All but the most worldly of readers will likely be astonished by how graphic Lost Girls is. As the tale unspools, Moore takes his characters into ever-more-elaborate pageants of pornography, from group sex to homosexuality and even, perhaps most troubling, incest and child sex. Yet this is ultimately non-exploitative porn with a soul, steeped in literary tradition, hearkening back to the legendary (and still shocking) work of the Marquis de Sade. Moore stands firmly on the belief that a fiction is a fiction, and cannot be held complicit for events in reality. "Pornographies are the enchanted parklands where the most secret and vulnerable of all our many selves can safely play," one character says. Lost Girls is id run amok, unapologetic.

Moore's work has grown in complexity and layers since his more mainstream material – his prose novel Voice of The Fire is almost Joycean in its cycling themes and references. Ditto his recent comic series Promethea, which moved from standard superheroine action into something quite magical and immense. Lost Girls is another step in the odyssey of this literary genius – a word I do not use lightly.

Moore gets us to think about the very nature of pornography. The very word itself has become a negative thing, largely because so much porn is hateful or merely artless. Yet by applying the full bore of his considerable talents upon the art of procreation, Moore reminds us that sex can be art. Very little porn out there is art these days, but once upon a time, erotic fiction was a distinct, credible genre. Lost Girls is Alan Moore's most revolutionary work, designed to smash assumptions, crash barricades.

In a remarkable three-part interview at the website Comic Book Resources with writer Adi Tantimedh, Moore lays bare some of his motivations for what will be seen by some as a red flag in the culture wars:

"Whatever urges there are out there are in our sexual imagination. And it seems to me that is a thing we fail to explore at our peril, if we allow shadowy, unexpected corners of it to remain where it is and never look inside them, and we end up with pretty much the type of society we've got now, where there is a fanatic outcry at anything suggestive involving a child where there is complete apathy at the number of children who are blown up every day in the world's war zones. Yeah, they only had their limbs blown off, but they haven't been touched sexually. That is something that is worth looking at."

Much of Moore's work involves a critical transformative event that breaks the border between worlds, such as the genocidal concentration camp that creates his "V" in V For Vendetta, or the murders of Jack the Ripper seen as a kind of invocation for the 20th century in From Hell. In Lost Girls, the telling of sexual histories by his girls is a chance for them to escape old hurts, embrace old pains and enjoy their sexuality unashamed. Wendy, from Peter Pan, is a tightly wound Victorian prude when we first see her, but gradually opens to embrace her lusty past with Moore's sexaholic Pan. Alice went "through the looking glass" to a terrible world where she was used and abused by others, only finally emerging with her own self-identity and pleasures. It certainly helps reading Lost Girls to be familiar with Oz, Pan and Alice, but even if you haven't read the original books many of their broad storylines are still familiar to us all.