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Robert Last
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Joined: 07 February 2006
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| Posted: 26 June 2006 at 1:30am | IP Logged | 1
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I think it was Bernie Wrightson who once said, while describing his own work how close horror and comedy are. If you push the envelope too far, that creature you've drawn evokes humour, not fear.
I suppose what I'm trying to put across with the above paragraph is that it's very easy to negate what you're trying to do or say in a story by pushing too many buttons. Do I think exploring awakening sexuality by using imaginary characters is ok? Yes. Do I think Moore is wrong to use established characters, and create pornography with them? Yes.
I'm afraid I'm not articulate enough to put across properly why I believe this is innapropriate use of the characters and ideas, but I hope you get what I mean.
As for Fables, I see why someone might see a connection, but having read most of the issues (the first 40 or so at least) all I can say is that the spirit and character of those creations is intact, and although some characters are adult, they still behave within the confines of their character and story. If anything, the structure of the world in Fables demands they do so, as the consequences of stepping over the line can be dire indeed.
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David Brunt
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| Posted: 26 June 2006 at 1:57am | IP Logged | 2
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When you reach issue 50 you might find something contentious in the 'Analogy' given for the relationship between Fable Town and the Homelands. Then again you may not.
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Dave Farabee
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| Posted: 26 June 2006 at 4:28am | IP Logged | 3
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Some reasons why I'll be reading LOST GIRLS...
First and foremost, I expect a good story. I've read enough Alan Moore works over the years to have the highest respect for his storytelling abilities, even in those works with which I have issues (THE KILLING JOKE comes to mind). Moore has very provocatively insisted on calling LOST GIRLS "pornography", but while I have no doubt whatsoever that it depicts many and varied sexual acts, interviews and reviews I've read on the book make it seem highly likely its explicitness is in service to story and theme and not the usual calling for porn: arousal and nothing else. As Gaiman's review put it:
If it failed for me, it was only as smut; the book, at least in large black and white photocopy form, was not a one-handed read. It was too heady, dense and strange to appreciate or to experience on a visceral level. (Your mileage may vary; porn is, after all, personal.)
As to why I'd be interested in erotica featuring fairy tale characters: I believe Moore has come up with a compelling reason for their use. To wit -
The actual reason why we were excited about using those three characters to tell a story about sex is because it is such a perfect metaphor for the way all of us, by the very nature of sex itself - when we enter into it, we are not mature. It doesn't matter what age we happen to enter into it, there is still a part of our maturation process that is incomplete until we have entered that peculiar realm. When we come out the other side of it, we may not be adults, but we're certainly not children anymore. I suspect that for many of us, the world of our first sexual encounters is a world every bit as strange and disorienting as Wonderland or Oz or Neverland. I suspect that we kind of find that all throughout our childhood, we had seen the world a certain way, and people's reactions and behaviors going according to certain rules. All of a sudden, when we are plunged into the world of sexuality, it is like we are living under the logic system of Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen - everything is kind of backwards, you have to run twice as fast just to stay where you are, nothing means quite the same thing, words that used to mean one thing now mean something completely different.
It struck me that all of those three stories would serve brilliantly as metaphors for that kind of strange, peculiar landscape that is the landscape of our earliest approach to sexuality.
Some might not find this as compelling as me. That's fine. But Moore's rationale makes it clear that the characters are core to the concept, putting to rest notions that he could have told the same story with invented characters. He surely could have used invented characters to tell a story about sexuality, but not a story that would resonate and yes, perhaps, disturb, as does one that taps into the mythology of established fairy tales. So to those suggesting Moore picked the characters deliberately to provoke, and that the story might not have garnered so much attention without them, I think you're right. And I don't think Moore would disagree.
Fairy tales have always been ripe with metaphor, many of them unpleasantly so. Anyone who's ever read the original Hans Christian Anderson LITTLE MERMAID has read a profoundly disturbing story - no deconstructive makeover needed. The Brothers Grimm version of LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD is easily open to mature interpretation as warning to innocent girls to beware the seductive "wolves" of the world (recall the scene where the wolf actually asks Red to get into bed with her). Fairy tales, especially the earliest ones, have always tapped into mature elements in serving up their moral lessons. With that in mind, I'm not only NOT offended by presenting fairy tale characters in an explicit way as a fable explicitly for adults, but I suspect they'll serve as especially potent symbols in conveying the message Moore wants to convey.
