Newsarama Note: Click here for Part One of our interview wit Alan Moore, and here for part two.

Newsarama: When this all got rolling - how did you get involved with Lost Girls? Alan had mentioned that it was Neil Gaiman that got the two of you talking in the first place…

Melinda Gebbie: Yeah, Neil gave me Alan's phone number because, as it turned out, he and I had both been asked by the same little magazine, called Tales of Shangri-La to produce an eight page contribution each. Then, when Alan and I got in contact, we started talking about the contribution. So I came up to visit him a little village near London, and we started talking about sexual politics, which were basically the meat of my whole underground comics career back in San Francisco.

Alan said that he'd always wanted to do a pornography, but he could never think of one that would be worth doing. To raise the levels requires so much thinking. So we started out just talking - I would come up over eth weekends, and we would have these brainstorming sessions. After about the second or third weekend, we had gotten into talking this thing so much, and were discussing that how the people who did make beautiful pornographic art often didn't sign their names at all, their partners burned their work after they died, they signed an alias to it, or at worst, nobody even knows who drew some of these works. Certainly, there's only one woman pornographer that I can think of, and there are very few drawings at that, and I don't think there's very much known about her life.

It's such a difficult and rare field, and what were thinking of seemed as difficult to portray as Heaven. Hell is easy, Heaven is almost impossible, and pornography is completely out of reach. So, we both saw this as a tremendous challenge.

The idea of using three people, as Alan mentioned, I'd done a couple of stories with three female protagonists, and I'd had a lot of fun with that, and it seemed to have a lot of nice energy. Then, of course, that got Alan moving from the Peter Pan idea to including Dorothy and Alice.

So that's really how it came about - we just brainstormed for a couple or three weekends before we actually decided that we had a lot to say, and somebody should say something. We realized that we certainly had the passion, and we were sick of the meager and disgusting material that was available.

When I was a little kid, around ten or eleven, I had a dream about a gypsy, and I remember waking up form it wondering what sex was like, and thinking that there myust be a big, beautiful book somewhere that has illustrations for everything that has to do with this whole area - it would be explained, it will reassure, and show what to expect, and what not to expect. There would be stories in it as well, like there are for everything else in the world, as well as beautiful illustrations. Of course, there never was. I never realized when I was ten that I would be one of the people who would make this book that I thought had to exist out there, somewhere.

So yeah, I guess I could say it's kind of a childhood aspiration, not to say that I was any more sexually obsessed than any other child. Early on, I had found my father's collection of erotic books and pictures, which, at that time were mostly Bettie Page pictures, and I thought she was a most beautiful princess. When I first saw them, I was worried only about the look on her face, and seeing that she was smiling, and doing what she liked, and seemed to like the person who was taking the picture. Later on, I sort of got into the habit of looking at pornography, and then, noticing how it almost always failed. Aside from one French photographer, I really wouldn't say that I have seen very much sexually-oriented, joyous art. I've seen it be tricky, funny, silly, scary, odd, upsetting, terrifying, depressing, but almost never beautiful and joyous - the way you'd expect a party to be. How is it possible that human beings can get so excited about this, and be so involved with this all the time in their minds, and yet there is almost no physical manifestation of these heightened passions.

NRAMA: Or, if sex can produce such joy in the participants, why does it also seem to be responsible for such a multitude of crappy art, photographs and more…

MG: Right - what happens between what's going on in the mind, and what the hand expresses? What must be happening is that people get self conscious. Of course, one of the things that happened to me form the very beginning of the book was that I suddenly became extremely aware of the fact that things that I was drawing for my own pleasure were going to be looked at by a lot of other people. So, the only way that I could do this genuinely was to assume that everyone is at least in some part like me - that they want to see this thing look wonderful and fun, the way musicals do, or the way great stories of any kind do. The passion, the beauty, the wildness, the fun.

We don't go into anything in an isolated way - sex isn't like a room in a hospital where we leave our stomachs behind. It's something that we take our souls with us. No one, I don't think, ever considers sex as nothing in terms of an important human event in their lives. All these stories in culture that lead up to the idea - they go to the top step, but never go into the "sex room" together, the lovers. It's always about love, and then the writer's courage fails, because he can't do ecstasy. Or he or she can do a bit of yearning, but they can't do realization. It can't be carried all the way through.

