It’s an old interview (2006), but if you missed it the first time around, you’ll nevertheless want to check out this conversation between Alan Moore and Paul Gravett on Lost Girls:
You and Melinda must have discussed how frank and explicit to make Lost Girls, and how to make it arousing without being clichéd or sensationalist. What were those discussions like?
There were an awful lot of complex discussions between me and Melinda over the sixteen years that it’s taken us to put the book together. Every aspect of it was discussed over and over again. Some of the scenes, perhaps at the beginning of the book, when we were thinking of things that would be coming up later, we wondered if they might be too strong or might cross some aesthetic line. But as we progressed with the book and especially as I saw how Melinda’s art was working out, in that it seemed to be able to imbue even the most potentially grotesque scene with a kind of charm, beauty, warmth and a sensual, human atmosphere that made it into something different. There was that inevitable balancing act in both the pictures and the words, probably more in the words, between how do you make this arousing and artistic at the same time? If people are appreciating it artistically, isn’t there a danger that they won’t be appreciating it erotically? If we’ve got it right for even a few of the readers, that will be pretty good. I think it would be impossible to strike that balance exactly for the whole of the readership. In a very good review that Neil Gaiman gave to Lost Girls in Publishers’ Weekly, he said that for his own tastes, it was perhaps a bit too strange and heady for him to respond to on a visceral level. But as he acknowledged, pornography is one of those things that is very much a matter of personal taste. We hope we’ve been as universal as possible. We tried to find something personally arousing in every scene, otherwise that would have been faking it to a degree. In the same way that when I’m writing a comedy scene, I like to actually laugh at it. Or if I’m writing a tragic and moving scene, I like to have tears in my eyes while I’m doing it. So, we had to be responding ourselves to the material in Lost Girls, but at the same time we didn’t want it just to be a mirror of our sexual tastes. We wanted to create something potentially appealing to people of whatever gender or sexuality.