Other elements that interest me:
*Moore's choice of 1914 as the year the women meet, pitting their sexuality against a backdrop of The Great War. At least as far back as WATCHMEN, Moore has wielded irony as one of the key elements of his style, and the juxtaposition of an orgy with one of the most brutal events of the 20th century seems like incredibly fertile territory to that approach.
*The use of the first performance of Igor Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" as a pivotal event in the story. I don't know precisely how it figures in, but Moore's mention of it in and interview piqued my interest. Not exactly the usual porn soundtrack, eh?
*Moore's intent to remain true to the basic spirit of the characters involved: "...keeping Alice true to the quirky, curious child that Lewis Carroll represented; keeping Wendy true to the slightly repressed and unnecessarily grown up little girl that J.M. Barrie talked about; and the same with Dorothy - keep that same spirited sense of adventure."
*Melinda Gebbie's as collaborator. Not only does the art in all the excerpts I've seen look gorgeous, but the presence of a woman as collaborator suggests an ultimate dynamic far removed from mere titillation.
*And lastly, the positive reviews I've read have intrigued me. Nearly all have described the work as challenging, and while I have a great fondness for the "comfort food" adventure genres that dominate the medium, just at the moment, I want something that makes me think and maybe even makes me feel uncomfortable in the process. I don't know if I'm expecting the comic equivalent of LOLITA, but knowing Moore's writing, I expect at the bare minimum as high level of craft. PUBLISHERS WEELKLY called LOST GIRLS "beautiful, literary, and moving" - I like to think they're not so easily swayed by prurient interests as the so-called "kewl" crowd some folks think are the target audience for this work.
Do I have any reservations? Beyond the copyright issue, not really. The copyright issues do cast Moore himself in a somewhat dubious light, but there's some persuasiveness to his "side", as outlined here:
http://www.alia.org.au/publishing/incite/2004/12/copyright.h tml
I'll concede that Moore is on legally gray ground, but not so definitively in the wrong that it will weigh on my reading of the book. For me, LOST GIRLS will prove to be a stunning accomplishment or a fascinating misfire (or who knows, maybe even a miserable failure) on its own merits.
I'll be sure to let y'all know how it pans out in August. I'm droppin' 75 bucks on this thing, so hopefully my trust is well-founded.
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Dave Farabee
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| Posted: 26 June 2006 at 4:52am | IP Logged | 4
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Robert Last wrote:
| As for Fables, I see why someone might see a connection, but having read most of the issues (the first 40 or so at least) all I can say is that the spirit and character of those creations is intact, and although some characters are adult, they still behave within the confines of their character and story. |
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Was Prince Charming a womanizer in any classic fairy tales?
The Big Bad Wolf played as a tough guy with a heart of gold?
Goldilocks an insurrectionist who slept with the Little Bear?
And without revealing the identity of the Adversary, do you think there's anything to the story from which he originates that suggests him becoming a Hitler-like figure?
Let me tell ya, I love me some FABLES. I actually think it's the best comic on the market and has been for several years. But while it seems to have a "good heart", it absolutely skewers its source material at many times. Anyone who's following it has little claim to dismiss LOST GIRLS for perverting authorial intent.
Incidentally, I also suspect that there's a "good heart" beating beneath LOST GIRLS. I've noticed that quality in near everything Alan Moore has written, even with all the cynical baggage.
Edited by Dave Farabee on 26 June 2006 at 4:52am
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Michael Garve
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Joined: 26 June 2006
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| Posted: 26 June 2006 at 5:38am | IP Logged | 5
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John Byrne wrote:
| The "sense of values" at issue here is that Moore is using, inappropriately and without permission, someone else's property. Wendy Darling is owned by the Great Ormond Street Hospital. |
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Not entirely, no, she's not. The Great Ormond Street Hospital currently holds copyright on Peter Pan in the UK and the EU, and nowhere else. Those copyrights expire in 2007.
