very important for a book this controversial to be sort of pre-approved by the public at large as a work of art, rather than come out cold and start getting detractors from the beginning … I’ve made sure the book is legitimised as a work of art. That’s why we’ve packaged it the way we have … So, there’s no confusion that it has literary merit, which in this country means it’s not obscene.’ Neil Gaiman – who, lest we forget, was the person who put Moore and Gebbie in touch in the first place – wrote a review for Publishers Weekly that, by accident or design, was perfectly on-message:
As a formal exercise in pure comics, Lost Girls is as good as anything Moore has written. (One of my favorite moments: a husband and wife trapped in a frozen, loveless, sexless relationship, conduct a stiff conversation, laced with unconscious puns and wordplay, moving into positions that cause their shadows to appear to copulate wildly, finding the physical passion that the people are denied.) In addition to being a masterclass in comics technique, Lost Girls is also an education in Edwardian smut – Gebbie and Moore pastiche the pornography of the period, taking in everything from The Oyster to the Venus and Tannhauser period work of Aubrey Beardsley. Melinda Gebbie was a strange and inspired choice as collaborator for Moore. She draws real people, with none of the exaggerated bodies usual to superhero or porno comics. Gebbie’s people, drawn for the most part in gentle crayons, have human bodies. Lost Girls is a bittersweet, beautiful, exhaustive, problematic, occasionally exhausting work.
The biggest gun in the marketing battle, though, was Alan Moore himself. Lost Girls would be published a few months after the release of the V for Vendetta movie, and there were many articles in the mainstream and comics press about his disputes with Hollywood and the comics industry. Moore was able to contrast such matters with his work on Lost Girls. As ever, he was not afraid to explain how clever
he was being, and his approach to writing pornography was characteristically thoughtful as he brought his revisionist, deconstructionist techniques to bear: ‘Even porn’s most uncompromising and vociferous feminist critic, Andrea Dworkin, has conceded that benign pornography might be conceivable, even if she considered such a thing highly unlikely. Given that we don’t want “bad pornography” and can’t have “no pornography”, it’s in this mere suggestion of the possibility of “good” pornography that the one ray of light in an intractable debate resides.’
Moore wanted to create such ‘good pornography’, work with genuine artistic merit and a degree of technical accomplishment. There was a grand purpose to the endeavour, and he was keen to position Lost Girls as a political statement:
I think if you were to sever that connection between arousal and shame, you might actually come up with something liberating and socially useful. It might be healthier for us, and lead to a situation such as they enjoy in Holland, Denmark, or Spain, where they have pornography all over the place – quite hardcore pornography – but they do not have anywhere near the incidence of sex crimes. Particularly not the sex crimes against children that we suffer from in Britain, and that I believe you suffer from in the United States. It seems at least potentially that pornography might be providing an essential pressure valve in those countries, which we do not have access to here. Rather than being able to have a healthy relationship with our own sexual imagination, we’re driven into some dark corners by shame and embarrassment and guilt, and those dark corners breed all sorts of monsters. Things that cross the line between the kind of pornography Melinda and I are doing, which only occurs in the realm of the mind, to the very unpleasant things that can occur in real life.
In a long essay, ‘Bog Venus v Nazi Cock Ring’, Moore summed up, with his tongue mostly in his cheek, what he believed to be the simple choice: ‘Sexually open and progressive cultures such as ancient Greece have given the West almost all of its civilising aspects, whereas sexually repressive cultures like late Rome have given us the Dark Ages.’
This was nothing new. Moore has contrasted ‘sex’ and ‘violence’ from his earliest work. In Miracleman #13 (November 1987), an eternal cosmic war between two galactic civilisations is ended following this exchange between the leader of one side and Miraclewoman:
KINGQUEEN:
Are both cultures forever doomed, then, to an unproductive war’s dull toil?
MIRACLEWOMAN:
Excuse me … but couldn’t you have sex instead?
KINGQUEEN:
Have sex?
