Speaking of Alice in Wonderland, I read Alan Moore's Lost Girls recently. That's a graphic novel (and really, we need a better word for that, it's so unwieldy). Alan Moore wrote Swamp Thing and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but Lost Girls is slightly different.
It focuses on a time, just before the first World War, in an Austrian hotel. There, Dorothy Gale (of The Wizard of Oz), Wendy Potter (formerly Darling, of Peter Pan) and Alice Fairchild (of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass) meet, and compare stories. Each of the three books mentioned is re-imagined as a discovery of budding sexuality. So yes, it's essentially Western hentai.
Incidentally, am I the only person who, when discussing graphic novels, has the urge to call them mangas? I know that's incorrect, but it's so much easier to say.
What's fascinating about it is how beautiful it is. It could be called art. Alan Moore's actually on record as saying that, if they'd send it was art, people would say "no, that's just porn". Whereas, if they call it porn, people say "no, it's art".
It's extremely beautiful, well done, imaginative pornography, with a lot of literary references (like a lot of Moore's work). Oddly, I didn't find much of it erotic. It's a bit like the way nudity isn't really considered a sexual thing in Sweden. For a lot of the book, sex was desexualised because there was so damn much of it. It was more interesting to see how Moore had reinterpreted the events of the books to be about sex. I especially liked the way he changed the meanings of the things the flowers said in Through the Looking Glass without changing a single word ("at least she's the right colour").
You get a lot more out of it if you've read the books, and it doesn't destroy them. I absolutely love Peter Pan, and I'm able to think of them separately. It doesn't bother me like a bad film adaptation would, probably because it's not an adaptation - more fanfiction.
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