So it's very complex, and until it's resolved in some way where people are reassured by the fact that yes, their wiring is indeed in place; they are not badly wired, they are not flawed, they are not perverse for being sexual - these are chapters in everyone's book. We cannot ignore this, except at the peril of our wholeness. The whole self is involved and if we are to be human in our sexual habits, we must bring heart into it, we must bring tenderness, and bravery. We must be as personally brave as, well Alan and I have been to do the book - that's brave, but it's also very brave to be who you are, even in the face of what you need.

NRAMA: It's removing all the internal censors that you've installed in yourself, and society has told you that you need…

ML: Exactly.

NRAMA: But while it is brave, you're also at the same time at your most vulnerable. In the materials Top Shelf has released for this project, it's referred to as your "life's work," and at first I found that slightly depressing, in the "Well, this is it!" kind of way, but looking at that phrase another way, this is your life's work in that this is truly you, without censors, without editing to fit into what society demands…

MG: Yeah. It's like if you could sit with a dear friend who'd been having a rotten tome, and could say, "Don't feel bad - this is what I've learned, and there is absolute joy in letting go of fear." Assuming that everybody is in the same place, we all need that reassurance. We all need to feel joy, we all need to feel desired, we all need to feel appreciated. All of the qualities that we consider higher parts of an educated heart are also applicable to sexuality. It is not an isolated event. For the general attitude - that is, to think of sex as a debased activity - it is only debased in the minds of those who choose to think of it that way.

NRAMA: On Alan's side of things, there was plenty of research into the true histories of the stories and the symbolism that could be read there when looked at from a sexual perspective. From your side of things, on the artistic side, how much research was involved in finding the stylistic and tonal approaches you used? Or was it more or less a natural extension of your own style?

MG: We discussed everything, and as we discussed it, we discovered what we wanted. There was a talking out loud process, and the more we talked about it, the more we saw the finer details of everything. 1913 is a very difficult period in terms of costume, because there was only one reference book that I could find at the time, and that was the costumes of Poiret. It was right at the turn of the century, they had just given up bustles, and we starting to wear loose-fitting clothing. Women had stopped wearing all the complicated undergarments, and everything was getting loose and billowy and experimental. And the architecture as well was in a very strange period - it had gone from being quite ornate, moving slightly towards the future Bauhaus kind of thing. There was an Austrian architect who came up with some wonderful, very simple looking buildings, but they had flowers painted on them. So it was a very big challenge to get eh buildings right, and I designed the hotel and almost all the figures in there, except for a few little things in reference books, are from my imagination.

And my anatomy improved tremendously over the years, I can tell you that much.

NRAMA: I was going to ask - the anatomy of all your characters is far from the stylized, idealized, or romanticized versions that you've come to see in comics, or, for that matter, would expect to see in pornography.

MG: Right. Especially with women's bodies, because of what the fat does on the figure - there were new things to learn and re-learn. If things were drawn wrong, then the eye will be slightly ill at ease, because it knows something's wrong. So - you have to make sure there's enough bottom and enough flesh, so the eye can repose with the figures.

NRAMA: Looking back on this now, is there anything that you look back on and realize was a challenge more so than the rest, or was it a free flowing process?

MG: Some of the stories took longer. Each of the flashback sequences, for instance, was done in a different style, as well as the chapters changing, one from the next. The Dorothy chapters probably took the longest, but I also moved the most, because they're so soft, and there's such a nice texture to them. There's a lot of layering of colored pencils in those.

In the Wendy chapters, it was very much about getting the design right, and the colors were mostly just light and dark, without a variation on shade that was in the Dorothy chapters. And the Alice chapters were all in watercolors, and went much more quickly than the others, and they ended up being the most spare, but in some instances, the brightest.

So, I think the hardest chapter of all was the black and white Chapter 13 - they're incredibly ornate. All of the artwork is pastiche - none of it is copied per se, all done in the fashion of the original artists and designers. But those took a painstaking amount of detail - there were times in that chapter that I felt like I was doing the Chinese forbidden stitch - that I was going to go blind. Tiny, tiny rosebuds and miniscule waving lines. If the texture just wasn't right, it would just clang at me. That was the most nerve-wracking chapter of them all.

