The tangled history of Miracleman-from its origins as a British derivation of the 1940s Captain Marvel character to its current status as the source of a seemingly bottomless legal quagmire-is a Primer unto itself. Moore’s run on the title stretched from its 1982 revival as a feature in Warrior through 16 issues. It begins with the middle-aged Micky Moran remembering he has the ability to transform into a superhero with the use of a magic word, and it ends with Moran’s alter ego becoming a god on earth. In between, Moore teases out the troubling implications always present in the genre. What do these power fantasies mean, and, if left unchecked, where would they take us? Can the gulf between humanity and superhumanity ever be closed? “His emotions are so pure,” Moran tells his wife early in the run, “when he loves you it’s gigantic. His love is so strong and clean… When I love you it’s all tangled up with who’s not doing their share of the washing up and twisted neurotic things like that.” By the end of Moore’s story, the part of Moran that asks such questions is gone.

…there was always an interesting thing where Frank Richards, the author of the ‘Billy Bunter’ stories, was having to turn out so many Bunter stories because of his gambling addiction. These were mentioned in an essay that George Orwell wrote, that were basically talking about how the Billy Bunter stories were just holding up the traditional British Empire values of racism and class consciousness in an approving light with the author apparently finding all foreigners amusing, and being very patronizing towards foreigners and women. Orwell wrote a very capable essay decrying all this, and foolishly, Frank Richards, stung by this review, decided to retaliate in a little letter where, in very wounded terms, went through all of Orwell’s points and tried his best to dismiss them. But he said, ‘As for Mr. Orwell’s point about me depicting foreigners as being comical, well, they are!’

‘The way that we worked on Lost Girls was actually different than the way I’ve worked on any other comic I’ve done. I’m known for turning out book-sized scripts with detailed written descriptions of each panel and all the dialogue and captions and sound effects. But Melinda had never worked with a scriptwriter before, so she looked at these enormous scripts I’d written for the first four or five episodes, and I think it crushed her spirit. She wasn’t comfortable, and she suggested that maybe I could do thumbnails, which is something I haven’t really done for other artists because I’m so lousy at drawing thumbnails. I have to write pages of explanation to tell them that this little blob down in the right-hand corner is actually the leading character’s head and shoulders. But Melinda, since she was living up here, I could talk her through all the breakdowns. She’d take my rough thumbnails and a pep talk and would go and turn out these lovely pages. Then I would do the dialoguing after the artwork was done, so that I could have a look at the expression that Melinda brought to the work. I could fine-tune the dialogue for the images so everything was much more synchronized. Lost Girls probably marks the closest that I’ve worked with an artist on a comic, perhaps unsurprisingly. With the nature of the material, it more or less demands an intimate relationship between the creators. Not just intimate in the usual physical sense, but also intimate in a mental and creative sense.’

Alan Moore: ‘…if we have any optimism in [Watchmen] it’ll be valid optimism because it won’t simply be based on ignoring the nasty facts of life. To me, just in that last panel, in Godfrey’s last line “I leave it entirely in your hands” – that’s talking to the reader as well… I leave it entirely in your hands, how do we sort out this Gordian Knot? If the question is who makes the world? then if there’s an answer it is that everybody does. Yeah, there’s people that seem to be in more immediate power than others but really the world is an elaborate series of accidents, coincidences and unbelievable synchronicities that people appear to be in control of but… well, think about the events in your own life, the things that have made really dramatic changes in you can be traced back to deciding to pick up a ballpoint pen or not pick it up.’