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[by Scott Thill]

[Previous Page: "At the end of it, when we human beings, as we frequently do, need some reassurance that there's actually some point to all of this pain and struggling, then we look back at the high points of our culture. We look back at Michelangelo We look back at the great artists, writers, humanitarians, composers and scientists. We don't look back and think, 'Hiroshima, now that was a high!'"]

Morphizm: The mirror is a fertile symbol, from Narcissus all the way to so-called reality TV. How did you use it, not just as a kinship metaphor for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland , but more generally as a comment on identity and selfhood?
AM: Again, it was a thing that came out of the original stories, but I soon saw that you could use a lot of things in the original three stories as powerful metaphors to talk about something rather important. I mean, it struck me that it would be technically quite a cold thing to open the whole of Lost Girls with a chapter reflected in a mirror. That mirror was, in Alice's narrative, and to a certain degree, a symbol for what was happening to the characters in the other narratives as well. It struck me that there must be ways to use the mirror, and one of the things I'm most pleased with is the penultimate chapter where the three girls are sexually performing in front of the mirror. In the mirror, you can see reflections of their younger selves, and there's a bit where Alice says "We are coming togerther." To me, that was one of the keys of the entire book, this reintegration where the three women are getting in touch with the girls that had been lost. The parts of them that had been lost in these neverlands of sex. So yeah, the mirror was very handy, and can be used to symbolize quite a lot of things.

Morphizm: Playing on the title, is there a sense that what is lost to these girls is the sexual underrcurrent of the narratives in which they live? So often, they are reduced to sexless characters, by Disney or whoever, when sex has everything to do, especially in the case of Lewis Carroll, with how they came to be culturally known in the first place.
AM: I wouldn't want to claim for a moment  that there was any sexual intention in any of the original books. But I would also like to say that yes, there is a lot of rich material in those books, and that they do provoke a sexual reading. I think that perhaps Wizard of Oz is the most innocent of the three of them. If L. Frank Baum was talking about anything, he was probably spinning some complex political allegory, the details of which are most likely remote and irrelevant to us today. With Alice, there is some slightly more sexual imagery creeping in there, and of course there has always been a question mark hanging over Lewis Carroll. And I don't really know how I feel about that. On the one hand, we have one camp saying that he just had a genuine emotional love of children, and as for the naked photographs of Alice Lidell, within the context of the time that could be seen as a perfectly innocent gesture. And there is another camp of children who argue that, even in the context of his time, it isn't a perfectly innocent gesture. I don't know which camp I side with; it's probably a moot point now. On balance, I would tend to think that Carroll was largely innocent; I think he was just a lonely man with a strange mind who didn't make friends easily. J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, of all the texts, the one that gave me the idea in the first place, is the most adult and the most knowing. It says some very surprising things, if you go back and read the unexpurgated version. There is one section of the original book that has one of the Lost Boys sleeping on a forest path, and a group of fairies coming home drunk from an orgy have to climb over him. That's in the Barrie original.

Morphizm: Wow. Not exactly common knowledge.
AM: Well, there are some stranger things as well. There is a little rumination about how strange the imaginations of children are, and I'm paraphrasing here: "Children are the strangest things. They can meet their dead father in the woods, and play a game with him, and later never tell a soul that it has happened." I mean, that's just creepy. You know? And of course at the end of Peter Pan, as we kind of reflected at the end of Wendy's narrative in Lost Girls, Wendy is a grown woman who has married and had a child. At the end of Peter Pan, she's shutting the nursery window because she doesn't want Peter Pan coming in and leading her child away in the way that he has led her away. That seems to me to speak of a very common parental reaction to sex. It says that, "Yes, it was alright for me to have sex at a precociously young age, but I certainly don't want my son or daughter doing that."

