Land of the lust

SMUT SERIOUSLY… Moore and Melinda Gebbie add sex to classic children’s books.

Singularly eccentric and staggeringly original, English writer Alan Moore has challenged the world of comics with masterpieces like Watchmen, From Hell and V for Vendetta. He’s about to unleash his most audacious work yet: Lost Girls, a lavishly illustrated three-volume graphic novel that examines the passage from child to adult. The sexually explicit tale stars grown versions of three of literature’s best-known innocents: Wendy from Peter Pan, Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Dorothy from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Illustrated by Moore’s fiancée, Melinda Gebbie, it’s a heady, sweaty journey, complete with preteen lust, incest and exquisitely drawn nudes. TONY called the 52-year-old author at his Northampton, U.K., home to talk about sex, growing up and the cave in his basement.

Did you have any qualms about using these beloved characters?

If we had done it as a smutty joke, yes, I would have felt dreadful. But we found that the characters themselves emerged very strongly, and they seemed to us to be reasonable extrapolations of the kind of spirits or energies that those three characters originally had, projected into adulthood. It didn’t feel like a betrayal at all.

In the book, the sexual adventures of Wendy, Dorothy and Alice push them into a transitional, almost magical realm.

We all go into sex as children, and we all come out of it as not quite an adult, but no longer a child. When we go into that zone of our sexuality it is a peculiar place where all the things you knew before turn out not to be true, where all this unlikely new stuff suddenly starts to preoccupy you. It is a wonderland, full of delights and very scary places, and you will go through it just as the three protagonists of those children’s books went through their adventures, and you’ll come out the other side as something different. That’s the way we’ve chosen to interpret the story.

When you chose Melinda as the artist, were you involved romantically?

Not at all. It’s a wonderful love story. Love through pornography. Originally, I’d been a tremendous fan of her underground comics. Around 1989 we got in touch, and Melinda came up here a couple of weekends while we thrashed out the rough ideas. And over the course of all this, me and Melinda…found we got on very well. It became an intimate relationship, probably because it had to, dealing with this kind of material.

So it isn’t like working on this book was a strain on your relationship?

To a degree, our entire relationship grew out of this collaboration. The fact that we were in a relationship brought something to the book that would not otherwise have been there. I recommend it. Work upon an immense, bejeweled pornography together—this is my marriage advice!

You’ve been a practicing magician for 12 years.What impact does that have on your life?

It used to be a thing of frequent rituals where I would be going for some spectacular effect—talking to things that weren’t there, visiting other dimensions or whatever you prefer to call them. Because when you first get into magic and find you are getting some kind of result from it, it is very exciting. But I found after a while that I didn’t need to be constantly proving to myself that this stuff worked. Now it’s more general: It has more or less become my entire worldview.

I’ve heard that you have a cave in your basement.

Yeah. I had the basement excavated and it stayed like that for a few years. It did become this grotesque cave. But we’re going to have it converted to a spare library. It’s becoming less of a cave and more of a kind of sane person’s basement.

So this wasn’t a cave where you were able to practice black-magic rituals and so on?

When I’m practicing my actually very colorful rituals I prefer to do it in the comfort of my living room, which is a piece of occult arcana in itself. Although it’s not a black hole in the ground, it has got Tibetan skulls and magic wands and Enochian tablets and other impedimenta. You’ve got to give me some credit.

Lost Girls ($75) is out now from Top Shelf Productions.