The Hospital has been granted some sort of special dispensation to receive royalties for publications and performances of the original work in the UK in perpetuity. However, even in the UK, all creative control and rights over derivative works expire next year.
In the US, Peter Pan passed into the public domain in 1987. The Hospital has claimed otherwise, but those claims have never been upheld in a court of law. As it stands now, Moore certainly has every reason to believe he is entitled to publish in the US immediately, and though the Hospital is expected to sue, their basis for doing so is far from clear.
However, in the somewhat unlikely event that the Hospital is able to block publication in the US, they will be powerless to stop publication in the UK or anywhere else in the EU after next year in any case. The Hospital's claims appear to have little merit, nor are they ultimately in any position to block publication for long. In the long term, the game is Moore's. He's deliberately courting controversy here, but he's not stupid.
All the same, in the event that legal troubles interrupt the printing run or cause other distribution problems, a first-printing copy of Lost Girls might end up fetching a great deal more than $75.00 as a collector's item.
Jim O'Neill wrote:
| No, it means he's taking J.M. Barrie's creation (for instance) and using her in ways that would have appalled her creator. Or do you think this is how J.M. would have "recreated" the adult Wendy? |
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J.M. Barrie's wishes are completely irrelevant for two major reasons:
First, and most obviously, he's long dead.
Second, creators have no right to expect any kind of deference to their wishes above and beyond copyright protections provided by the law, and, frankly, even those are completely excessive and in dire need of revision. Intellectual property law is, at best, a necessary evil, where we all agree to pretend that ideas can be owned in the mostly vain hope that in doing so we will create economic incentives for creativity. In practise, the costs (in terms of suppressed creativity and new content) generally outweigh the benefits of a such a situation, especially now that we're living in an age of essentially free mass reproduction and distribution where the practical utility provided by traditional distribution channels is fast approaching zero.
Fifteen years ago, Island Records nearly drove experimental sound collage artists/media pranksters Negativland into bankruptcy over copyright issues related to samples from a U2 song. Mark Hosler and Don Joyce of Negativland ended up interviewing The Edge from U2 for Mondo 2000 magazine, and in the course of their conversation they ended up cutting right to the core of the issue of the public domain:
Mark Hosler: The other feeling we had, which we were kinda talking about earlier with the Zoo TV tour, was we said: Look, a long time ago when artists were- artists are always reacting to their environment right? You're always doing something that's reacting to the world you're in, so what are the tools or the technology you had a few hundred years ago to do that? Well, maybe you had a paintbrush, you had a piano, a lute. You could interpret things that way, and the way we see it now, and it sounds like perhaps you agree, is that now the technology is simply different and now it happens that instead of just making a painting of something I can take a photograph, a video, I can make a xerox, I can make a sample...
Don Joyce: It's capturing...
Mark Hosler: ...And you can capture it, and our environment is- and it's something you're suggesting in the Zoo TV tour too- the environment is this media-saturated thing that we live in.
The Edge: Yes.
Mark Hosler: And to us it was like, on the one hand I know that U2 is a bunch of guys just trying to make some music, but at another level, U2 is part of the media environment we live in, you know, I hear your songs playing in the shopping mall in the background when I'm shopping, whether I want to or not.
The Edge: Yeah.
Mark Hosler: And so for us to ask permission to do something that's in response to the environment we're in, which is something McGuinness said to us very early on: "Oh, you should have asked us"- and we sort of felt from a business standpoint, that's one way- but from an artistic standpoint, we felt that No, we don't need to. This is just the world that we're in. (emphasis added)
Any ideas put out into the world become part of the fabric of the culture, which is appropriate enough, since that's where all ideas ultimately come from: other ideas which "creators" appropriated, or reacted against, or remixed, or recontextualized until they looked different enough from their points of inspiration that they were able to convince people they were new. Creativity, as they say, is merely disguising your sources.
