Moore may be noting, too, that the superheroes and villains with which comics are often dismissively associated have always been a potent part of literature. Where From Hell mired itself in Victorian darkness, this is the era's Technicolor flipside, a tribute to the vigorous fictions the age also birthed. But the "M" the League answer to turns out not to be, as they suspected, Mycroft Holmes, but Moriarty, hunched survivor of his battle at the Reichenbach Falls with the more famous Holmes (beautifully restaged in flashback), and a murderous secret employee of the British state, who emerges from his own West End base to bombard Fu Manchu's East End.
Together, they brave Fu Manchu in his Limehouse lair, and steal back the Cavorite (the means of lunar flight in Wells's scientific romance The First Men in the Moon) with which he means to air-bomb London.
In 1898, a threatened British Empire brings together Mina Harker (Dracula's survivor), Captain Nemo, Dr Jekyll and especially Mr Hyde, Allan Quatermain and the Invisible Man. With the award-winning, bestselling Watchmen (1986) - leader of the new breed of "graphic novels" that briefly made comics socially acceptable - he reimagined the superhero genre in its entirety, reweaving every strand of society, from mass media to nuclear dread, around the fact of their existence, with obsessive rigour and visceral conviction. And, in his principal role as comics' most revolutionary writer, he is a formal innovator, puppeteer of pulp iconography and creator of functioning, fantastic worlds with few peers. He occupies the lonely post of Northampton's Greatest Novelist, thanks to his single effort at full-length prose, Voice of the Fire (1996), a millennia-spanning dissection of his home town.
He is a self-proclaimed magus, writing, since his 40th birthday 10 years ago, with the aid of visions and divine communications. Alan Moore is one of the British underground's great figures, a wild-haired, dragon-ringed associate of Michael Moorcock, Iain Sinclair and other keepers of the Blakean flame.
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