The women are grown-up versions of Wendy from Peter Pan, Alice from Alice in Wonderland, and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. As the recently published three volume epic progresses and the women get to know each other in ways most biblical, it becomes clear Wendy, Alice and Dorothy aren't the only ones who have come of age.
The depiction of sex in comics has also matured.
"The way in which those three women enter into the world of sexuality is a perfect metaphor for how any human being does," offers Moore (whose long list of credits includes V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) from his Northampton, England home.
"All of us, in a sense, are plucked out of the pre-sexual world of childhood and taken to a very strange place where the rules are suddenly different, where it's a strange, exciting, frightening, unfathomable landscape that's every bit as weird as those of Oz or Wonderland or Neverland, and full of creatures and characters every bit as colorful."
It's hardly the same vision of human sexuality that informs the lowbrow comic book series Anal Intruders from Uranus. But maybe the two have more in common than might first appear -- for instance, the hardcover Lost Girls and the relatively cheaply printed Anal Intruders induce the same frisson of naughtiness that comes from seeing explicit sex depicted in a medium long regarded as the domain of children.
In fact, comics were exploiting carnality long before a planetary explosion sent Superman rocketing through space to a Midwestern farm. Depression-era audiences ate up the Tijuana Bibles, which featured popular figures of the day, from Cary Grant to John Dillinger to Popeye and Blondie, engaging in cartoon carnality. "Cheerfully pornographic and downright illegal" is how American comic artist Art Spiegelman describes these poorly reproduced pamphlets in an article for www.salon.com.
But part of the appeal of the crudely drawn and written strips, Spiegelman notes, "lies in their peculiar combination of debauchery and innocence... They seem to marvel at the very idea of sex."
It's easy to imagine Hugh Hefner as being among the Tijuana Bibles' readers. A failed cartoonist himself, the Playboy publisher filled his magazine with sex-filled gag strips, included the long-running serial "Little Annie Fanny." Written and illustrated by two Mad Magazine alumni, Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder, the strip revolved around a combination of lasciviousness and innocence as personified by its impossibly buxom and equally naïve heroine.
With the emergence of the underground, artists like Robert Williams, S. Clay Wilson, and Robert Crumb transformed the comic book medium into a taboo-breaking playground for their unrestrained ids. These pioneers didn't so much "marvel at the idea of sex" as deconstruct it for their own twisted ends. Suddenly, readers who had grown up on Batman and Donald Duck had the option of flipping through books about the sexual adventures of the Checkered Demon and Fritz the Cat.
Perhaps because of their kid-friendly image, comics have attracted more than their fair share of attention from censors and authority figures. In 1954, Dr. Fredric Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent, an inflammatory tract against sex and violence in crime, science fiction and horror comics of the day. The book led to a Congressional inquiry and the establishment of the Comics Code Authority.
Crumb's "Joe Blow" strip, about an incestuous S&M family orgy, was ruled obscene in 1969 by a New York State judge. More recently, a Florida court came to the same conclusion about artist Mike Diana's 1993 Boiled Angel comic. And Little Sister's, a Vancouver bookstore, has been fighting censorship battles with Canada Customs for, in part, the right to import explicit gay sex-themed comics.
But legal battles haven't stopped publishers. Fantagraphics, the Seattle-based company responsible for launching major talents like Daniel Clowes (Ghost World), Jamie Hernandez (Love and Rockets), and Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan), realized early on that black-and-white comics about twentysomething angst alone weren't going to pay the bills.