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Never let it be said that comic-book auteur Alan Moore rests on his laurels. Throughout an illustrious career, he's masterminded a number of masterpieces -- including Watchmen, which (though 20 years old) still deserves its title as the Citizen Kane of graphic novels, and Promethea, a heady tour of ancient mystical traditions wrapped in a pulp/sci-fi package.

Now the writer sets out -- accompanied by his fiancée, artist Melinda Gebbie -- on his most ambitious project to date: to reclaim "pornography" as a genre worthy of literary respect. More than a decade in the making, the controversial Lost Girls -- a blend of erotica, fantasy and historical fiction -- gets a handsome, slip-cased, coffee-table-tome treatment.

While Moore proudly proclaims Girls' content as pornographic, its three-volume hardcover form lends a more sophisticated air. Few porn products contain this many cultural references. And Gebbie's masterful artwork draws on a variety of stylistic influences, from Henri Matisse to Maxfield Parrish. She often renders her characters in soft lines that contrast their adult behavior. Bottom line: If this is porn, it's the thinking person's porn.

Moore takes three characters from classic fantasy literature and mixes them together in this world, divorced from their fantasy lands: inquisitive Alice of Wonderland, now an aging but still lusty lesbian dowager; the beloved Dorothy of Oz, a traveling single woman whose ignorant hick diction belies her worldly ways; and Wendy, once a Darling who dallied with Peter Pan, now a repressed British housewife. With World War I looming, the three women explore omnisexual possibilities on the grounds of hotel Himmelgarten (Heaven's Garden), a sybaritic paradise in Austria. It's not hard to imagine legions of kid-lit fans outraged about a tale that mixes "innocent" childhood heroines in repeated rounds of strap-on shtupping.

Despite a thousand deft touches, Lost Girls fails to match the heights of Moore's best past achievements. There's an undeniable power in his conceit of sexual awakenings being translated into the fantasy tales of our youth, but the cornucopia presented here feels unbalanced. Still, there's no denying that Moore and Gebbie have crafted a provocative, supremely confident work of art. The price tag might be hefty but, then again, December's coming. You could have yourself a risqué little Christmas.