That's what writer Alan Moore ("V for Vendetta,"From Hell") and illustrator Melinda Gebbie have done with "Lost Girls," a three-volume graphic novel that refracts Dorothy's Oz, Alice's Wonderland and Wendy's Neverland through a prism of sadism and explicit, bisexual, pedophilic Edwardian pornography.
Perhaps it's not so provocative, considering the apparent appeal of costumes that put sexy adult spins on the tights and blue dresses that Dorothy and Alice made iconic. (Google "Dorothy" and "costume" or "Alice" and "costume" and see the scanty things that anyone could have seen strolling through Uptown on Halloween.)
The same impulses that turn our culture on when they are the basis of fantasies (see under: plaid skirts and pigtails) outrage us when they are the basis of court cases.
The distinction between what's allowable as fantasy and what's taboo as reality is one that is at the heart of "Lost Girls," at least for its creators. At one point they make their case by creating a book-within-a-book sequence wherein one character -- a fat, horny hotelier -- defends pornography and attacks middle-class values, recounting the story of an otherwise mainstream family's joyous and unashamed descent into incest, while joining Alice, Dorothy, Wendy and the hotel staff in an orgy.
"Fiction and fact: only madmen and magistrates cannot discriminate between them," he says, before tearing off on another tale, this time about a vicar and an altar boy.
The holy man abusing his churchly charges is a common enough real-life horror that it has spawned hundreds of jokes, and you know what Freud said about the serious implications of our jokes.
Make no mistake, Moore is using this well-worn scenario knowingly: Well, now that we've come this far, let's see how far we can take this thing ... and don't dare try to tell us that anything in this book is worse than what's in news reports on a weekly basis.
Moore has reportedly called the book "a pornography," but "Lost Girls" is a measure more high-minded and sophisticated than anything you will see on pay-on-demand TV channels.
Take for example a sequence of panels that dramatically contrasts the world-changing event of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand with the orgiastic celebrations going on at the Austrian hotel where Alice, Dorothy and Wendy ritualistically have their ways with each other. Days later the hotel will be abandoned by its vacationing guests and overrun by Prussian soldiers who sack the place, including Alice's beloved looking glass.
It's a pro-sex, antiwar metaphor that speaks of the death of Art Nouveau and other aesthetic achievements of the so-called "beautiful era," and symbolizes the end of the Edwardian period's relative cultural liberalism and the rise of fascism in Europe.
It's not common porn that aspires to thematic juxtapositions such as this, and "Lost Girls" is in some respects more "erotic" than pornographic, if the distinction means anything in a culture where porn is now more ubiquitous than erotic art.
It is page upon page of sometimes unsettling sexual scenarios, but punctuated by subtle moments of storytelling brilliance and a marvelous ear for period tone. It is illustrated in a soft-focus but explicit style that is as well crafted as its prose. It is assembled in a luxe, expensive, slipcased presentation that says: I'm not a pervert, I'm an aesthete with an appreciation for the sexual arts.
And it is, perhaps, provocative, if one is willing and still able to be provoked.
Eric Hanson • 612-673-7517 • ehanson@startribune.com