Book-A-Day #139 (12/2): Lost Girls, Book 3

This post has sat, completely empty, for two days while I tried to figure out what to say, and I still don't know.

I don't think Lost Girls is entirely successful, but I have a suspicion that it couldn't be entirely successful -- Moore wanted to write something simultaneously arousing and thought-provoking, and those two aims fight against each other. It's a noble experiment, though; an attempt to push back the barriers of what art can do.

The sex isn't quite as transgressive as some reviews had led me to believe, or maybe I've already been too desensitized by things like Ghastly's Ghastly Comic and Sexy Losers -- in any case, if you're on the Internet and a geekish person of my generation, you probably won't come across anything new. (Now, that's an unfortunate turn of phrase, but what the hell...I'll leave it in.)

I'm a bit more conflicted by Melinda Gebbie's art, which has problems with faces regularly. She's not aiming for a strictly realistic style, true, but she also doesn't seem to be in control of the art for too much of the book.

All in all, it's far too expensive for what it is -- almost certainly to ensure a minimum of legal trouble -- and primarily of interest to Moore completists and connoisseurs of Victorian porn.

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