…
MIRACLEWOMAN:
If two organisms or two cultures are forced into contact, it can be thanatic and destructive, or erotic and creative.
It boils down to the old hippy mantra: ‘make love, not war’. But Moore, true to character, sees it not as a suggestion, but as a description of fundamental universal forces, with history representing the Manichean struggle between them.
In Promethea #22 (November 2002), Moore describes ‘godsex’ as ‘This chaotic animal force. It’s the primal scene. It’s mom and dad doing it, humping towards the moment of conception, but it’s the conception of the universe. The universe. All the male and female energies pounding in the binary throb of being. On and off. Back and forth. In and out. Gravity. Electromagnetism. The weak nuclear force. The strong nuclear force. Earth, air, water, fire. This phosphorous angel copulation … building like music, building to a crescendo. Building to its outburst.’ It’s a coming together that creates the universe.
Indeed, Moore sees sex as the ultimate union and creative act. He’s often described it in similar, psychedelic terms as a great journey upwards. Promethea #10 (October 2000) includes the passage ‘This is heart, and soul … this is the Sun, this is the Gold in us and you are almost me and I am almost you. Oh love. Love … and we become each other … become hermaphrodite … as we climb … towards the godhead’. Snakes and Ladders (1999) reaches a transcendental climax: ‘we climb on … the he and she of us become a limitation to our pleasure, sloughs away in favour of a more erotic possibility: the limitless horny intimacy if we could become each other.’ And there’s the sex scene in Swamp Thing #34 (March 1985): ‘I am no longer certain where I end … where he begins … I feel my own hand like he feels it […] we … are … one creature … and all … that there is … is in us … Together we know the light, exploding upward in a birdcloud.’
That Swamp Thing story, ‘The Rite of Spring’, was named after the Stravinsky ballet which holds an important place in Moore’s worldview. For Moore, the original Rite of Spring represents truly revolutionary forces in its unbottling of great passion. Such energies can be channelled in one of two directions: war divides and destroys; sex unites and creates. While he has been dismissive of Freud, once telling The Onion, ‘Sigmund Freud, frankly, I’ve not got a great deal of time for, because I think he was a child-fixated cokehead, to be perfectly honest’, Moore’s model is practically identical to Freud’s theory of Eros and Thanatos. As he explains: ‘Control sex and death, and controlling populations becomes simple. Death’s easily subjugated: William Burroughs observed that anyone who can lift a frying pan owns death. Similarly, those owning the most pans, troops, tanks or warheads own the most death, and can regulate the supply accordingly. Death’s a pushover, but how do you control desire?’
This is the question at the heart of Lost Girls. In the story, the main characters leave the hotel to attend a performance of The Rite of Spring. While they are carried away sexually by the pagan rhythms, the majority of the audience becomes violent and a riot ensues. In 2006 Moore was able to make a case for the contemporary relevance of the book, saying ‘This has taken us sixteen years. We didn’t know it was going to come out in 2006, in the middle of George Bush’s second administration, with the world plunged more thoroughly into war than it’s been in a couple of decades. It could just have easily come out nine years ago, when Clinton was in office, and it might’ve seemed irrelevant, and not particularly shocking in a time of [Andres Serrano’s] “Piss Christ”. And if we’d done this forty years ago, there would’ve been people asking us if we hadn’t gone a bit far by portraying homosexuality.’
The regularity with which Moore is interviewed means that when he’s asked the same question by different journalists, naturally enough he will give broadly the same answer, and tends to use similar examples or anecdotes. With the round of Lost Girls interviews, though, he gave almost word-for-word answers to MTV, the Independent, Onion, Patriot-News and other media outlets. He was clearly girding his loins for a fight, aware he needed to choose his words carefully.
