To read what was never written: the licentiousness of history in Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls

Abstract

Lost Girls by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie (2006. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf Productions) incorporates a variety of both historical and fictional sources into its sexually explicit narrative of three women recounting their troubled pasts. Many of these sources are represented through adaptation and pastiche. This article examines Moore and Gebbie’s strategy of mimicking rather than merely alluding to the intertexts that shape the narrative of Lost Girls. Further, since many of their sources are showcased through the metafictional technique of mise en abyme, I argue that the mimicry of the comic draws attention to the dangers involved in processes of interpretation. The reader of Lost Girls is self-reflexively interpellated by the comic as a reader of history, adaptation and pornography, and as such is prompted to address a series of related distinctions that often shape processes of value-assessment: between the factual and the fictional, the authentic and the forged, and the literary and the obscene.