Alan Moore Interview
Alan Moore
Interviewed by Noel MurrayAugust 2nd, 2006
Alan Moore, the author of Watchmen, V For Vendetta, and From Hell, now returns with Lost Girls, a three-volume hardcover graphic novel produced in collaboration with Melinda Gebbie, who began this project 16 years ago as Moore's artist-for-hire, and finished it as his fiancée. Lost Girls teams up three icons of children's literature—Alice from Alice In Wonderland, Wendy from Peter Pan, and Dorothy from The Wizard Of Oz—and re-tells their stories with the fantasy elements stripped away, replaced by real-world sexual experiences. Unsurprisingly, the book has stirred some controversy. Fans of the original characters have attacked Moore for turning them into porn stars, the owners of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan copyright have been contemplating a lawsuit, and some have questioned the way Lost Girls features young teenagers and pre-teens engaged in sexual activity, frequently with family members. Meanwhile, Moore has also been in the comics-news headlines this year for refusing to accept any money for the movie version of V For Vendetta, furthering his reputation as a prickly iconoclast. Reached by phone in his Northampton, England home, Moore genially explained himself to The A.V. Club.
The A.V. Club: Given the pre-release controversy about Lost Girls, are you anxious about the response it's going to receive when it finally comes out?
Alan Moore: Well, Melinda and I have had 16 years to talk about this, and I think our position is pretty solid. If we're serious about this stuff, and we are, we have to be prepared to defend it. One of the reasons we started this was because we were sick of the approach to sex in the culture. It seemed to us unhealthy, unproductive, and unbeautiful. In countries like the U.S. and Great Britain, we exist in a wholly sexualized culture, where everything from cars to snack food are sold with a healthy slathering of sex to make them more commercially appealing. But if you're using sex to sell sneakers, then you're not just selling sneakers, you're selling sex as well, and you're contributing to the sexual temperature of society. You're going to get people who, unsurprisingly, become overheated in that kind of sexual environment, and if they attempt to assuage their desires by resorting to the widely available medium of pornography, they're going to have their moment of gratification, and then they're going to have a much longer period of self-loathing, disgust, shame and embarrassment. It's almost like a kind of a reverse Skinner-box experiment, where once the rat has pushed the lever and successfully received the food, then he gets the electric shock.
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 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.
AVC: After immersing yourself in erotica for 16 years, are you sick of sex?
AM: No, no. It's only during this last year that Melinda and I have been living together all the time. Normally we'd spend two or three days out of every week in each other's company, but we've only been living together for these last 18 months. We're hopefully going to get married later this year, if we can get the paperwork sorted out. I'd recommend to anybody working on their relationship that they should try embarking on a 16-year elaborate pornography together. I think they'll find it works wonders.
Melinda's and my relationship made Lost Girls a very different and much richer book then if Melinda and I hadn't been in a relationship. We were approaching the work with such diligence, and approaching our actual relationship with a great deal of diligence as well. It was a happy synthesis that the two tended to work well with each other. Because in order to do something like Lost Girls, from the word "go," you've really got to be completely frank with each other. That's the way that we started our relationship, a condition some relationships never arrive at. And I would say at the end of this 16-year run, I'm still every bit as interested in sex, and every bit as interested in the erotic in art. But I would probably never again attempt to create another work like Lost Girls. I think in the future, I'd prefer to take what I've learned from Lost Girls and follow that back into my other work. To include sex scenes alongside the adventure scenes and everyday-life scenes, as if they were all part of the same thing. Which of course they are. Sex is not discrete from the rest of our existence. We tend to have our sex scenes in uncomfortably close proximity to our everyday-life scenes, and our scenes of despair and torment.
AVC: How did Melinda Gebbie get involved with Lost Girls originally?
