Tradio #28 - Lost Girls

Today on a very special Valentine's Day episode of Tradio we look at one of the most romantic graphic novels ever written.  Today we look at Lost Girls by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie, published by Top Shelf Productions.

Ah...young love.  Full of awkwardness and promise.  Exciting and nervous.  So many conflicting feelings come to a head and it is one of the scariest things we subject ourselves to.  Lost Girls looks at all these things...by using the framework of hardcore porn.  Yeah...porn.  There is no other way around it.  Lost Girls is porn featuring the characters from beloved childrens' tales Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and The Wizard of Oz.  And not just your ordinary porn either.  Pedophilia, incest, rape...this lovely tale has it all! Basically, the book uses the framework of Alice, Wendy, and Dorothy meeting at a hotel during World War I and having lots and lots of sex with one another and others at the hotel as they tell the tales of their youth.  As it turns out, the books written about their exploits are very sanitized retellings of what really happened.  Tea parties become orgies, Capt. Hook becomes an old pedophile with a whithered hand, and the farm hands become rapists.  Over and over, the tales we know and love are twisted into depraved versions were the stories only get the story tellers and the listeners that much hotter.  Overall, the ending of the book is a nice twist, but man, what you have to go through to get there is pretty rough.

But did I like it?  Yes and no.  I liked that it takes chances and makes no bones about what it really is.  What I didn't like is that it is a very graphic good about underage literary characters that a lot of young girls look up to in very perverse situations.  I am not one who thinks that something like this should not of been made, but sometimes I feel that Moore is doing more and more things in his old age to push the envelope just because he can get away with it like no one else can.  Maybe he just wants to make sure no more of his works get made into movies.  I am not sure, but I wish he had spent more time doing something with these characters that I could share with other people or even my kids someday.  Gebbie's art is amazing, though a little stiff (I really can't believe I just typed that with a straight face).  She isn't really a comic book artist and it shows in the layouts of the book.  They aren't bad, just not very dynamic and for a bigger format book like this is, there are SO many grids at times.  All in all, it is a work of graphic fiction that exists to show just how far you can push the envelope.  I am just not sure if we really needed to take this particular journey to get there.