Morphizm: I've survived it, but I don't want them to experience it.
AM: That's it, yeah. And so we shut the nursery window to keep Peter Pan from getting in. So if any of those three narratives had a sexual component, Peter Pan probably was the one that was most overt and knowing. But like I said, I think that all three of them are fair game. Whether their authors ever intended them to have sexual metaphors or not, and it's probably most certainly not, then they're certainly fertile sources of sexual metaphor, including the central one of a wonderland. All of the three main heroines seem to enter into them at the end of childhood. It strikes me that it's a perfect metaphor find our first experience of sex. Prior to sex, and I'm not talking about age here, to a certain degree before you've had sex, you are technically immature. And that first sexual experience might not be until you're 35! So technically, you are a child until you've had that experience. And after that experience, you may not be an adult, but you're not a child anymore. So it strikes me that the stories of Alice, Dorothy and Wendy provide a brilliant metaphor for the worlds we all find ourselves plunged into when we first enter the sexual arena.

Morphizm: The brave new world.
AM: All of a sudden, we're in a world where all the rules and laws that we learned in our childhood don't apply anymore. People are talking a strange language where things don't mean quite what they appear to mean. It's a world that seems to be run by the Red Queen's rules: Everything is ass-backwards and you have to run really fast just to stay where you are. That to me seemed like the perfect metaphor at the heart of all three stories that would say something to every human being. Also, given that as you said earlier that there is this focus over here and in America on protecting children, and of course, of course, any form of coercive sex is wrong. Any form of nonconsensual sex, whether involves adults, children or animals, is wrong. I would go even further and say that any form on nonconsensual anything is wrong; it doesn't really matter whether it is sexual. I don't see what the big hang-up is over something just because it is sexual. Nonconsensual activity is always wrong. But at the same time, we've got a very conflicted way of looking at this. We have this gut-level reaction against pedophilia, and of course it's awful! Any kind of nonconsensual sex with adults or children is bad. But we do have a culture where the Spice Girls can make every nine-year-old in the land want to get a belly ring, dress in sexualized clothing, and sing about how they really, really, really want to "zig-a-zig-ha," when they -- and me, actually -- have no idea what "zig-a-zig-ha" really means. So we sexualize all of our nine-year-old girls without a second thought. It's OK for them to walk around with a T-shirt that says "Porn Star" on it, you know? And of course we don't mind Barely Legal magazine, because hey, all those models are over 18 -- at least they said they were! I mean, I know Traci Lords said she was as well, but let's forget about that. And hey, Pretty Baby with Brooke Shields, what a great movie that was. And do you remember Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver? We do actually have a culture that obsessed with sexualizing its youngest element. So when you've got the same culture demonizing these, I'm sure, very unpleasant people -- pedophiles who need to be getting treatment somewhere -- I can't help but think it's a smokescreen. If we can single out these clearly depraved individuals, then we don't have to think about what kind of messages we are sending in and taking out of society. And that's kind of convenient.

Morphizm: The worst is Disney, who have been fronting these sexless tales of girlhood like Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland for decades, but have also introduced the world to hypersexualized starlets like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Lindsay Lohan, all of whom were once working for the House of Mouse.
AM: This is it. I mean, in my own arena of comics, manga is all over it like a madwoman's shit. And this is not even manga as I used to understand the term, when it still meant something. Back when I first heard the term manga, which was about 25 years ago, it meant "comic strip" in Japanese, and that was all it meant. So excellent things like Lone Wolf and Cub were included under the rubric of manga. Nowadays, manga is only recognizable in that all of its female characters, and most of its male characters, have all got huge eyes, all look about thirteen, and all seem to have been infected what is known amusingly in Japan as "rorycom." There's a bit of code in that one. Apparently, "rorycom" is short for "Lolita complex," which is why you can have vending machines selling schoolgirl panties in Japan. This seems to be accepted as a visual shorthand all over the comics medium, and nothing is said about it. It's a fetishization of younger and younger children  trying to be anything else but pornography, or prurient. I mean, we included sex with characters who are part of the sexual landscape. I mean, things like incest. Freud said that sublimated incest is at the root of all sexual desire. Now, I've got a lot of problems with Freud, not the least of which was that he was a coked-up child molester. So he may have been projecting his own feelings onto the whole of humanity, but he's still the most respected and revered sexual theorist. No one has really replaced him yet, and I think that's a great shame, but it remains that he is a figure who overshadows the debate upon sexuality. So we felt more or less honor bound to include the whole spectrum of sexuality, even those parts that are clearly socially unacceptable. I think that puts a terrible barriers between people. It probably draws them into some very dark spaces, like we were saying at the beginning about the number of child murder and abuse cases in our sexually repressive countries. You have to start to wonder if the reason for this sexual repression is to keep it a bit dirty, is to keep that frisson of, "Ooh, this is naughty, but nice." There's a perversity in that.

