Current music:

Pet Shop Boys, "The Sodom and Gomorrah Show"

John Byrne: If you've bought Alan Moore's Lost Girls, you're an asshole.
So. Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's Lost Girls, FTNITK, is a work of comics pornography (their choice of word) some sixteen years in the making. Top Shelf Comics is releasing the three-volume, slipcased complete edition later this summer. August, to be exact.

Already, I'm getting sick of the wank[*] over this thing, which has pretty much been up and down the comics blogosphere for the last month or so, but which seems to be reaching a fever pitch as publication draws nearer.

There are a couple of major angles to the fapping, which I'll try to sum up here. First is that it's about Wendy from Peter Pan, Alice from Alice in Wonderland, and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz meeting as adults at an Austrian hotel just before WWI breaks out, where they talk about sex, remember sexual events in their lives, and have sex. Second is that some of said erotic flashbacks involve scenes of the characters as adolescents under 18. Third is that the Great Ormond Street Hospital, which holds the British copyright to Peter Pan, is, as you might imagine, in a twist.

All of these elements and more are covered in this discussion on John Byrne's forum, in which, among lots of other things, you will find this:

Dave Farabee: Got my copy on order. Looking forward to it more than any other comic in quite some time.

John Byrne: Then you are a complete asshole.

Good times.

(Full disclosure: By Byrne's assessment, I too am a "complete asshole". I ordered my signed and numbered copy from Top Shelf almost exactly a year ago. Yes, I am something of a Moore fangirl.)


[*] I also feel compelled to add that anyone engaging in literal wank over this book had better have a sturdy bedside lectern. The volumes, by all account, are quite weighty and not exactly one-handed reading.