His work became known in British comic magazines Warrior and 2000 A.D. In 1984, DC Comics tapped him to take over one of its least successful books, "Swamp Thing." Unconventional and serious, he turned the book into a tool for exploring social issues, using it to discuss everything from racism to environmental affairs. In return, he quickly drew a devoted following and raised the monthly sales of the comic from 17,000 to 100,000 copies.

"Nobody," he says, "wanted to actually say, 'But he's talking rubbish.' They all sort of said, 'He's an English genius, and you must be a fool if you don't see it,' which did me well for a while."

After "Swamp Thing," everyone saw the genius with "Watchmen," which, along with Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns," a depiction of Batman's older, alcoholic, calamitous self, spawned a slew of imitators. For the better part of five years, every book seemed to feature deconstructed bad guys turned mildly good who, dredged up from the sewers, say very little and kill very readily.

Having become the comics' first "star writer," Moore was mobbed at conventions and asked to appear on TV, and he soon swore off both. He and artist Dave Gibbons fought with DC over money. Then DC, in response to evangelical pressure, slapped some of its titles with "Mature Readers Only" labels. In response, Moore walked away from DC, from "mainstream comics" and even from superheroes forever.

Moore threw all of the "Watchmen" money into his own publishing company, and began his ill-fated magnum opus. It was called "Big Numbers," and it was supposed to be a 12-part, 480-to-500-page work, with 40 characters. The script was huge. Moore, his wife and their mutual girlfriend would spend whole days photographing scenes for long tracking shots that were meant to last for four or five pages.

Our most ambitious endeavors are the ones most prone to great failure. Artist Bill Sienkiewicz started turning in his artwork later and later, and then quit after the second issue. His replacement, Al Columbia, worked on one issue and then disappeared. In the course of things, Moore's marriage ended, and he lost nearly all of the money he'd earned from "Watchmen."

"I don't think it was misguided at all," says Gary Groth, editor of the Comics Journal. "I think it was the best thing Alan could have done -- for himself and for comics. That it failed was a real tragedy."

Moore's response was to return to the superhero, but not through the same door. He now believed that talking about an issue such as the environment in comics was perfectly all right, but using a swamp monster to do so trivialized the matter. Moreover, by attaching a self-consciousness to superheroes, a belief that they had to be grounded in what is often an awful reality, one was throwing away their fundamental greatness: the uncanny ability to lift our spirits, to bring us closest to the primordial setting of the storyteller "sitting around the campfire, making up impromptu stories about the guy who can fly."

Moore's reclamation project began in 1996, when he took over a "very, very, very, very, very" lame superhero named Supreme. Created by artist Rob Liefeld, Supreme had been drawn and written as a brooding, musclebound oaf, a crusader who said largely incomprehensible things like "Foolish pup! Back to your mother!" Moore threw away this severity by refashioning the hero's origin and recycling elements that had been discarded by DC Comics' various Superman revisionists. He filled the book with silly, wonderful components, and converted the central character into a moral paragon. Supreme was the jumping-off point for Moore's current idea of saving the comics industry, one that has led him back to the financial auspices of DC. By August of 1998, Moore had begun work on a major project for Wildstorm Comics, developing story outlines and commissioning artists, when he received a visit from then Wildstorm owner Jim Lee and the company's editor in chief, Scott Dunbier. Over lunch Lee told Moore that because of the instability of the market, he had agreed to sell Wildstorm to the behemoth Moore had walked away from more than 10 years before. Moore thought about dropping the project altogether, but he was reassured that he'd be working directly under Wildstorm's editors in California, not those at the Time Warner (DC's parent company) building in New York.

"Alan's got as much input as he wants," Dunbier says. "He will always have as much input as he wants. But he trusts us. I mean, he trusts us a lot more so than a lot of other publishers."

It's hard to say whether all of Moore's efforts will succeed. Retailers have complained that the ABC books are consistently late, and in February, the seventh issue of "Top 10" ranked 59th, with 32,000 copies sold on the direct market, while "Promethea" had sold 29,000, good for 70th place. These numbers are profitable, but they're nowhere near good enough to resuscitate comic shops that have taken to selling toys, memorabilia and even adult publications to stay afloat.

"Did Alan say he's trying to save comics?" asks Groth, who loathes superhero comics and has yet to read any of Moore's ABC books. "Good lord, it sounds like desperate hyperbole. Why would anyone want to save mainstream comics?"

There are many things about the industry Moore cannot change. All he can do is hope for new fans, and hope that the old ones who watched him take apart the superhero 14 years ago will return to see the myth reassembled.

"What I could do is what everyone wants me to do," Moore says over coffee, having come back with me to the lounge of the hotel where he once scrubbed toilets, "and to ignore the fact the popular market is going down the toilet. I could do something really obscure. I'd get critical appeal and sell 1,500 copies and incidentally go broke and earn the respect of Gary Groth, and the comics industry would completely fall to pieces. Even if it all happens, and comics does fall to pieces, at least I did my best."

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