Once "new" ideas are communicated, they go back into the culture and become part of the landscape of ideas. When you record a song, and a generation of young people grow up with it, fall in love to it, break up to it, etc., it's morally, if not legally, as much "their" song as it is the "property" of the person who recorded it. It's become a part of the world they live in, and a part of the way they think, and a part of the common reference bank of ideas we call "culture."
Mark Hosler hits this on the head in the last line I quoted above. The law may give someone certain rights, and it may make practical sense to deal with that situation realistically, but in artistic terms? In moral terms? Hell, no. How dare you presume to tell us how we should relate to our common cultural inheritance? How dare you dictate who can reference our common cultural touchstones, and how?
Wendy, Dorothy, and Alice are so deeply enmeshed in our common culture that it's insane and appalling for anyone to claim sole ownership of them. Morally, they belong to all of us, who grew up being read to sleep with their stories, whether the government chooses to recognize that or not. If someone wants to create new art that incorporates characters from our shared cultural heritage, and that new art resonates with readers, and people are moved, or excited, or outraged, or challenged by it, then all is as it damn well should be, and it behooves every decent person not to squash that process.
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John Byrne
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| Posted: 26 June 2006 at 5:47am | IP Logged | 6
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The Great Ormond Street Hospital currently holds
copyright on Peter Pan in the UK and the EU, and
nowhere else. Those copyrights expire in 2007.
****
I am happy to inform you you are wrong. Shame to
be such a dickweed in your first post, hmm?
http://www.gosh.org/about_us/peterpan/copyright.html
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Thanos Kollias
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| Posted: 26 June 2006 at 6:01am | IP Logged | 7
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Alica, Dorothy and Wendy are only present in the original books and plays and, on some level, in the material based directly on them. ANYTHING that strays away from the source material is irrelevant. The sad thing is that the internet can allow images form these books to flood our screens, against which no parental control system can provide with good enough filtering.
I think it will be a sad day when a young boy or girl innocently googles "Wendy" or "Alice in Wonderland" and ends up with porno depictions of the characters. It saddens me that some of you can't see that danger and ultimately choose to make this a subject of artistic expression/freedom/whatever. What Moore has done is in very, very bad taste and very insulting to the spirit of creators' visions.
Of course, I thought that a fat, married Peter Pan with children was a bad, bad idea (fanboy jerk-off moment).... And this was done by Spielberg whom I really like a lot.
Edited by Thanos Kollias on 26 June 2006 at 6:04am
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Thanos Kollias
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| Posted: 26 June 2006 at 6:12am | IP Logged | 8
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Oh, and a link about those who think this has nothing to do with pedophilia
http://www.tinynibbles.com/blogarchives/2006/05/exclusive_al an.html
I think it's prett obvious they return to the good, old stories and recite them a little bit differently.
Also, the art is way beyond bad!
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Deepak Ramani
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| Posted: 26 June 2006 at 6:18am | IP Logged | 9
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I understand that the GOSH thinks the US copyright expires in 2023, but others, including Disney, think the copyright on Peter Pan, at least in the US, expired in 1998:
http://www.alia.org.au/publishing/incite/2004/12/copyright.h tml
I got this link from a post that Neil Gaiman made at his journal:
http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2006/06/indisputedly-my-de ar-watson.html
I am not a lawyer, and I have no idea whether or not Peter Pan is in copyright, but there does seem to be an argument about it.
(I have to admit that I greatly enjoy seeing Disney arguing that somebody else's copyright has expired . . . .)
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Deepak Ramani
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| Posted: 26 June 2006 at 6:25am | IP Logged | 10
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One other point. The author of the article is an Australian law professor, and he makes clear that the Peter Pan copyright is expired in Australia. So, if all else fails, Lost Girls could be printed in Australia. I think this makes the entire copyright debate largely irrelevant, which is as it should be. Eventually the hospital's right to prevent artistic works using the Peter Pan characters will run out. At that time the only argument against such works is going to be that it's inappropriate to use the characters in this fashion. I think that should be the main argument now too. Arguing about the legal right to make the work only muddles the clarity of the argument that the work shouldn't be made, even with the law on one's side.
