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| Cover of Lost Girls book 2 by Alan Moore |
Score (out of 5 Capes)
My Review
In this, the middle volume of Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's stunning and controversial Lost Girls books, we no longer need to meet and catch up with our main characters. Volume one introduced us to Alice and her affection for mirrors and looking glasses, Dorothy with her midwestern American upbringing, and Wendy in her loveless marriage and sexual repression. Freed from the setup details, our creators can dive fully into the heart of the tales they have to tell.
The overall effect is more sex and nudity but a less compelling read than volume one. Still definitely for Mature readers, only.
Let's take a look at the ten short stories in this volume first.
The first story, titled A Caucus Race and a Long Tale, is framed as a letter written by Wendy's husband to an associate. With clever double-entendres aplenty, both in word and in image, the story is a sequence of couplings, a new pair on each subsequent page: Starting with two male hotel staffers posing for the manager's erotic painting project; one of them then enjoys a maid in a closet; she then is fiddled with by Alice; who then gets it on with Dorothy; she, in turn, beds Bauer; who then masturbates while watching Wendy in the sauna; she returns to her room where her husband fantasizes some dark things while watching her from across the room; he finally takes a bath, and masturbates while flipping through the manager's in-room book of paintings, and the circle is complete.
In Shaking and Waking, Alice first dominates and humiliates before finally affectionately seducing Wendy. This is an artistic accomplishment with the unfolding events told and pictured in stacked panel, perfectly paralleled by a tall, narrow single panel per page stepping through each of the infamous "seven deadly sins." Word and picture work hand in hand more purely and compellingly in this chapter than in any of the others.
Contrarywise then follows this same artistic layout - stacked panels on the left, telling the unfolding present, paralleled by a single page-height panel to the right, a water-colour retelling of Dorian Gray. As in the preceding chapter, Moore weaves the two stories together with skill and verve; as Mister Potter learns some things about pleasure and pain from Mister Bauer, so, too, Dorian Gray has his own education. Gebbie again rises to the occasion, rendering this challenging tale with grace and care.
The Straw Man returns our three heroines to sharing their stories with one another. Dorothy regales her audience with the birth of her love of pretty shoes - a parental bribe for leaving her home alone during a tornado storm. Thus, shod in her sparkly new pumps, and bolstered in her confidence, she promptly seduces the slow-witted hired hand for a fling in the barn. It is a sweet coupling, one that, in processing it after, awakens her to new and exciting possibilities down the road.
This tale also launches a new artistic element. As the ladies share their fond memories and coming-of-age tales, Gebbie interrupts the flow of the tales with a single, dreamy, full-page poster of the tale. Six in all, two for each of the women. Beautiful, erotic works of art.
Wendy goes next, in The Island Come True. This time, instead of Peter coming to her chambers, she and her younger brothers seek him out in the park. Interrupting an encounter with Annabel, they are nearly discovered by a suspicious, lurking adult. The visuals return to the layout and structure we saw in volume one for Wendy's memories, with a silhouetted upper banner over three vertical and full-colour panels - Wendy's visually distinct pattern with Gebbie's careful touches.
Alice gets two chapters in a row for her unfolding tale of her flowering youth. In The Garden of Live Flowers, she recalls the sexual escapades she and her classmates got into at their all-girls boarding school, whether with other students or with a certain teacher - Miss Regent, in a rich nod to the Red Queen in the original source material. Gebbie then runs with this motif, sprinkling several clever clues throughout her visuals.
Following completion of her schooling, Alice is then hired by her former teacher and the sexual encounters quickly take a more twisted turn, first with bondage and then increasingly risky methods and places of their couplings. All told in an appropriately titled chapter, A Mad Tea Party.
Dorothy's turn telling a memory comes next, in The Cowardly Lion. In perhaps the sweetest tale of the entire collection, she seduces a timid farmhand, only to produce an awakening, a coming-of-age in him. His confidence and love blossoms into life, but not for her. The new respect and courage she sparked in him launches him into a world of deeper and more meaningful relationships with other women.
In Wendy's final tale of this volume, Peter Breaks Through, the mysterious adult of her previous chapter returns with his own evil designs. The Hook to Peter's Pan, he interrupts the young lovers with his own gratification, leaving Wendy with a lesson in the darker and more disgusting side of her newfound sexuality.
The tenth and final tale, Snicker-Snack, overlays a romantic threesome outing with larger political events. Echoes of the power and costs of sexuality and freedoms, threaded so well through the earlier tales, all come together in this closing chapter. In his writing, Moore swings for the fences but only manages a simple base-hit. He cannot quite land this ambitious merging of the many themes he has laid out before us. It is the most forced and heavy-handed of the chapters.
Fortunately, there is one more volume in this collection, so he will have more opportunities.
In all, this is another breathtaking collection of erotic fiction and art. The themes are woven so intelligently into the threads taken from the source material - Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and the Wizard of Oz. The visuals continue to dazzle with their innovative layouts and compelling use of colour and space.
It cannot quite live up to the heights of volume one, unfortunately. The complexity of the plot doesn't quite gel into a unified whole; and the erotic imagery becomes reductive, repetitive and stiff on several occasions. Still, an amazing collection of stories.
What I loved
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| A typical oval panel framing another memory from Alice's story |
The artistic commitment to form, with all of the tales that focus on Alice's remembrances framed in oval panels, reminiscent of a parlour mirror looking glass. Even as her past reflections turn increasingly disturbing, from schoolgirl larks and explorations to power dynamic imbalances and manipulations behind the increasingly dangerous assaults, the pattern never breaks, never cracks. Metaphorical reflections abound, and any artistic constraint caused by the lack of corners in these panels affect Gebbie and her creations not in the least.
What I didn't love
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| Stamp-like image of the archduke |
As with volume one, so in this second volume the weakest story is the final one. The visual artistry remains very strong, with the upper two-thirds of each page portraying the ongoing explorations and awakenings of our heroines in bursts of colour and highly stylized jungle imagery, with the bottom third a starker and darker parallel story of the assassination that would launch a world war. Gebbie does her best to salvage this chapter.
But as in volume one, Moore's story becomes overburdened with his artistic ambitions. An already narratively heavy book slips even farther into over-extended text. At the same time, the parallels between the two sides of the split narrative - the women and their afternoon dalliances set against an historical political assassination - falls flat and fails to do full justice to either side of the line.
Related Reviews
Lost Girls Book One - Older Children
Lost Girls Book Three (coming soon)
Quick Reference Details
Writers: Alan Moore
Artists: Melinda Gebbie
Published By: Top Shelf
Published When: Aug 26, 2006
Parental Rating: Mature (X)
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