This might be a good moment to mention that Moore is also a practicing magician—which is to say, he performs rituals, and summons entities. “The first experience I had,” he told Arthur magazine in 2003,

and this is very difficult to describe, but it felt to me as if me and a very close friend of mine, were both taken on this ride by a specific entity. The entity seemed to me, and to my friend, to be … [sighs] … to be this second-century Roman snake god called Glycon.

Moore’s magicking has entered his writing most didactically in the comic Promethea: Book Four of the series gives readers a guided tour of the kabbalistic Tree of Life, roosting in whose branches we find 20th-century magi such as Aleister Crowley (in drag) and the late artist Austin Osman Spare. The apparent paradox presented here—a droll postmodernist who worships at the altar of Glycon—is, within the world of comics, no paradox at all.

“If you can make a symbol that plants itself in someone’s head,” said Douglas Wolk, author of Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean, when I called him in February to talk about all this, “then you’re doing magic. Right now, for instance, they’re getting ready to make Iron Man II, and you could look at Iron Man, in that sense, as a spell that was cast 45 years ago that is only now coming to fruition. This is pop culture we’re talking about. Get your idea in front of a whole lot of eyeballs, and congratulations, you’ve changed the world.”

Nothing gets in front of those eyeballs like a big movie, of course, but Moore retains a pagan suspicion of Hollywood, and has refused to so much as look at any of the adaptations of his work. The first two, it’s true, he would barely recognize: the Hughes brothers’ From Hell (2001) made a bloody hash of his multitiered Ripper-ography, while The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) rendered the literary supermen of the graphic novel—Captain Nemo, Quatermain, etc.—as a sort of antiquarian A-Team. V for Vendetta (2006) was getting closer, but missed the original’s very English seep of paranoia—a tone, incidentally, that was perfectly caught by the same year’s Children of Men.

And now we have Zack Snyder’s Watchmen—as devout and frame-by-frame a reworking as could be imagined. Set in a tweaked version of Nixon’s America, in which the 37th president is enjoying his fifth term in office, Watchmen features an imminent nuclear showdown with the Soviet Union, a squad of aging and profane superheroes, and a Vietnam War that was won by the U.S. with the help of a naked blue radioactive man.

This last personage, who goes by the name of Dr. Manhattan (and who’s played rather beautifully by Billy Crudup in the movie), is the time bomb at the heart of the book. His genesis is poignant. As a harmless physicist named Jon Osterman, he gets himself disembodied in an incident with some particle cannons: a terrible radiance consumes him. His consciousness, however, survives, and in some private air pocket of time he remodels his physical being, manifesting finally as a hairless and phosphorescent semi-deity in robin’s-egg blue. His awesome telekinetic powers—blowing up tanks, building nuclear reactors in midair—are almost incidental to his bewildering metaphysical insights. Dr. Manhattan sees the past and the future with equal clarity, and is only a little wobbly on the day-to-day. His presence in the story, never quite accommodated, seems in some magnetic way to determine the structure of Moore’s Watchmen, with its use—unprecedented in comics at the time—of flashbacks and symmetries and sudden expansions into mental space.