AVC: The incest scenes in Lost Girls are reminiscent of two things: Victorian erotica, which frequently has cousins discovering each other's bodies and then moving on to their brothers and sisters and so on, and R. Crumb's story "Joe Blow." Were those similarities intentional?
AM: Both played a considerable part in Lost Girls, though probably the Victorian erotica played a bigger part than the estimable Robert Crumb. I looked at a relatively small amount of contemporary erotica and found that it didn't really appeal. None of the filmed or photographic material did anything for me, because there's such a lot of emotional human baggage that comes with anything that involves real models, real actors. You're too aware that this is somebody real, and that they might not have actually wanted to do this for a living. There's an air of disappointment or sadness that hangs over the material. So I tended to gravitate toward literary and artistic pornography of the Victorian and Edwardian period, simply because it's a lot better. It was a kind of golden age of porn. There were some very cruel and unpleasant pieces of writing, but at the same time, there were some surprisingly liberal and progressive pieces as well. The stories all seemed to take place in a kind of porno-topia, where characters in the middle of an orgy would be likely to deliver a lecture on sexual etiquette, about considering the feelings of one's partner, and how gentlemen should always defer to ladies. A lot of surprisingly enlightened views for this notorious and repressed Victorian period.
Now, Robert Crumb was an influence in a different way. Crumb was an influence simply because in my eyes and in Melinda's eyes, he's an impassable giant in the field of erotica. I mean, he was doing this 40 years ago. He just didn't care. And he's one of the few people of his era that has progressed throughout his lengthy career. Last year, we had a Crumb exhibition over here in England, and one Britain's leading liberal newspapers, The Guardian, devoted a big feature to it in its supplement every day for a whole week, and included reproductions of sections of "Joe Blow." And this is a national newspaper. So I wonder if we're doing anything that shocking in Lost Girls, when Crumb set the benchmark 40 years ago. If you're going to be dealing with erotica, you want to do it as frankly and directly and full-on as the way Crumb handled it.
AVC: Like a lot of your work, Lost Girls contains a lot of layers, in that it's about pornography, children's stories, and the loss of innocence that accompanies wartime. Would it be accurate to say that there's also some commentary about class privilege as well, since these women really only get to enjoy their sexual adventures because they have the money to do so?
AM: Certainly. All three characters are from different class backgrounds. You've got Alice, who is a very disenchanted member of the English upper class. You've got Wendy, who is very much a part of the hidebound and repressed English middle-class. And you've got Dorothy, who's from a rural blue-collar background. It's probably not one of the overwhelming themes in the book. It probably takes second place to the war and things like that. But at the same time, it is an important theme, particularly in the Wendy chapter. In J.M. Barrie's original book, you get the sense of class difference between very prim and proper Wendy and the rascally Lost Boys, who are rough and wild and essentially working-class. We come to the same end of our narrative as Barrie did, with Wendy grown up and married and with a child. And shutting the nursery window, so that none of the influences that came into her bedroom window and took her off into the night can ever do the same to her son. She's shutting the window against sex and shadows and the working class.
AVC: Speaking of Peter Pan, what's the status of the Great Ormond Street Hospital's copyright complaints?
AM: I don't know how much of a fuss that actually is. They expressed some concerns, but I'm not entirely sure why. There's always a chance that I might have something wrong, but if I understand it correctly, Barrie gifted them with royalties to the stage performances of Peter Pan, and I believe different circumstances apply to the book, which is already in the public domain in America, and will be in the public domain in England by next year. I personally have never seen the play Peter Pan, or read it. I did go over the book extensively when we were putting Lost Girls together. I tend to think this is a bit of a storm in a teacup. Not to condescend or overlook Great Ormond Street Hospital, and I mean, me and Melinda and [Top Shelf publisher] Chris Staros have got no problems with giving them a royalty or something. It's a children's hospital, you know? Who's going to say no? But I think they seem to be making a bit more of it than I'd expected from people who've been gifted by a fantasy writer. It seemed a bit odd that they should take on so vociferously. Especially when we actually never used the words "Peter Pan" or "Captain Hook" or even "Wendy Darling" anywhere in the book. Obviously, it's based upon those characters. But it's just as obviously not the same Peter Pan and Wendy Darling that J.M. Barrie wrote about. And as far as I know, Great Ormond Street had not seen any of Lost Girls or read any of it when they decided it wasn't the kind the thing they wished to be associated with.
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