NRAMA: As an artist, as a creator, when do you start to think about the reaction the work will receive?

MG: I wasn't ever thinking that way when I was working on it, directly, because I had to have a very immediate relationship with the page. Every time I put a line down, I had to be in a state of mind where I was trying to recapture the first moments of seeing something extraordinary. So, it was always about first, maximum effect - the pink of her cheek, the pale blue of the satin chair, the pattern left behind on a seat by someone's bottom in a soft cushion. It's as though I had to live in that moment, hovering above that bit of what I was looking at, so that it would be forever remembered. It was if the girls were sketching their own lives with their own pencils - that's why we made all their styles different.

But, probably about three years ago, I started worrying about it. We finished the artwork a longtime before we started trying to get the stuff reproduced here in London, and that's a whole other story of horror - the guys at the printing place, they were all very nice, except for this one guy who had a lot of problems believing that a woman would draw these pictures. He was very funny with me - he just didn't know how to deal with me at all. He didn't think that a woman like me could possibly exist, that there must be some story there that he didn't understand.

We've had nothing but positive response from people. I always show it to women - guys can take care of themselves, they've been looking at pornography for a long time, but women - you can't get them to look at it. But every woman I've shown it to - and none of them are particularly interested in erotica at all - has immediately gotten very much involved in it. I think a lot of that has to do with what I told Alan over and over again - whatever we do, every woman in here must look comfortable. She must look competent. She must look like a little Persian cat on a pillow - except for the times when they're in distress, which is a whole other thing, but when they're actually having the adventures that they're going through - their present day adventures, they must be seen to be comfortable, attractive, and well taken care of, so that the woman looking at this is not uncomfortable or worried in any way for the character, or identifies with her in any other way other than pleasurably and in a relaxed state. So I paid a lot of attention to hand gestures and relaxed shapes of the bodies and a privacy - as if they had no idea anyone else was there. That way, the viewer feels protected against being judged, and the characters - there is no showing the female as object, as if they were seen with a hungry eye. These are no more than people being who they are. And they really do look nice. We just happen to get a really nice eyeful of people carrying out their lives in a very private way, so that no one is upset in the process, unless they're supposed to be for the sake of the story.

NRAMA: Do you think the fact that a woman illustrated this is going to affect how its received? Alan had mentioned he felt that if this was a work produced by two men, it would have a different feel, obviously, but also would affect the audience's perception of everything, from the intent, to the finished art…changing it to "Oh it's just a dirty book by two guys looking to get off…"

MG: I don't know. I have a friend in California who's a "sexpert," Susie Bright, and she only saw a few early pages of it, and thought it was absolutely great. But yes, I think people will be interested in the fact that a woman drew this, and I think people will want to know what kind of person I am - that's my only real expectation of it all. People will probably want to know why a woman would do this book, if I'm a professional pornographer, etc. Some people, I'm afraid, will be especially interested in what kind of moral code I have. I'm prepared for that - I would expect that, especially in America, to tell you the truth. I don't think I would get asked questions about my moral code in Europe - in places like Scandinavia or Spain. But I think I would get asked that in America, by someone.

NRAMA: To warp things up, in your view, what's the best case scenario of how the work will be received and the effect it will have on those who read it?

MG: I hope it will be a vehicle for dialogue between partners. I hope that it will be a safe way for people to express their feelings towards another person without being told that they're disgusting or that they shouldn't show them thi8ngs like that. I am very encouraged in what I've seen from my friends who are not in any way involved in any of the things that I'm in - they're just women that I know from all different professions - they just seem to really love the Girls. They have a great feeling of affection and excitement about it.

I just hope that it is a useful vehicle and provides something for people that I wanted to exist when I was a kid, that would tell me on every page, that it is not bad to be sexual. It will change the whole ballpark, I'm hoping. I hope there won't be too much stone-throwing or accusations, because that just means that people haven't understood what we're doing. It's never meant as a licentious book or anything to promote any kind of bad behavior on anyone's part toward anyone else.

Discuss this story

Homepage