Morphizm: It's the transgression.
AM: Yeah, and it's a dangerous one. Because it leads to real people being really hurt and really messed up.

Morphizm: And it takes a long time to unlearn all that shit.
AM: Absolutely, and one of the only tools you can use to make your way through that maze is pornography. But pornography is such a degraded genre with absolutely no standards. It doesn't serve any function other than to make people feel wretched, ashamed, and alone. It reinforces our loneliness and our wretched human misery. And it shouldn't.

Morphizm: Which perhaps offers up a distinction between pornography and erotica? The former estranges you from society and sex, while the latter perhaps connects you to it?
AM: Well, actually I've been insistent on calling Lost Girls pornography right from the start, mainly because I think that the difference between the two is the state of the person reading it -- and also because erotica pertains to Eros. And yeah, sex that has love involved is probably going to be a lot better than sex that does not have it involved. However, I can imagine that most of us can remember one or two sexual fumblings that had nothing to do with love, but rather complete and honest physical lust, and which were very satisfying and enjoyable for all parties concerned. Sex and love aren't necessarily synonymous; sure, it's better if they're together, but it's not the end of the world if they're not. Sex can just be being friendly with somebody. So technically that's what erotica means. Pornography literally means drawings and writings of prostitutes, but that's a bit harsh and judgmental. The basic sense of it is drawings and writings about wantons. And that'll do me for Lost Girls.

Morphizm: Same with homosexuality, which has been with us forever, though some in today's culture seem to think that it's a recent phenomenon.
AM: I've heard people say that when they were little that they never had child abuse or incest. Actually, they did, and a lot more of it. It's just that they never used to talk about it. I'm researching stuff to do with my own family for my next book, and we've got all got some strange skeletons in our closets.

Morphizm: And you don't have to go back far to find them either.
AM: No, you don't. I suppose that, yeah, Melinda's from the California underground and I'm an English anarchist, so I suppose I'd be lying if I said we didn't want to throw the cat in amongst the pigeons to a certain extent. But that is not the main reason we did this. This  is a genuine and passionate expression of something we very deeply believe.

Morphizm: Everything you do seems to have that honest passion and thorough research behind it. When you go into something, you go in deep.
AM: It's the intent. But you wouldn't want to be in a lift with me. I'd probably be holding onto your lapels and screaming in your face.

Morphizm: Hey man, I'd rather have that than some sucker trying to bullshit me to my face.
AM: I suppose so. At least it would get your attention, wouldn't it?

Morphizm: What was it like to work with Melinda, your partner, on this project for so long?
AM: Well, we're getting married, if that answers your question!

Morphizm: You are?
AM: Yeah!

Morphizm: Congratulations, man!
AM: Sometime later this year. We've had lots of things coming up that have put it back, but sometime later this year we're getting married. We love each other more than we did at the beginning of the project. Of course, there have been ups and downs with it. If we had been raising a child together over these last 16 years, I'm sure we would have had disagreements over some elements of Lost Girls. But there haven't been very many, and nothing that we couldn't resolve. I think we have a singular vision.

Morphizm: How did the collaboration work? Was it weird going back and forth from your own intimate lives to the intimate lives of your characters?
AM: It's been remarkably easy. It could have been a lot more problematic but actually I'd recommend it, especially as a way of building in your relationship something that both partners can contribute to. And you'll have something to show for it in the end. I've never collaborated with a partner before. In fact, I've had very few collaborations with women, full stop. And that probably has shamefully more to do with the comics industry, even today, than to do with a lack of wanting to work with women. No, I'd say that it has been incredibly enriching for our relationship, and the fact that we're in a relationship has probably enriched Lost Girls in its turn. I think there is probably an emotional depth and maturity that has gone into Lost Girls. There's nothing we can't talk about, and in my book that's the sign of a healthy relationship.

Morphizm: I think getting married is a nice way to the close the book on the Lost Girls project for you and Melinda.
AM: Yeah, and it shows that, despite all this talk about sex and pornography, we're a couple of old traditionalists at heart. I should reassure middle America.

September 19, 2006