Playboy.com: How did you come up with the idea to use these three characters that have been ingrained in American and British pop culture for generations?

Moore: I'd been thinking for years all through my early mainstream career about the possibility of producing an extended piece of comic strip narrative that was entirely about sex rather than the odd issue focused upon sex that I maybe worked into Swamp Thing. I wanted to see if it was possible to do an extended narrative that was just about sex, which didn't have a swamp monster in it and which didn't need to have action in the sense of constant violence. It occurred to me that since there are plenty of stories that are based around constant violence, it should be possible to do a story based around constant sex. Although that was an honorable idea, I didn't really get very far with it. I couldn't think of a sexual story that didn't sound sort of smutty or as if it was just using sex as a way of spicing up an otherwise dull story.

We talked about what we did want to do with pornography and more importantly what we didn't want to do in pornography. We cast around for an idea. There were a couple of false starts. I probably mentioned my fairly lame Peter Pan idea. Melinda said that she had always been interested in stories that had three women in the main dramatic role; three women as protagonists. These two ideas kind of crossbred and I suppose that the chain of thought went from, "Well, if Wendy from Peter Pan was one of these three women, then who would the other two women be." Alice and Dorothy are just obvious.

Playboy.com: Were you concerned about how to handle these characters, given their popularity?

Moore: We have been very concerned right from the beginning that these characters be treated with respect, because we have nothing but respect for them and their authors. We certainly wouldn't have wanted to travesty them, which is one of the reasons it took us 17 years to do it. We were very careful. We were aware that we were presenting pornography in a new form and a new light. And we were also aware that we were treading, hopefully carefully, upon a lot of people's childhood dreams. The one thing we didn't want to do was a smutty parody of those three books because that sort of thing has been done rather a lot before. I know that Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland and almost certainly The Wizard of Oz have had similar treatment. That's just part of the thinking of the porno industry. If Saving Private Ryan comes out, then you bring out Shaving Ryan's Privates. This in itself is not new and we didn't want to do just a smutty pornographic parody of these beloved figures. That wouldn't have been doing them any service and it wouldn't have been doing pornography any service.

Playboy.com: How did you organize the story so that all three characters would intertwine?

Moore: These three characters are all young women who are taken out of their familiar reality and dropped into worlds where nothing makes sense in the conventional way. It struck us that it was a blindingly perfect metaphor for the way that most people feel when they first enter the territory of sex and sexuality, at whatever age they have their first encounter with sexuality. To some degree that is such a marker post signaling the end of one stage of our development, the end of our childhood if you like, and the beginning of what comes after. Almost by definition all of us are children when we enter into sexuality -- even if we're 35. We are in a different state than the state that we shall be in after contact with sexuality, and I'm sure that to all of us, it's an incredibly confusing time. The very words that we'd been using all of our lives up to then suddenly mean different things. People's behavior becomes strange, bizarre and unreadable. Everybody seems to be working according to the logic of the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland. All the rules are completely different. It becomes a strange, topsy-turvy world until we start to get some sort of grip upon its rules and how it works. At that point we probably become adults or something approaching adults.