During the 2001 general election campaign I was taking a taxi across London when the young cabbie engaged

During the 2001 general election campaign, I was taking a taxi across London when the young cabbie engaged me in conversation about the inadequacies of William Hague as Tory leader. ‘Lost Girls’ is published by Top Shelf ( www.topshelfcomix ). ‘The Mindscape of Alan Moore’ is screened at the ICA in October and released on DVD in November ( www.shadowsnake ). Already going into a third printing of 20,000, their distribution to Britain has been delayed because of correspondence to the publishers, Top Shelf, from Great Ormond Street Hospital – which was given the copyright to Peter Pan in JM Barrie’s will – possibly until January 2008, when its rights expire.

We tried to find something personally arousing in every scene, otherwise that would have been faking it, but we didn’t want it just to be a mirror of our sexual tastes. “I think every reader can identify with these characters, because they represent our own childhood and the changes that happened to them are similar to those that have happened to us.”These three different ages and types of woman, each with her own secrets encoded in her fairytale youth, meet and share their erotic fantasies at the luxury Hotel Himmelgarten on the Austrian border in 1913. You start to think, which of these is obscene?”Issued in three slipcased hardbacks, Lost Girls shows a “pornotopia” of assorted and strong sexual activity, and yet Gebbie’s luscious art, harking back to past masters and mistresses of erotica, has a quality that, in Moore’s view, “seems able to imbue even the most potentially grotesque scene with a kind of charm, beauty, warmth and a sensual, human atmosphere. Moore mentions one arresting contrast: “The last chapter shows a big dildo on a dressing table in an opening shot, and by the end, when we show the battlefields, there’s a human penis outside the context of an attached body which mirrors it but in an appalling way. Setting it amid the imminent First World War allows Moore and Gebbie to comment on the human imagination in its sexual phase and the absolute lack of imagination represented by war. You know, I’ve got to read the novel sometime.’”Hollywood is not Kennedy’s only target in Temptation: New York publishing is firmly in his sights too. Nor am I one of these wannabe artists who don’t graft, and turn out absolute crap Like the Venice Biennale last year – what a load of shite My arse produces more interesting work than that No ideas, no technique Here, we work, and we work, and we work Our film will be out next year.

I believe it will be outstanding.”She now lives with her second husband, in a fashionable district of Paris.”He’s a Westerner,” she volunteers, in an uncharacteristic moment of candour.”He’s from Sweden, isn’t he?”"He is.”"What’s his name?”"I’m not saying.”"Is he an artist?”"That’s private.”"I won’t ask his shoe size.”"I won’t tell you.”"Joseph Heller once said that he’d succeeded ‘despite that great handicap for a novelist, a happy childhood’.”"Well, I would have much preferred to have had a normal childhood. I would have loved it if my greatest dilemma, at 14, was whether to go to Benetton for my pullovers. I would have preferred not to have cried all the tears I have cried.”"Even if it meant not writing?”"Definitely Because I would have been happy. But when you’re dropped in a pile of shit, so to speak, you have to decide – either add to the pile, or use it as fertiliser, and grow flowers.”The latest bloom to spring from Satrapi’s ample reserve of manure – her family’s experience of exile, torture and execution by firing squad goes back many generations – is a graphic novel called Chicken With Plums.

In Lost Girls, Moore and Gebbie set out to transform pornography, “ordinarily a dull and ugly genre with absolutely no standards”, into something potentially artistic as well as arousing. They revisit the beloved children’s storybook heroines Alice (from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), Wendy Darling (from Peter Pan) and Dorothy Gale (from The Wizard of Oz) as if they were real, grown up and sexually experienced. Gebbie, a fiercely original underground cartoonist in her own right, was a victim of British judicial squeamishness in 1985, when her uninhibited 1977 comic book Fresca Zizis was declared obscene and destroyed. “It annoys me to hear people talk about ‘Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta’. What you see on the page is the meeting between an artist and myself.

That’s where the creation takes place.” Moore always prefers close collaborations, because out of these emerge the “multi-track” levels of verbal and visual reading that only comics can achieve.Of all Moore’s collaborations, the work on his latest graphic novel, Lost Girls, has been especially long, some 16 years, and intensive, as he and Melinda Gebbie became partners and lovers. It’s possibly the first film of his work that he is totally pleased with.He reserves the magic of his words for exceptional one-off, multi-media performances, which have been issued on CD and turned into comics, and above all for his prose and graphic novels. Writing for comics, he tailors each script with specific artists in mind, lacing them with surreal asides and all manner of detail. So much so, that the thought he invests into every word can make his work-rate agonisingly slow. According to Dave Gibbons, this meant that to draw Watchmen, before emails, before faxes, he was sent pages of the script “in ones and twos on the passenger seat of a taxi, all the way from Northampton to St Albans”.Some of his scripts can grow unusually elaborate. For example, the single opening panel in the first volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, an external shot set in “Dover, May, 1898″, takes him over 500 words to convey. His suggestions to artist Kevin O’Neill include “chalk-streaks of gullshit on the railing in the foreground” Equally, however, Moore is no control freak or puppeteer.