All of this leaves me with what Harper's editor Lewis Lapham once described as the "desperate innocence" of a true believer, willing to go any distance to sit near the feet of a near spiritual being. This is what "Watchmen" made of Moore in the eyes of comic fandom: the man who made comics that disapproving nonreaders enjoyed. An Alan Moore comic in hand earned you a bit of redemption.

Set in mid-1980s New York, "Watchmen" asks what would have happened to us if costumed heroes had appeared in reality around the same time they appeared in the American pop consciousness: the 1930s. It shows heroes getting old and losing faith in the public, against the backdrop of an imminent nuclear war. The series received startling acclaim in Time, Rolling Stone and the Nation. A headline in the Chicago Tribune declared it "a comic book as gripping as Dickens," but warned readers to "think twice before you show it to your kids."

Moore, 6-foot-2, with hair way past his shoulders and a beard that appears to reach his chest, arrives. Yes, he dresses completely in black and carries a walking stick in the shape of a snake. He has thick metal rings on all his fingers, but also the air of a rosy-cheeked English barrister back from the Continent, waving his snake in circles as he talks, a storyteller trying to lay out the places he has seen on the map of his imagination.

Over lunch in a basement pizza parlor, Moore says that his current endeavor -- "America's Best Comics" (ABC) -- came to him "almost mystically," after the 1998 collapse of Awesome Entertainment, the publisher of his project "Supreme." In thinking about what would come next, Moore opened up one of the notebooks in which he occasionally scribbles dialogue for his characters in longhand, and there he found a list of names.

Tom Strong. Promethea. Greyshirt. Jack B. Quick. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Top 10. He hadn't remembered writing these, but they were in his hand. And it seemed to him that the names themselves had a certain degree of resonance, that they wanted to reflect an earlier time in comics history, before Superman's creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, by accident really, changed America for good and forever.

Essence was what he was interested in here -- taking just the plain nub of what makes superheroes appealing and "fusing it with a progressive sensibility -- something that can be retrograde and avant-garde at the same time. So you get the best of what comics were, sort of distilled in some way to make the fuel for what comics will be."

"Not," he adds, "to sound too high flatulent about something that's just a crap superhero book."

Moore himself favors nonhero, small-press work to the dozens of books he receives each month in his "big box of shit" from DC Comics. He says he would prefer the diversity of comics in the 1950s, where one could find everything, from the most benign subjects -- cowboys and Martians and funny animals -- to the most morally aphasic characters, within the 24-page pamphlet. He would rather not write about superheroes, but he feels that he must do what he can to save the mainstream marketplace and, in so doing, embolden the only subject anyone in the mainstream has any interest in reading about.

In trying to pull the locomotive from peril, then, Moore has chosen to use all of his available hours to write and bring together a horde of artists giddy at the prospect of working with him. He produces five books, including "Tom Strong" and "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," in which Captain Nemo, Bram Stoker's Mina Murray, Allan Quatermain, Henry Jekyll and the Invisible Man team up to fight the forces of darkness at the end of the 19th century.

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