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153 Moore: “We Wanted to Do Something Which Solved a Lot of the Abiding Problems That Pornography Has.” CHRIS MAUTNER / 2006 The Patriot-News (August 25, 2006): 15 pp. Reprinted by permission of Joan S. Clippinger , The Patriot-News (Harrisburg). Patriot-News columnist Chris Mautner spent almost two hours interviewing Lost Girls author Alan Moore, from his home in Northampton, England. Q: I’ll start with the obvious question first. How did the book come to be? How did it get started? A: Well, that is quite an obvious question. It’s got a lengthy answer. I suppose that it originally started with me having done a number of mainstream comic books in which I felt that if the character was going to be completely rounded, even if that was a character like Swamp Thing, then there should be a sexual dimension to the character. So this was something that I had done in a number of my comic works where it was appropriate. And I found myself thinking that it might be possible to actually do a comic narrative that was about nothing but sexuality. I mean, it seemed to me that if most of the comics that were on the market at that time seemed to be about nothing other than fighting then it should be possible to do a lengthy work that was actually about nothing other than sex. That was about as far as my thinking got for a number of years because it’s more difficult than it looks to come up with something that is actually erotic or pornographic and which does all the things that that sort of material is supposed to do but at the same time is intelligent enough to interest me in actually working on it. 154 alan moore: conversations So, I had drawn a number of blanks. Then, sometime about 1989, there was a magazine proposed over here that was, I believe, going to be called Lost Horizons of Shangri-La. There’s nothing of this since, so I presume it never came out, and it was “lost” somewhere. They had asked me to do an eight-page story for them. It was an erotic anthology. They had asked me to write an eight-page story for them. Unbeknownst to me, they had also asked Melinda Gebbie, who was then working in London on the fringes of the comic industry, but she wasn’t working in a day job as an artist. I think Neil Gaiman had stumbled across her, and he told me this, and I had been an admirer of Melinda’s work for a number of years since seeing her early California underground comics in the seventies and early eighties. So, I asked Neil if he could give her my phone number with an eye to collaborating with her upon this eight-page script for this proposed magazine. So Melinda came up and visited for a few weekends. And we just talked about what we wanted to do with an erotic story and, most importantly, what we didn’t want to do, which was that we didn’t want to do anything that was like the pornography that was prevalent around us at that time. We wanted to do something which solved a lot of the abiding problems that pornography has, in that, generally, it’s an ugly genre. Ugly in all sorts of ways. It can be aesthetically ugly; it can be morally ugly, politically ugly. So we actually wanted to kind of rethink the genre to a certain extent. And it took us a while, thrashing it out: a couple of weeks. And then two halfformed ideas seemed to collide. I’d had a vague idea that there might be some mileage in taking J. M. Barrie ’s Peter Pan and actually reworking it as a sexual narrative. I think this was based upon the fact that Sigmund Freud had made much of the fact that dreams of flying were dreams of sexual expression and there were, of course, a lot of flying scenes in Peter Pan. Which kind of sounds superficially clever but didn’t really go very far. It was difficult to see how that idea could turn into anything other than a kind of smutty parody of Peter Pan, which was not really what we were after. Melinda happened to mention that she always enjoyed in the past—when working on her own stories—working on narratives where there...

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