ENGLAND —In discussions of sexually explicit depictions, visual or otherwise, a question often posed in some form or another is “Where and how does one draw the line between ‘art’ and ‘pornography?’”According to Alan Moore, the English graphic novelist who created such notable titles as Watchmen, From Hell and V for Vendetta, a more salient question might be “Why draw the line at all?”

In reference to his latest work, a collaboration between Moore and artist Melinda Gebbie entitled The Lost Girls, Moore told USA Today that “Our position is this is art and pornography.”

“What we intended with The Lost Girls was to sever the connection between pornography and embarrassment, and between the pornographic imagination and the real world,” Moore added. “These are two very distinctive spaces.”

The Lost Girls is a three-volume, hardcover graphic novel that envisions a fantasy world in which three well-known literary heroines, Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, Wendy from Peter Pan and Alice from Through the Looking Glass, have “grown up and are ready to guide us again, this time through the realms of our sexual awakening and fulfillment,” to put it in the terms used on the website for Top Shelf Productions, distributors of The Lost Girls and other Moore titles.

While Moore’s fans are waiting anxiously for the new work to be made readily available, some critics have complained that Moore has transformed beloved literary characters into cartoon porn stars, and the owners of the copyright to Peter Pan reportedly have been considering filing a lawsuit against Moore.

Controversy is nothing new for Moore, who recently told AVClub.com that he and Gebbie, who in addition to being his collaborator is also Moore’s fiancé, “have had 16 years to talk about this and I think our position is pretty solid.”

“If we’re serious about this stuff, and we are, we have to be prepared to defend it,” Moore said in the interview conducted August 2. “One of the reasons we started this was because we were sick of the approach to sex in the culture. It seemed to us unhealthy, unproductive, and unbeautiful.”

In both interviews, Moore talks of his desire to reexamine certain cultural assumptions about sex, and the attempt to “sever” connections drawn between sexual thought and remorse or guilt stemming from those thoughts.

“I think if you were to sever that connection between arousal and shame, you might actually come up with something liberating and socially useful,” Moore told AVClub.com “It might be healthier for us, and lead to a situation such as they enjoy in Holland, Denmark, or Spain, where they have pornography all over the place – quite hardcore pornography – but they do not have anywhere the incidence of sex crimes. Particularly not the sex crimes against children that we suffer from in Britain, and that I believe you suffer from in the United States.”

Don’t mistake Moore for a fan of pornography, however, at least not in its modern form.

Moore said that in working on The Lost Girls, he looked at a “relatively small amount of contemporary erotica and found that it didn’t really appeal,” and added that there’s “a lot of emotional human baggage that comes with anything that involves real models, real actors.”

“You’re too aware that this is somebody real, and that they might not have actually wanted to do this for a living,” said Moore. “There’s an air of disappointment or sadness that hangs over the material. So I tended to gravitate toward literary and artistic pornography of the Victorian and Edwardian period, simply because it’s a lot better.”

Moore’s latest work is bound to draw some criticism even from those who might not find much contemporary pornography objectionable, in that the graphic novel also depicts underage characters engaged in sex acts, including acts of incest with family members.

Moore said that, aside from the obvious fact that the characters are made-up and not real people, “we have a culture over here – and I’m sure in America as well – where we go in for an awful lot of pedophilic titillation,” and that he felt it important that the work deal with even the most difficult and socially unacceptable forms of sexual imagery and conduct.

“We have to put our hands up and admit to our complicity in the sexual problems we have,” Moore told AVClub.com.

While Moore said he doesn’t agree with Sigmund Freud (whom Moore refers to as a “child-fixated cokehead”) that all sex is “sublimated incest,” Freud’s assertion “does suggest that incest is one of the big players in the theater of our desires.”

In the end, Moore said, he and Gebbie determined that the book was bound to offend some people, regardless of how they approached the themes and depictions, and that such objections were ultimately irrelevant.

“Inevitably, there will be people, I’m sure, who will be offended by one thing or another,” said Moore, “but we really couldn’t pay any attention to that.”

The Lost Girls is available to order through Top Shelf at http://www.topshelfcomix.com/index.php as well as through Amazon.com.

The USA Today feature on Moore can be found here:
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2006-08-29-moore_x.htm

The full AVClub.com interview with Moore is available here: http://www.avclub.com/content/node/51180/