It’s not exactly on a par with his previous triumphs, but Astounding Weird Penises is as close to a new Alan Moore comic as you’re likely to get these days. It’s drawn by Moore himself and you’ve got to admit that’s a snappy title; but from the shaggy-maned magus who redefined the medium with influential masterworks such as Watchmen (1), V For Vendetta (2), and From Hell, you kind of expect a little more than eight pages of puerile pornographic sci-fi involving a phallus in a space helmet (3). Oh, and you’ll only get hold of it by buying issue two of Dodgem Logic, his new underground magazine, in which it’s a free insert. There’s no point wondering if Moore has lost his mind; here is a man who scrambles minds for a living. But has Moore lost his love of comics?

“That has continued,” he says in his unmistakable Northampton twang. He’s still writing his Victorian pulp fiction mash-up The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen (4) and a few other bits and pieces, but that’s about it. “There’s so many other things that seem to be springing up like mushrooms everywhere. Effectively retiring, at least from mainstream comics, has just given me more time to do things I’d always wanted to do before.”

Dodgem Logic (5) is one of those things: a proper underground mag in the tradition of 1960s counterculture titles Oz (6) and The International Times. It’s a trove of esoteric instruction: anarchy, activism, feminism, urban guerrilla gardening, 1970s-style comic strips and all things alt. Recently, though, the mag attracted wider attention, not because of what was in it but what wasn’t. Last year, Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett of Gorillaz asked Moore to write the libretto for a new opera they were working on, along the lines of their Monkey: Journey To The West. They wanted a superhero-themed work but Moore convinced them to make the subject John Dee, occult-dabbling scientist and adviser to Elizabeth I. In return, Moore asked Gorillaz to guest-edit a few pages of Dodgem Logic, but they missed their deadline, explaining that they had too many other commitments. At this point Moore decided he had too many commitments, too, and wouldn’t be doing their opera any more.

‘I’m glad that I’m out of the Gorillaz opera. I don’t think it would have been a good idea, and I don’t think it would have continued happily’

Unearthing creator Alan Moore

“I understood that they had been told a deadline, and they’d agreed to it. Apparently they don’t think they were told a deadline, but this is not important to me or to the matter in hand,” says Moore. “I’m glad that I’m out of it, and I don’t think it would have been a good idea, and I don’t think it would have continued happily.” (7)

It’s not the first time Moore has defended his pride. He’s refused to be involved in any of the movies made out of his writings, particularly last year’s Watchmen (8). Nor is he great pals with the two giants of the comics industry, Marvel and DC. After various disputes over control of his work (9), he vowed never to work with either of them again. He doesn’t often leave the book-stuffed Northampton terrace house where he’s lived most of his life. You could be forgiven for thinking he’s a curmudgeonly old hermit, but in person he’s genuinely warm, considerate and utterly unpretentious.

Quick Guide The five Alan Moore comics you must read Show V for Vendetta (1982 - 1989) This dystopian graphic novel continues to be relevant even 30 years after it ended. With its warnings against fascism, white supremacy and the horrors of a police state, V for Vendetta follows one woman and a revolutionary anarchist on a campaign to challenge and change the world. Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow (1986) Moore's quintessential Superman story. Though it has not aged as well as some of his work, this comic is still one of the best Man of Steel stories ever written, and one of the most memorable comics in DC's canon. A Small Killing (1991) This introspective, stream-of-consciousness comic follows a successful ad man who begins to have a midlife crisis after realising the moral failings of his life and work. Tom Strong (1999 - 2006) A love letter to the silver age of comics that nods to Buck Rogers and other classics of pulp fiction. Tom Strong embodies all of the ideals Moore holds for what a superhero should be.

The League of Extraordinary Gentleman (1999-2019) One of Moore's best known comic series, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is the ultimate in crossover works, drawing on characters from all across the literary world who are on a mission to save it.

And if proof was needed that he’s not difficult to work with, there’s his new project, Unearthing, a strange audio tale, written and narrated by Moore, with musical texture provided by an all-star band including Mike Patton of Faith No Moore and assorted members of Mogwai, Fog and Godflesh (10).

Originally it was an essay for an anthology edited by Iain Sinclair; now it’s been released in a deluxe box set with accompanying images by his photographer friend Mitch Jenkins. On 29 and 30 Jul, Moore will perform it live in the tunnels underneath Waterloo station. “What started as a piece of text has now completely jumped the corral fence,” says Moore with calm bemusement. “I’ve got no idea where this is going, frankly, but I’m quite happy to have something that is rampaging out of control.”

In essence, Unearthing is the biographical tale of Moore’s longtime friend and mentor, Steve Moore (no relation), an influential figure in the emerging British comics scene of the 1970s (11). “It was his model I was following when I became a comics writer, and it was his model I was following when I decided to get into magic, so in many ways, he is singularly responsible for having ruined my life,” says Moore. If it sounds offputtingly obscure, it bears remembering that Alan Moore could write a note to the milkman and make it sound like a finely wrought work of literature. His prose is dense, vivid and hypnotic, crammed with literary, occult and historical references and psychogeographical diversions (12). And there’s an astounding postmodern ending to the piece where Alan Moore goes from detailing what Steve Moore has done all his life to directing what he’s going to do immediately after he finishes reading the manuscript of the text we’re listening to.