AM: I'd been an admirer of Melinda's work since the underground days, in the early '70s, when she was working with people like S. Clay Wilson and Spain Rodriguez and Robert Crumb. I think Neil Gaiman was instrumental in getting in touch with her and telling her what I wanted. She and I started talking about how we felt about erotica, pornography, and the comics medium. It was a subject we didn't think had been treated in the way we'd like to see it treated. Then I mentioned an idea I'd had, a kind of half-assed connection between flying in Peter Pan and Freud's comment that dreams of flying are sexual. I thought there might be something I could do with that, but I couldn't come up with anything beyond a smutty parody of Peter Pan. Then Melinda mentioned that in her earlier strips, she'd enjoyed working with stories that had three women. So these two ideas kind of collided, and I thought if Wendy from Peter Pan were one of three women, who would the other two be? Alice and Dorothy sprung to mind immediately. The story kind of suggested itself from there, in an excited rush of conversation.
The way that we worked on Lost Girls was actually different than the way I've worked on any other comic I've done. I'm known for turning out book-sized scripts with detailed written descriptions of each panel and all the dialogue and captions and sound effects. But Melinda had never worked with a scriptwriter before, so she looked at these enormous scripts I'd written for the first four or five episodes, and I think it crushed her spirit. She wasn't comfortable, and she suggested that maybe I could do thumbnails, which is something I haven't really done for other artists because I'm so lousy at drawing thumbnails. I have to write pages of explanation to tell them that this little blob down in the right-hand corner is actually the leading character's head and shoulders. But Melinda, since she was living up here, I could talk her through all the breakdowns. She'd take my rough thumbnails and a pep talk and would go and turn out these lovely pages. Then I would do the dialoguing after the artwork was done, so that I could have a look at the expression that Melinda brought to the work. I could fine-tune the dialogue for the images so everything was much more synchronized. Lost Girls probably marks the closest that I've worked with an artist on a comic, perhaps unsurprisingly. With the nature of the material, it more or less demands an intimate relationship between the creators. Not just intimate in the usual physical sense, but also intimate in a mental and creative sense.
to finish reading this interview, continue to http://www.avclub.com/content/node/51180
Interviewed by Noel MurrayAugust 2nd, 2006
Alan Moore, the author of Watchmen, V For Vendetta, and From Hell, now returns with Lost Girls, a three-volume hardcover graphic novel produced in collaboration with Melinda Gebbie, who began this project 16 years ago as Moore's artist-for-hire, and finished it as his fiancée. Lost Girls teams up three icons of children's literature—Alice from Alice In Wonderland, Wendy from Peter Pan, and Dorothy from The Wizard Of Oz—and re-tells their stories with the fantasy elements stripped away, replaced by real-world sexual experiences. Unsurprisingly, the book has stirred some controversy. Fans of the original characters have attacked Moore for turning them into porn stars, the owners of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan copyright have been contemplating a lawsuit, and some have questioned the way Lost Girls features young teenagers and pre-teens engaged in sexual activity, frequently with family members. Meanwhile, Moore has also been in the comics-news headlines this year for refusing to accept any money for the movie version of V For Vendetta, furthering his reputation as a prickly iconoclast. Reached by phone in his Northampton, England home, Moore genially explained himself to The A.V. Club.
The A.V. Club: Given the pre-release controversy about Lost Girls, are you anxious about the response it's going to receive when it finally comes out?
Alan Moore: Well, Melinda and I have had 16 years to talk about this, and I think our position is pretty solid. If we're serious about this stuff, and we are, we have to be prepared to defend it. One of the reasons we started this was because we were sick of the approach to sex in the culture. It seemed to us unhealthy, unproductive, and unbeautiful. In countries like the U.S. and Great Britain, we exist in a wholly sexualized culture, where everything from cars to snack food are sold with a healthy slathering of sex to make them more commercially appealing. But if you're using sex to sell sneakers, then you're not just selling sneakers, you're selling sex as well, and you're contributing to the sexual temperature of society. You're going to get people who, unsurprisingly, become overheated in that kind of sexual environment, and if they attempt to assuage their desires by resorting to the widely available medium of pornography, they're going to have their moment of gratification, and then they're going to have a much longer period of self-loathing, disgust, shame and embarrassment. It's almost like a kind of a reverse Skinner-box experiment, where once the rat has pushed the lever and successfully received the food, then he gets the electric shock.
