‘In the end, I saw Superman not as a superhero or even a science fiction character, but as a story of Everyman. We’re all Superman in our own adventures. We have our own Fortresses of Solitude we retreat to, with our own special collections of valued stuff, our own super-pets, our own “Bottle Cities” that we feel guilty for neglecting. We have our own peers and rivals and bizarre emotional or moral tangles to deal with.

I felt I’d really grasped the concept when I saw him as Everyman, or rather as the dreamself of Everyman. That “S” is the radiant emblem of divinity we reveal when we rip off our stuffy shirts, our social masks, our neuroses, our constructed selves, and become who we truly are.’

I wouldn’t want to make him sound respectable. Moore’s comics are utterly mad. He believes in the occult and is a practising Magus. In Black Dossier his characters end up in a mystic alternate reality which he seems to be claiming is a real place, not a fiction. In fact he appears to believe that fictional personae have their own existence in some spiritual realm he can access through magic. Now you’re disturbed. Well, we’re always being told art should disturb. Moore makes artists like the Chapmans look like the middle-class entertainers they are. He’s a real force of imagination in a world that is full of fakes.

I remember Julie Schwarz telling me – who was a lovely man – he told me about Mort Weisinger’s funeral – and this was probably just an old Jewish joke that he’d adapted – for Mort Weisinger – but he said that apparently during Jewish funerals there’s a part where people can stand up and spontaneously will say a few words about the departed – personal tributes, things like that. So it’s Mort Weisinger’s funeral, and it gets to this bit in the funeral and there’s absolute dead silence, and the silence just goes on and on and on and nobody gets up and says anything and eventually this guy at the back of the synagogue gets up and says: “His brother was worse!” (laughter).

At one point in the panel, just to clarify (or maybe rationalize) his language, Chaykin said, ‘anybody under 18 who would actually be interested in sitting and listening to me is obviously on drugs.’

When asked about illustrating the Star Wars comic adaptation: ‘If I’d known the movie was going to be so successful, I would have done a better job.’

Chaykin said he is at work on a ten-issue prequel to ‘Black Kiss’ for Dynamite Entertainment. ‘Each issue will be a decade of the 20th Century, with the filth appropriate to that decade.’