‘I suppose technically, we were hallucinating but the fact that we were both seeing the same hallucination behaving in the same way makes it perhaps a different category of hallucination’

The most arresting part of Unearthing is the moment when Steve Moore summons an incarnation of Selene, the Greek moon goddess, for Alan Moore to witness. Steve has been secretly living with this goddess as his invisible companion for some time, the narration tells us, so one night, with a bit of chanting, he brings her out in Alan’s study. Both of them see her, sitting on Steve’s lap. “I suppose technically, we were both hallucinating,” he explains, “but the fact that we were both seeing the same hallucination behaving in the same way makes it perhaps a different category of hallucination. This is not making any outrageous claims. This is how it seemed to us. We may be deluded but we are honest.”

A self-declared magician (13) and prodigious marijuana smoker with more than a passing knowledge of other psychedelics (14), Moore’s well aware how ridiculous this sounds to our closed, rational, unstoned minds. “I’ve had years of bizarre hallucinogenic magical experiences in which I believed I had communicated with entities that may well have been disassociated parts of my own personality or conceivably some independent entity of a metaphysical nature,” he muses. “Both would seem equally interesting. I realise that these things can never be accepted scientifically but I’m just happy with them as what they are – experiences I can turn into art, or perhaps philosophical musings.”

They don’t teach you that in English Lit, but it seems to be working for Moore. Magic and imagination are one and the same for him, and so long as the ideas keep coming, and he doesn’t get distracted by any moon goddesses, why should he change? He wasn’t brushing off the Gorillaz out of pique; he’s a busy man, what with numerous writing projects (15) and continued stewardship over Dodgem Logic (16). He’s the hardest-working stoner magician in the cosmos; you wonder where he gets the time. Does he have a secret office in an alternative zone of reality where the clocks run backwards?

“It’s more about finding the energy,” he says. “If the energy is there, the time tends to find itself.”

GIMME MOORE: THOSE FOOTNOTES EXPLAINED

(1) Lost writer Damon Lindelof called Watchmen, “the greatest piece of popular fiction ever produced” and the series is littered with references to it. You can also detect its influence in Kick-Ass, The Incredibles, The Dark Knight, and pretty much every “for mature readers” comic subsequently written. Its “blowing up New York” climax even foresaw 9/11.

(2) V For Vendetta’s anarchist hero, sporting a Guy Fawkes mask, has been adopted by the internet organisation Anonymous. Last year a gang of Fawkes-masked protesters picketed the Church of Scientology’s London headquarters.

(3) He has form in alt-porn. His comic Lost Girls imagines slash-fiction scenarios as Dorothy from The Wizard Of Oz getting it on with the Tin Man and the Scarecrow, and Alice as an a sex slave to the Caterpillar. Don’t let him near the Harry Potter franchise.

(4) Two writers claimed the movie adaptation of League had plagiarised a script of theirs and sued 20th Century Fox. Moore had to give a 10-hour legal deposition proving the comic was really his work. He says he’d have suffered less if he’d “sodomised and murdered a busload of children after giving them heroin”. That’s how most people felt who watched the movie.

(5) Slogan: “Colliding ideas to see what happens.”

(6) Oz’s obscenity trial in 1970 is now the stuff of legend. It revolved around an image of Rupert Bear with a raging hard-on. Hugh Grant played Oz editor Richard Neville in a 1991 TV dramatisation, and Cillian Murphy plays him in new movie Hippie Hippie Shake.

(7) Albarn says he spent six months reading up on Hermetic magic, Euclid and Pythagorus in preparation. What a waste. Still, it could explain the new Gorillaz single Pentangle And The Hieroglyphic Monad Of The Hypoteneuse.

(8) Moore had long declared Watchmen unfilmable. To many, Zack Snyder’s movie proved him right, but it still grossed $185m worldwide. Moore didn’t want a penny of it. Same with the other movies; he hasn’t even watched them.

(9) In Moore’s guest-appearance in The Simpsons, Millhouse asks him to sign his DVD of Watchmen Babies In V For Vacation. Moore has to go and read a Little Lulu comic to calm himself down.

(10) This is not Moore’s first foray into music. He formed a band with Bauhaus bassist David J in the 1980s, under the pseudonym of Translucia Baboon. Their song March Of The Sinister Ducks – “Look closer and you may recoil in surprise/At web-footed fascists with mad little eyes” – failed to translate into a national anti-duck uprising.

(11) Fans of 2000AD will remember Steve Moore as the creator of Tharg’s Future Shocks, a long-running “what if?” series that gave breaks to writers like Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Peter Milligan and Alan Davis, as well as Moore.

(12) Sample extract: “Black on silver-dusted black, the hill pokes up its positive yang terminal into the night’s electrolyte, plated across the centuries with urban dream in a metallic rind.”

(13) He doesn’t do children’s parties, before you ask.

(14) Check out issue 43 of Moore’s DC comic series Swamp Thing, in which two people consume a vegetable that falls off the plant-monster superhero, and have very different life-altering psychedelic experiences. Far out.

(15) Among other things, an illustrated “Bumper Book Of Magic”, with Steve Moore, a weighty novel called Jerusalem (about Northampton, of course), and a sequel to Unearthing (called Earthing).

(16) Issue five of the magazine features the first chapter of the autobiography of Newcastle-born modern poet Tom Pickard. The first sentence is “Do you think this hashish is coated with opium, Basil?”

• This article was amended on 26 July 2010. The original stated that the first chapter of the autobiography of Tom Pickard would appear in issue four of Dodgem Logic. This has been corrected.