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 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.
AVC: After immersing yourself in erotica for 16 years, are you sick of sex?
AM: No, no. It's only during this last year that Melinda and I have been living together all the time. Normally we'd spend two or three days out of every week in each other's company, but we've only been living together for these last 18 months. We're hopefully going to get married later this year, if we can get the paperwork sorted out. I'd recommend to anybody working on their relationship that they should try embarking on a 16-year elaborate pornography together. I think they'll find it works wonders.
Melinda's and my relationship made Lost Girls a very different and much richer book then if Melinda and I hadn't been in a relationship. We were approaching the work with such diligence, and approaching our actual relationship with a great deal of diligence as well. It was a happy synthesis that the two tended to work well with each other. Because in order to do something like Lost Girls, from the word "go," you've really got to be completely frank with each other. That's the way that we started our relationship, a condition some relationships never arrive at. And I would say at the end of this 16-year run, I'm still every bit as interested in sex, and every bit as interested in the erotic in art. But I would probably never again attempt to create another work like Lost Girls. I think in the future, I'd prefer to take what I've learned from Lost Girls and follow that back into my other work. To include sex scenes alongside the adventure scenes and everyday-life scenes, as if they were all part of the same thing. Which of course they are. Sex is not discrete from the rest of our existence. We tend to have our sex scenes in uncomfortably close proximity to our everyday-life scenes, and our scenes of despair and torment.
AVC: How did Melinda Gebbie get involved with Lost Girls originally?
AM: I'd been an admirer of Melinda's work since the underground days, in the early '70s, when she was working with people like S. Clay Wilson and Spain Rodriguez and Robert Crumb. I think Neil Gaiman was instrumental in getting in touch with her and telling her what I wanted. She and I started talking about how we felt about erotica, pornography, and the comics medium. It was a subject we didn't think had been treated in the way we'd like to see it treated. Then I mentioned an idea I'd had, a kind of half-assed connection between flying in Peter Pan and Freud's comment that dreams of flying are sexual. I thought there might be something I could do with that, but I couldn't come up with anything beyond a smutty parody of Peter Pan. Then Melinda mentioned that in her earlier strips, she'd enjoyed working with stories that had three women. So these two ideas kind of collided, and I thought if Wendy from Peter Pan were one of three women, who would the other two be? Alice and Dorothy sprung to mind immediately. The story kind of suggested itself from there, in an excited rush of conversation.
The way that we worked on Lost Girls was actually different than the way I've worked on any other comic I've done. I'm known for turning out book-sized scripts with detailed written descriptions of each panel and all the dialogue and captions and sound effects. But Melinda had never worked with a scriptwriter before, so she looked at these enormous scripts I'd written for the first four or five episodes, and I think it crushed her spirit. She wasn't comfortable, and she suggested that maybe I could do thumbnails, which is something I haven't really done for other artists because I'm so lousy at drawing thumbnails. I have to write pages of explanation to tell them that this little blob down in the right-hand corner is actually the leading character's head and shoulders. But Melinda, since she was living up here, I could talk her through all the breakdowns. She'd take my rough thumbnails and a pep talk and would go and turn out these lovely pages. Then I would do the dialoguing after the artwork was done, so that I could have a look at the expression that Melinda brought to the work. I could fine-tune the dialogue for the images so everything was much more synchronized. Lost Girls probably marks the closest that I've worked with an artist on a comic, perhaps unsurprisingly. With the nature of the material, it more or less demands an intimate relationship between the creators. Not just intimate in the usual physical sense, but also intimate in a mental and creative sense.
to finish reading this interview, continue to http://www.avclub.com/content/node/51180
