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Having read this it's a strange piece of work. A lifeless first volume, a second volume suddenly infused with energy and colour, and a third volume that becomes boring and even repellent. My partner's been crawling through v3 for about a fortnight, and still hasn't finished it even though it would take about twenty minutes to do so. I'll read parts of it again but I doubt I'll reread it as a whole. It's interesting, it's impressive, but it's not necessarily much good.
The art is superb. I wasn't sure I'd like it in the initial chapters but the awkward stylisation of it, like a cross between a children's book and a stained-glass window, is something you need to get accustomed to. By the time you're deep into the characters' stories, each of which has six pages of regular panels followed by a full-page symbolic splash, I was anticipating that splash and savouring it when it came. The quality of the reproduction means it glows on the page as if backlit, a fantasy realm you can almost reach into. Gebbie adopts different styles for each of the womens' stories and sticks to them rigidly, giving each one the feel of a different children's book in which these terribly perverted tales unfold, the sexuality of the characters contained within these Victorian cages.
The characters are the problem with the book. They're like stained-glass as well; they're not really there... Obviously they're carrying a great deal of symbolic baggage. Each is an archetype: maiden, mother and crone to begin with, then the sexual roles associated with those characters, then the stories of Dorothy, Wendy and Alice which are laden with symbolism of their own even before more is ladled on by Moore. As in sexual role-playing they're not so much characters as stereotypes and they're confined by that. As in all pornography, their actions are circumscribed by the plot, or rather the sexual acts they're required for. They only come alive in the flashbacks.
And these are the main characters. The minor characters are no more than puppets. Harold Potter is a virtual automaton, the stereotype of the Victorian husband more interested in ships than sex and unmindful of his wife's passions. Rolf has only three functions; to provide a scene of foot fetishism, to provide some hot gay action, and to be a harbinger of war. The licentious hotelier is a cliche, an enabler of orgies. The characterisation is, at times, very pornographic because there isn't any. These people exist to be used as sex objects.
It may not be just because of the genre. Moore appears to be exploring a single narrow aspect of his storytelling talents with this one. The technique of double and triple meanings or entendres, where the action we're watching is commented on by narration of different events, is revived for the first time since Watchmen. That seems to be the unifying theme of the work, to create a skeleton of action and character and drape it with as many different levels of interpretation as possible. Someone on here once called Alan Moore the greatest formalist in comics and that's never truer than here. There's barely a page that isn't serving some symbolic and structural purpose. Like a stained-glass window or religious, where the positioning of each figure and the colour of their clothing has a deeper significance, this is a dance of themes and ideas only briefly punctuated with more human moments. Which kind of overshadows all the porn.
As a one-handed read, Lost Girls is not successful. Perhaps that's the nature of the genre more than anything else. Pornography is specific. This is broad. If a particular sexual act isn't one that you respond to, and especially if lesbian sex doesn't hold an erotic charge, then the sex will leave you cold. Moore compared artistic treatments of sex, and the censorship surrounding them, to our culture's treatment of violence in the interviews before this came out. The difference being that few fans of violence are, for example, hot to see two-handgun action but completely turned off by samurai swords while in porn the opposite is true. If foot fetishism does nothing for you but blowjobs do, you'll be disinterested in one chapter and turned on by another.
It's a curious work, though. Writing this has made me want to read it again. It's no masterpiece but it's a magnum opus of a kind, exhaustively complete in what it does, and certainly a kind of classic. |
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