We're thrilled to have interviewed Alan Moore - creator of benchmark comics Watchmen and V For Vendetta and longtime WORD hero - in FACE TIME this month. Alan is one of the planet's great conversationalists and we could fit only a part of our 90 minute discussion in the magazine. So, in the spirit of the Extended Deluxe Double CD edition, here's some more of Mr Moore discussing his new work of "literary pornography" Lost Girls, his century-spanning supersaga The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen... and why Heroes is rubbish.

THE WORD: With your new graphic novel Lost Girls (below), you and your wife Melinda Gebbie set out to make a work of pornography, but pornography Is inextricably linked with obscenity. Do you think that Lost Girls could corrupt and deprave? It features "scenes of a sexual nature" in which children are present. Will we even be able to buy it in the UK?

ALAN MOORE: You can buy it here but we've had our ups and downs. Firstly we were told that Great Ormond Street Hospital believed they owned the copyright in the character of Wendy, as part of JM Barrie's bequest of Peter Pan to them. Happily it was settled in the most amicable fashion possible: we didn't concede copyright infringement but didn't publish until after their copyright had lapsed at the start of 2008. Then our French publisher withdrew, thinking that he'd contravene new French laws on child pornography, so we were in the strange position of having Italy, Spain and Germany - all the former fascist countries - on our side.

Then - and this is brilliant - the books were seized by Canadian customs, and Canada has very strict laws regarding children and pornography. So our US publisher sends them a thick dossier of supporting quotes about Melinda and I, and a wonderful letter of intent spelling out why the scenes of incest and bestiality are not obscene, why this is a work of serious artistic intent and why the scenes of underage sexual activity can in no way be considered child pornography. And Canadian Customs agreed, which was just wonderful! Then, following that, HM Customs here in the UK also ruled that Lost Girls could not be considered child pornography because it was of clear artistic merit. And then our French publisher decided that he really ought to publish after all. So it was almost a perfect clean sweep. You just don't expect it to go that way but it did.

Your other major work of the moment, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (below), started out as a Victorian version of the Justice League with characters like Mr Hyde and the Invisible Man instead of Superman and Batman. But it's blossomed into an all-consuming "crossover" of fictional worlds that incorporates everything from Rupert the Bear to 1984. Do you ever suspect you're going to drive yourself mad in trying to connect everything together?

Well... the more you look at the real world, the more you realise that it's just as interconnected, in just as preposterous a manner, as the fictional one you're creating. Take the world of British intelligence as presented in the new League book The Black Dossier. In real life, Graham Greene based Harry Lime in The Third Man on Kim Philby, who'd been his handler in MI6. When Philby defected in 1963,the newspaper headlines read PHILBY IS THE THIRD MAN, but they were simply reiterating a literal truth from a work of fiction. Philby had been the third man all along.

And then... Philby was named after Rudyard Kipling's Kim. Kipling lived in Broadstairs which is where John Buchan wrote The 39 Steps, near the real 39 steps down to the beach. So it all ties together. There's something about it all that's more than coincidence. It drives you mad after a while. I'm just introducing everyone else to my private world of mental torture.

The Black Dossier is a huge undertaking, featuring an undiscovered Shakespeare playlet, a version of the Daily Mirror's saucy wartime strip Jane in written in 1984's newspeak ("SEXJANE: WORKBELT CRIMEPOKE") and an encounter between Bertie Wooster and HP Lovecraft's extradimensional monstrosities entitled What Ho, Gods Of The Abyss. Can you possibly take the League concept any further?

The Black Dossier should have been even better, actually - there'll be a bigger edition next year with a 7-inch single and, ideally, the Fanny Hill pastiche as a sealed section, in the finest tradition of Victorian filth. Writing the Kerouac pastiche was fantastic fun, although when you re-read him he's not actually as mad and bebop as we remember him. I had to draw on one of his poems, Old Angel Midnight, for the right tone of unpunctuated, freeform Kerouacness.

It's not the end of the League story. We're already working on the next instalment, which will be a three-volume work called Century. The first one takes place in 1910 and is called What Keeps Mankind Alive. It's the Edwardian incarnation of the League, when Raffles the gentleman thief and Virginia Woolf's Orlando were members, and we're going to be doing our version of The Threepenny Opera, complete with Mack The Knife and Pirate Jenny. I've written a new libretto for it.

Part two is set in 1968 and it's called Paint It Black. Everyone knows about the brilliant psychedelic underground of the time but the occult renewal is less well known. We'll be looking at the crossover of swinging London, dodgy Satanism and organised crime, because the Krays were in and out of both worlds. I'm happy to say that we're including no less than six fictional incarnations of Ronnie Kray - Harry Starks from The Long Game, Harry Flowers from Performance, Doug and Dinsdale Piranha... and lots of Aleister Crowley. And then the third part brings us bang up to the present day, 2008.

You're very scathing on the state of today's superhero comics. Did you watch Heroes?

I was persuaded to watch it by people who said it nods to Watchmen but God, what a load of rubbish! It's a late-70s X-Men at best and full of terrible ideas and characters who've all been done to death. Beyond death. And the writing shows such contempt for the viewer. The climax, a man who is going to explode is carried off into the air by his brother... did anybody bother to compare the effects of a groundburst with an airburst nuclear explosion? I'll take the former over the latter, thanks. This is supposed to be the sort of thing that superhero stories are good at. I tell you, if we are ever threatened with a scenario like that in real life I hope the superheroes aren't American because we'll be sunk.

This is why I don't work in movies or TV. It is almost physically impossible to tell a real story there.

A lot of people did think there were strange echoes of the climax of Watchmen in the events of 9/11. The atrocity in New York that leads to a complete change in international politics...

It's a fairly commonplace observation to say that 9/11 resembled an action movie, yes. A writer friend of mine visited Ground Zero not long afterwards and said he expected to see the alien monster to climb out of the pit. The resonance with Watchmen was rather chilling, but I can't really understand why the hunger to see New York obliterated in movie after movie after comic after TV series hasn't abated. I can understand the retreat into drippy, infantile new age spirituality. As a practising magician I find it pathetic, but there you go. It's the "bring it on" aspect of American popular culture that I find disturbing. There's this sense that America is saying "It's our fault for not restraining them harshly enough."

You've now dedicated yourself to the practise and exploration of magic. Does it work? Do you use it to a purpose: "I curse you, DC Comics, for nicking V For Vendetta off me" and so on?

Well if I had I wouldn't tell you, would I, ha ha! I do have a few personal rituals which I pursue from time to time and all I can say is, my personal wellbeing and belief system are in pretty good shape. I do have quite an old and rare book called The Grimoire Of The Spirit Of The Place which purports to be written by "an old sea captain" and details how you can summon up and capture the local spirit using a pig - although apparently if you have the book you don't need to kill the pig, which is good. I might give that a try soon; it fits with my interest in psychogeography and the locality of Northampton. I like my magic to be public. That way, if it's ridiculous, people know.