Moore was ready for anything … except what actually happened. Soon, the Independent on Sunday was able to report:
In spite of worries that Lost Girls’ explicit imagery might prove controversial or even actionable in America, the book received glowing press, even in the normally conservative USA Today, and sold out there of its 10,000-copy first printing in one day. Already going into a third printing of 20,000, their distribution to Britain has been delayed because of correspondence to the publishers, Top Shelf, from Great Ormond Street Hospital – which was given the copyright to Peter Pan in J.M. Barrie’s will – possibly until January 2008, when its rights expire. This has not stopped the book hitting the Top 20 on Amazon.
The first print run sold out on the day of release, Wednesday 30 August 2006. Two weeks later, Chris Staros announced, ‘since the back orders in the Diamond system were already greater than the second printing of 10,000 we had ordered in anticipation of higher demand, we had to go ahead and order a third printing of 20,000 copies. So in a period of four days, we went through the first, second and part of the third printing.’ By 9 November, Top Shelf announced that 17,000 of the following month’s third printing were already back ordered. Lost Girls was not banned by any store or (for any length of time) by any jurisdiction, and remains available from any retailer of graphic novels, latterly in a single-vol
ume edition. American bookstore chain Borders insisted the book be shrinkwrapped, but that was just as likely done in an effort to protect a $75 book from grubby-fingered customers as to protect the customers from the contents of the book.
Challenge after challenge fell away. Moore said, ‘We got back a wonderful letter from the Canadian Customs Authority, basically saying that, even though there were scenes that were tantamount to bestiality or incest, this could in no way be considered obscene, and even though it did appear that there were underage people taking part in some of the sex scenes, this could in no way be considered as child pornography, and that it was a work of great social and artistic benefit.’ There was no tabloid outrage. When Moore was interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on 22 June 2006, the encounter started out confrontationally, but Moore soon turned the subject around from child abuse to the joys of free speech and the exchange ended up almost playful. He could hardly have had a more respectable or prestigious platform – his interview followed a discussion with Al Gore about climate change. And on New Year’s Eve 2011, he was invited back to Today to deliver the Thought for the Day homily; he chose to extol the virtues of worshipping a glove puppet, ending with: ‘Anyway, thank you very much for listening and from both me and Glycon, a very happy new year to you all.’
The coverage of Lost Girls was by no means all fawning or even positive, but the criticism it received was concerned less with its subject matter and more with its merits as a comic. For some time the work became the focus of heated back-and-forth debates in both the venerable The Comics Journal and the online academic comics forum InterText.
It also attracted broad scholarly attention. Moore and Gebbie had managed to encompass many of the hot button topics of contemporary English Literature courses – gender studies, queer theory, identity politics, Victoriana, the fin de siècle, constructions of childhood, the First World War, children’s literature, sex, rape and censorship – as well as offering rich meat for those looking simply to examine formal aspects of comics storytelling. It seemed there was much to discuss; the introduction to the collection Sexual Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore went as far as to assert ‘Lost Girls has become a sort of Rosetta Stone for understanding Moore’s career’. When Leah Moore was at university in the late nineties, both she and her father had been a little surprised to find his work on her reading lists; since then, a number of books have been published solely dedicated to his life and work, ranging from slim paperbacks to coffee-table books. There are book-long interviews with Moore, collections of old interviews, and a growing weight of academic papers. By 2010 Moore was such a focus of scholarly attention that on 28–29 May, the University of Northampton organised Magus: Transdisciplinary Approaches to the Work of Alan Moore, an event that included papers with titles like ‘Big Numbers: Comics Beyond Referentiality and Reinvention’, ‘Chaotic Criminality: The Villains of Alan Moore’ and ‘V Versus Hollywood: A Discourse on Polemic Thievery’. Subjects ranged from Moore’s mainstream comics, through his connection to Northampton, to his performance art and magic. Efforts were made to link his work to broader literary movements, such as postmodernism and the Gothic, and there was considerable discussion of his influences and influence. There were also screenings of Moore rarities like Don’t Let Me Die in Black and White, before the conference culminated with a panel appearance by Moore and Gebbie themselves.
Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore Page 42
