What's appealing about Tom Strong is precisely how unrealistic he is, how very little attempt there is to link him to the drudgery of daily life. Little if any concern is given to the fact that Tom is 100 years old and looks 39, or to the fact that, when called upon, he will be sent back into time and travel to Venus. Moreover, Tom Strong acts not out of a desire to feed his ego or a pathological need to hurt but out of what Plato, in his "Republic," deemed "justice": each person in a society performing the role to which he is most suited.

"He's got a fantastic visual imagination, and no comic book writer ever tried to communicate that to an artist before," says longtime Moore collaborator Rick Veitch. "What most comic book writers did was give you the most simplified, bare-bones description of an act that was supposed to take place on a panel, like 'Superman fights Bizzaro,' [whereas] Alan goes into the motivations of all the characters while they're doing that. He's setting up tiny little images, telling you, 'Oh yeah, there's a picture on the wall back there of Bizzaro when he's a young kid.' He's tracing it in all these different levels -- and some artists can't handle that."

"I'm not interested so much in whether they're clever or profound," Moore says of his comics. "If they happen to be occasionally, fine. But I'm mainly concerned with whether they're fresh or not. It's just been kind of stale -- 'For Christ's sake, will somebody open a window?' -- for the comics industry for 10 years. I just wanted a bit of fresh air."

After lunch Moore and I walk around the streets of Northampton. He seems out of place here, though he has never really been anywhere else. Born here in 1953, he was raised in a neighborhood with houses from the 19th century, owned and rented out by the Town Council. The maternal grandmother with whom he and his family lived had no indoor toilet, while his other grandmother had indoor plumbing, all right, but no electric light.

"Looking back on it," he says, "it sounds like I'm describing something out of Dickens. I mean, I'm talking 1955, but 1955 in England. I've seen 'Happy Days' on television. Maybe the American '50s were like that, but that wasn't what the British '50s were like. It was all sort of monochrome, and it was all indoors."

The escapes Moore found were all in the form of imaginative forces -- in mythology, first, with the children's versions of the Greek and Norse legends, the children's Robin Hood and Hiawatha. There were comics, of course, but these were British comics, works that depicted the travails of uniformed boys in public school. Black and white, they focused mainly on jokes about headmasters and corporal punishment, and appeared to Moore then not as an escape but as a cackling mirror of the problems he faced.

Then came Superman and the Flash -- modern-day extensions of his beloved myths. And they were even more fantastic for their presence in America, a place drawn in color, with huge buildings Northampton just couldn't offer.

"I got my morals more from Superman than I ever did from my teachers and peers," he says. "Because Superman wasn't real -- he was incorruptible. You were seeing morals in their pure form. You don't see Superman secretly going out behind the back and lying and killing, which, of course, most real-life heroes tend to be doing."

After dealing acid (something Clark Kent might frown upon) and getting thrown out of school at 17, Moore traded his childish flights for grown-up rigor. He went to work at a sheep-skinning plant on the outskirts of town for 6 pounds (now equal to $8.66) a week, then cleaned toilets at the Grand Hotel, where we're meeting. It was after moving up to an office job at the local gas company that he hit his crossroads: He decided that if he didn't act soon on his more creative impulses, he'd have to face himself in the mirror when he was 40, and decide whether to slit his wrists.

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