Dirty Words: New Zealand Library Will Stock Pornographic Comic Book By Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie

For Al Goldstein, publisher of Screw, the self-proclaimed “World’s Greatest Newspaper,” anything was a fair target for his sarcastic barbs, with a couple of caveats. Goldstein, a man who loved only two things more than sex, food and litigation, drew the line at bestiality and pedophilia. Even the Lard and Masturbator had a moral line he wouldn’t cross. 

English comic-book scribe Alan Moore, famous as the author of “Watchmen,” “V for Vendetta” and “From Hell,” among many others, crossed that line with his wife, artist Melinda Gebbie, on their collaboration “Lost Girls.” Most recently published in its entirety by Top Shelf Publications in 2006, "Lost Girls" is a pornographic comic book that imagines the underaged sex lives of three famous children’s book heroines: Dorothy Gale of “The Wizard of Oz,” Alice Fairchild from “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and Wendy Darling of “Peter Pan.”

The book is pornographic by design. “That was one of the main reasons we did ‘Lost Girls,’” Moore said in a 2006 interview with MrSkin.com. “There was no pornography around that we found terribly readable.” While Moore and Gebbie may have been working to create a new pornography, one not patented solely for heterosexual men, they touched on taboo that nearly 10 years after its publication is still creating controversy. 

The newest chapter in the ongoing saga of “Lost Girls” is set in the Auckland City Libraries in New Zealand, which declined to add the book to its collection, fearing prosecution under the country’s child pornography laws. According to a recent posting by the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, a non-profit organization dedicated to the protection of the First Amendment rights of the comics art form, New Zealand cartoonist Dylan Horrocks requested that Auckland City Libraries purchase a copy of “Lost Girls,” to which the library responded that “we have been advised by the Office of Film and Literature Classification that we may be at risk of prosecution if we made the book available to customers.”

That fear of prosecution, fear of even submitting the material through the proper channels to determine its eligibility, is paramount to self-censorship by the library and sends a chilling message to creators and readers alike. Happily, the library did finally seek a rating for the book and were given the appropriate R18, allowing “Lost Girls” to be purchased by the library without fear of prosecution and circulated restrictedly to adults only. The censorship office’s decision is surprisingly nuanced and is reprinted below.

Lost Girls is a challenging work that contains problematic material. However, the book has been widely acclaimed for its literary and artistic significance, and its call for the freedom of the sexual imagination. The book has a serious purpose: author and artist intend it as “good” pornography that re-asserts pornography’s potential as art and therefore, its socio-political possibilities as an antidote to repression and violence. It is likely that most readers will experience some discomfort at images and text that appear to challenge strong social taboos. However, the publication as a whole does not promote or support, or tend to promote or support, any of the activities shown.

The book is clearly intended for adult readers. There is a consensus amongst the public of New Zealand that children and young people should not be exposed to explicit sexual material intended for adults until they reach a level of maturity and experience that would allow them to cope with such material. In particular, young readers should not be exposed to images and text that they would be likely to find extremely shocking and disturbing. The availability of ‘Lost Girls’ is therefore restricted to adults. Given how explicitly sexual the book is, the classification does not greatly interfere with the right to freedom of expression set out in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990. In light of the book’s intended adult readership, the decision is a reasonable and justified limitation on the freedom of expression.

Considering how much trouble their content elicits, Moore and Gebbie say the subject matter of their book was accidental. “Originally I had a half-assed idea—before I hooked up with Melinda as an artist—that it might be possible to take a story like ‘Peter Pan’ and interpret it sexually,” Moore told MrSkin.com.

“Sigmund Freud said that dreams of flying are dreams of sexual expression. There's a lot of flying in ‘Peter Pan.’ That's about as far as I thought, as pathetic as it sounds, and I couldn't really see where to take it that wouldn't have ended up with a smutty parody of Peter Pan, of which there are probably several existing already. That wasn't what I wanted to do.

“We just did a sexual reading of the three books. I don't think there were necessarily conscious sexual elements in them, but some of the images, they're fair game. It's a fair thing to interpret those symbols and see where they take you.”

Click here to purchase a copy of "Lost Girls"