I wonder though why he uses Alice Wendy and Dorothy the way he is doing if he doesn't like his characters/stories made into something they are not.

I grow tired of Alan Moore.

I wonder though why he uses Alice Wendy and Dorothy the way he is doing if he doesn't like his characters/stories made into something they are not.

DRE: But also people have been putting these girls into sexually charged stories probably since soon after the books were originally released.

AM: That is quite possible. The original germ of the idea was one that I’d had a couple of decades ago with relation to Sigmund Freud’s comments about how dreams of flying were expressions of sex. There were flying sequences in Peter Pan so I wondered if you could do a sexual decoding of something like Peter Pan. But I couldn’t think of how to do it without it becoming a smutty parody. I think that is what most of the things that you’re talking about have probably turned out to be. I wasn’t sure of how to avoid that because the world certainly didn’t need another comic strip pointing out how sexy Tinkerbell looked in the Disney version of Peter Pan. I know that the late, great Wally Wood certainly got a lot of mileage out of that erotic imagery. We’ve got the greatest of reverence for those three authors and those three books so we didn’t want to do anything that would actually travesty the characters. I know that’s probably going to sound strange given that we’re talking about a pornographic book that involves Dorothy, Alice and Wendy. But I think we have tried to approach each of these characters with absolute love and sympathy. At the trial of Alice for example, it does still retain a lot of that quirky thinking, strange intelligence and curiosity that is in Lewis Carroll’s Alice. I think treating the characters with respect, even in their most undignified moments which all of us have, is what elevates it above the mere saucy parodies, which are perfectly worthwhile in their own terms, but that wasn’t quite what we were going for.

DRE: Lost Girls fits in very well with many of the other books you’ve done. Most superhero comic books feed off of what has come in the past. What you’re doing with these characters in Lost Girls doesn’t seem dissimilar from when you deconstructed characters such as Swamp Thing and Marvelman. Was it a similar thought process?

AM: When I was dealing superhero characters or licensed superhero characters, that other people had created but I’d been given there was a set of problems in redefining them. When it came to approaching characters from the wider world of literature, that was a far different proposition because there is a world of difference. No disrespect to Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson’s Swamp Thing, but there was a world of difference between redefining Swamp Thing and redefining Lewis Carroll’s Alice. What’s the worst that can happen if you mess up your revival of Swamp Thing? You’ll just join the legion of other people who’ve done exactly the same thing and outside of comics no one is bothered by that. Whereas when you’ve got somebody like Alice or Wendy or Dorothy which are characters beloved by generations of readers the literate world over so there’s much more at risk. If you mess up characters such as those, it’s a much bigger disgrace than if your revival of Superman doesn’t go according to plan or whatever. I think that it was probably working on the Lost Girls characters that gave me the confidence to attempt something like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen which in many ways grew out of it. It was, “hey the act of taking fictional characters for the purposes of pornography seems to be working out marvelously” and I think somewhere along the line I thought, “hey, you could do an adventure book along the same premise.” I think that led to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. But it was Lost Girls where I found myself having to go back and read the original works to try and decode them and see how that could fit into the new narrative that I was putting together. It was very painstaking.

On V For Vendetta:

DRE: A few years ago I read that you were a fan of The Sopranos.

AM: I was. I don’t know where I was going with that one, really. That one betrayed me and let me down.

DRE: They let us all down.

AM: I started off with hope in my heart regarding The Sopranos and I was saying lots of things about its Shakespearean qualities. That was when I still thought that it was going to end with series five, which was what they had originally promised. I thought, “Well, this means that it won’t just be a soap opera then. That it will be a something that has a beginning, middle and end. A proper dramatic structure. When it was announced that because the show was doing so well they were going to stick another season on it, that was when I stopped watching it. I think that was providing a pattern, which an awful lot of very promising American drama series have tended to follow. You get the impression that there isn’t an end in sight because they’re waiting to see how well it does. They’ve come up with a vehicle that could be extended, potentially forever and they’re making it up as they go along. The fascinating elements seem to be forgotten by the writer a couple of weeks later if they’re ever referred to again. It doesn’t have a satisfying dramatic shape. What I am enjoying now, which avoids all these problems is HBO’s The Wire.

DRE: I haven’t gotten into it yet. I do hear that it is very good.

AM: It’s very good because it’s restrained. It’s only talking about one specific case but it goes into incredible detail. I was even more impressed when I found out that the very convincing Baltimore black street gangs that were present in the first series were actors. I was proud and amazed when I found out that a good number of them are actually from England. There’s some very good writing and George Pelecanos is one of the writers and he is certainly the best of the modern American crime writers. He’s certainly more stylish and probably has more range than a number of the others. They’re good in their way but they don’t quite have the range that he has. It’s a lot tighter and things do get resolved. Of course I could be horribly disappointed by the third season and reviling it in a year’s time, but I hope not.

Then he got dragged into a plagerism trial for League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, mostly based on elements that were *added* by Hollywood.