Allan Haverholm » review

Review: Lost Girls

Allan Haverholm — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 18:13:43 +0000

3 years after my old site crashed, I’ve managed to dig out the blog posts from the debris of the database. This is one:

Which isn’t so much a review as a towel being thrown -

I’ve tried and I’ve tried to write this review, but I just haven’t been able to gather the enthusiasm for it. The fact remains that as much as I want to like Moore and Gebbie’s Lost Girls, it seems to fall short of the expectations mounted by the pre-release controversy and massive coverage. The book has all the makings of a (in)decent Moore romp, and I openly admit to being touched in the right places (metaphorically) by the erotic pornographic material – somehow, the two parts are at odds, though. It’s like two people attempting to have sex with their backs turned to each other, which gives an oddly fitting picture of the reading experience.

It will take a sturdier reader or a more hardened porn fiend than me to identify which element gets in the way of the other, but there is a persistently unsatisfying feeling of “Goddammit, I was this close – !” in reading Lost Girls’ alternating takes of retelling the classic children’s books and the main characters engaging in rollicking threesomes. A good-humoured tease is fine and well, as is retardation, but what do I get for reading through 330 pages of it? A bomb crater with a dismembered penis next to it? In some ways I liked the Hyde/Invisible Man sex scene from League of Extraordinary Gentlemen better.

That was sarcasm; I don’t want to paint Lost Girls as a horrible turnoff. As mentioned above, there are genuine thrills of either kind to be had. However, the hype leading up to the publication of the book(s) was partly concerned with Moore and Gebbie’s aim to produce a) a pornographic work of literature and b) porn that isn’t degrading or obtuse. In my opinion, they only succeed in the latter – but one out of two isn’t half bad, really. The attention that Lost Girls garnered prior to its collected release may have been hyperbolic when it came to the use of established characters, but the critique for openly displaying imaginative, sexual intercourse actually just showed that in the 21st century there are still people among us who are afraid of sex. Moore’s the pity.

Sorry ’bout that one. I don’t have any conclusions to this, other than a faint hope that I’ll like the LoEG: Black Dossier more. And an encouragement to Top Shelf not to use the same Photoshop texture on the dustjackets of all three books next time? It cheapens the look on a quality publication.

Mix Tape on Chili Com Carne

Allan Haverholm — Thu, 07 May 2009 20:30:49 +0000

Mix Tape has recently been reviewed on Portuguese comics site Chili com carne. The article is witten by Marcos F., who I chatted up on the last night of SPX Stockholm.

I’ll post a translation of the text when I’m on the laptop again

1910

Allan Haverholm — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 06:41:53 +0000

During the Stockholm SPX this weekend I got hold of the latest League of Extraordinary Gentlemen book, Century: 1910, habitual Alan Moore oniomaniac that I am.

Upon first reading, I am somewhat underwhelmed, even if the artist and author are visibly having a ball with the contrafact, pre-war period piece.

This doesn’t detract from the fact that Moore and O’Neill are probably the best collaborative team working in comics right now. However, this being the first of three books under the Century header, there are many plot lines left hanging by the last page.

1910 further investigates some of the vast continuity that Moore and O’Neill mine from pulp literature, and I won’t pretend to catch even 10 per cent of the references to different fictional events or characters.

Many of the references I did get were (disappointingly) pointing right back to other parts of Moore’s œuvre: most obviously the Threepenny Opera by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, from which the author lifted the Black Freighter motif in Watchmen.

Weil and Brecht’s “opera” serves as a skeleton for the main plot, Moore fitting his own players into several of the parts. Mack the Knife becomes a latter-day Jack the Ripper and the delusions of poor Pirate Jenny is turned into the very real prospect of a quite different Jenny.

Even a twice fictionalized Aleister Crowley makes an appearance, or manifestation if you will, and I’m quite sure that’s the esteemed Iain Sinclair appearing as the Prisoner of London. Sinclair is thanked in the credits, anyway.

Crowley has played a major role in Moore’s magical thinking, as well as that of most Western dabblers in magic, and has appeared personally in at least From Hell and Promethea. Other Crowley/Moore connections may elude me at the moments.

Sinclair’s epic poems about London, and specifically the Whitechapel murders, were source material for From Hell, and Moore has on several occasions praised him for his visionary transtemporal writings that precede Moore’s own magic manifestations like The Birth Caul or Snakes and Ladders by decades.

If the Brecht/Weill seems somewhat dominantly out of place, it is likely because Moore is using large quotations from the lyrics as characters burst into singing, with notations circling the balloons to make sure the reader gets the point.

It’s not as bad as it may sound, taking into consideration the overall solidity of the book. Still, it is such an incongruently mixed media that it lessens the impact of Pirate Jenny’s revenge fantasy come to life.

As opulent as Threepenny Opera can be, it does not come across at max effect in this treatment, and it represents an uncommon miscalculation of the author’s tools of the trade on Moore’s part.

A thing that has naturally faded since the first two collections of LoEG is of course the Jules Vernean steampunk technology displayed as early as the fist pages of vol. one.

Sure, there is still weird science in abundance but one might expect it to be a bit more advanced by the early twentieth century. Of course, that is more dictated by the pulp works of the time than by logical progression.

As has been the case since vol. two, the things that do point onward and out from the familiar tropes are mostly contained in the text piece at the end.

A palaeolithic man presents to a woman, Bio (probably a reference I don’t get) the shattered remains of an obsidian stele. Originally of the dimensions 2x4x9, I’d hazard.

And to some delight for those like me, who are sad to see the Victorian elements of the first two volumes disappear on the horizon, the same text piece also features Captain Universe, a hint that in due time Moore and O’Neill will perform the slightly askew LoEG parlor magic on the superhero canon.

All in all a good read but so full of unanswered questions that it can’t be properly reviewed until the Century cycle has run its course.

Much like that other work of pop literary cross reference, Warren Ellis’ and John Cassaday’s Planetary, previous volumes of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen have been notoriously, chronically late for publication.

Hopefully the publishers of this edition have made sure to buffer enough material to ascertain a more or less steady publication schedule!