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Dave Farabee
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| Posted: 26 June 2006 at 6:28am | IP Logged | 11
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Thanos Kollias wrote:
| Oh, and a link about those who think this has nothing to do with pedophilia |
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I don't think there's anyone denying that acts of pedophilia occur in the book - Moore's spoken openly about it and reviewers have acknowledged it. The question is how it's presented. Like I noted a few pages back, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD has an act of rape as a central plot point...but it's not what you'd call pro-rape is it?
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Michael Garve
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| Posted: 26 June 2006 at 7:22am | IP Logged | 12
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John Byrne wrote:
| I am happy to inform you you are wrong. |
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I wouldn't be so happy, since you have proved nothing of the sort, as Deepak Ramani has pointed out, as have others throughout this thread. We all know what the Hospital's position on the subject is. However, everyone but you seems to understand that they're hardly an unbiased source for balanced coverage of the issue, and the legal situation is more complex than they are attempting to make it appear, and the fact that they claim that they've got the rights until 2023 doesn't make it so. I know you support the hospital's stance, but simply repeating it ad nauseum and insulting anyone who doesn't agree does not change the reality of the legal situation.
John Byrne wrote:
| Shame to be such a dickweed in your first post, hmm? |
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I welcome substantial responses to anything I've posted, but posting what amounts to a press release from one of the parties involved in the looming legal dispute and following it up with a personal insult is not a substantial response.
Thanos Kollias wrote:
| I think it will be a sad day when a young boy or girl innocently googles "Wendy" or "Alice in Wonderland" and ends up with porno depictions of the characters. It saddens me that some of you can't see that danger and ultimately choose to make this a subject of artistic expression/freedom/whatever. |
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Let's all acknowledge that none of us have read the work in question in its totality, so any of us or all of us on all sides may be jumping to unwarranted conclusions.
That said, what has come out so far seems to suggest that the work is, in some respects, an artistic inquiry into the process of sexual awakening and maturation, about the thrills and terrors of discovering and exploring one's own sexuality as a young person.
Personally, I don't think that's an issue that children necessarily need to be protected from, at least not with the degree of paranoia with which we seem to approach it, anyway. I don't think that it's a "danger," to use your word, that we need to be concerned about to such a degree that it trumps freedom of expression issues.
I believe that one of the reviews referred to a scene where the scene with the tornado sweeping Dorothy away in the Wizard of Oz is retold in such a way that it coincides with Dorothy's first experience with masturbation. I'm sure we can all see the play of metaphors and whatnot there, and we could argue about whether that's insightful or trite all day if we liked. However, I just don't see anything there that's likely to damage a child. It's just masturbation, and as the saying goes, there are two types of people in the world: people who masturbate, and people who lie. We all do it, generally from a very young age, and it's a healthy and normal part of life. I don't see what would be so terrible about the possibility of a child accidentally reading a depiction of it. I think most kids at some point in their childhoods come across a dirty picture or two, or read something that's a little ... advanced for them, and unless you're talking about an adult actively pushing age-inappropriate material on them, most kids are not damaged by that sort of thing.
Obviously, not everyone is going to see it that way, and that's fine, as long as they don't try to interfere with other adults who may want to read it.
Deepak Ramani wrote:
| (I have to admit that I greatly enjoy seeing Disney arguing that somebody else's copyright has expired . . . .) |
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Seriously!
Deepak Ramani wrote:
| At that time the only argument against such works is going to be that it's inappropriate to use the characters in this fashion. I think that should be the main argument now too. Arguing about the legal right to make the work only muddles the clarity of the argument that the work shouldn't be made, even with the law on one's side. |
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I agree that if you're going to make an argument against Lost Girls, the copyright argument is much weaker than the appropriateness/obscenity argument. However, while I don't know whether or not I'm personally going to buy it, I would strongly support the book being made available to those adults who are interested, and I will never in my life argue that a book shouldn't be written or a work of art, however offensive to some or even most, should not be produced.
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