- Hardcover: 264 pages
- Publisher: Top Shelf Productions (Sep 12 2006)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1891830740
- ISBN-13: 978-1891830747
- Product Dimensions: 31.4 x 23.4 x 6.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 3.3 Kg
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #187,384 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. [Signature]Reviewed by Neil GaimanAlmost 10 years before his The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen took many of the figures of Victorian popular fiction on a remarkable romp, Alan Moore, in collaboration with underground artist Melinda Gebbie, began Lost Girls, with a similar, although less fantastical, conceit: that the three women whose adventures in girlhood may have inspired respectively, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Peter Pan and Wendy and the Wizard of Oz, meet in a Swiss hotel shortly before the first World War. Wendy, Dorothy and Alice, three very different women—one jaded and old; one trapped in a frigid adulthood; the last a spunky but innocent young American good-time girl—provide each other with the liberation they need, while also providing very different (and, for this is a pornography, very sexual) versions of the stories we associate with them. We go with the girls, in memory, to the incidents that became the Rabbit Hole, Oz and Neverland. 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 master-class 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 BeardsleyMelinda 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. It succeeded for me wonderfully as a true graphic novel. If it failed for me, it was as smut. The book, at least in large black-and-white photocopy form, was not a one-handed read. It was too heady and strange to appreciate or to experience on a visceral level. (Your mileage may vary; porn is, after all, personal.)Top Shelf has chosen to package it elegantly and expensively, presenting it to the world not as pornography, but as erotica. It is one of the tropes of pure pornography that events are without consequence. No babies, no STDs, no trauma, no memories best left unexamined. Lost Girls parts company from pure porn in precisely that place: it's all about consequences, not to mention war, music, love, lust, repression and memory. (Aug.)Neil Gaiman is the author of the bestsellers Anansi Boys and American Gods. Films based on his books Stardust and Coraline are due in 2007and 2008, respectively.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Although Moore (Watchmen, 1987; From Hell, 2000) is arguably comics' most popular writer, many fans and more libraries may be scared off from his latest project, an unabashedly porno graphic novel in which Wonderland's Alice, Oz's Dorothy, and Neverland's Wendy reveal their carnal natures by relating their past sexual encounters and coupling in the present, especially with one another. While explicit sex, including incest, is on virtually every page, Moore has an agenda beyond titillation. The work voices an impassioned defense of artistic freedom that stresses that fiction and fantasies aren't the same as actual events and behavior. "Only madmen and magistrates cannot discriminate between them," one character proclaims. Gebbie's delicate, painted style, rife with art nouveau references, somewhat mitigates the sensational subject matter. She and Moore have labored on Lost Girls since 1991, and the book's lavish production (three oversize, hardcover volumes in a slipcase) monumentalizes their dedication and adds a high price tag to the red-flag contents to put off all but readers and collections highly tolerant of the transgressive. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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Most helpful customer reviews
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful sumptuous and sensational,
By M. L. C. Montgomery (Winnipeg, MB, Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Lost Girls Collected (Hardcover)
I'm a great fan of Alan Moore, one of comics' most acclaimed authors, and I'm also a great fan of erotica. Moore, being comics' greatest formalists structures this tale of sexual identity and experimentation in Austria in 1914, before the onset of the Great War.We are introduced to Alice through a looking glass. We are introduced to Dorothy via her luxurious shoes. And we are introduced to Wendy by floating downwards from the top of the hotel, the main setting for this. Each woman has a story to tell. The hotel has a story to tell. The "bibles" lain around the hotel have a story to tell. Moore uses the three famous stories of our youths to explore concepts of sex and art and where they meet. Each note-worthy element of the prime-stories is apparent and used to portray the development of the woman. This is a bildungsroman of sexuality and innocence. We watch and listen to the growth of Alice, Dorothy and Wendy as they couple. We are a voyeur. This effect is echoed in the first volume, as the characters take inspiration from the Tijuana bibles in the hotel (of course, they're not named "tijuana" by Moore; although he does in Top Ten). This is an excellent work of erotic exploration. What can erotica do? What can comics do? What can stories do? These are the questions that Moore asks of the different media. These are the questions he asks with every project. I will follow him with every step as he attempts to puzzle it out. A note on the physical item. It's far larger than I expected. When it arrived, I was taken aback by the girth of the book. It's huge. About a foot and a half tall, and about a foot wide. The pages are large, allowing for almost microscopic analysis of the art. This edition is akin to DC's "Absolute" editions of Watchmen, Dark Knight and Kingdom Come. (Sadly, Lost Girls does not come with any creator commentary or bonus features. Oh well.) I recommend this title to those who enjoy Moore's work, or to those who feel comics are of a juvenile sort. This is art.
5.0 out of 5 stars
MP,
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This review is from: Lost Girls Hardcover Edition (Hardcover)
This item was all that I expected it to be. It was in prestine condition and at a great price. This item was also shipped very fast, it was at my door in 4 days from when I purchased it.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very fun.,
This review is from: Lost Girls Hardcover Edition (Hardcover)
This is an excellent form of erotica literature; where three well loved females of fiction set the stage for a series of sexual fantasies.
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