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Alan Moore, the undisputed, eccentric king of comic-book writing, made it acceptable for literary-minded adults to enjoy books about superheroes. Will his new book do the same for erotica? Susanna Clarke, the novelist and long-time Moore devotee, speaks to him about sex, magic, and why he prefers his home town to Hollywood

I first became an Alan Moore fan in Covent Garden on a Saturday afternoon in 1987, when I bought a copy of Watchmen, his graphic novel about ageing superheroes and nuclear apocalypse. I had always been fascinated by comics but it had taken me several weeks to make up my mind to buy Watchmen; for someone on a publisher's assistant's salary it was some quite unheard-of sum of money. I began reading on the Tube home. I read all weekend and by Monday morning I still had a couple of chapters to go. For the book itself, I refer you to pretty much any review – intelligent, multi-layered, extraordinary, etc – but what I remember 20 years later is not so much what I thought of it, as its effect on me. That Monday at work I felt almost physically sick: sick from not being able to read Watchmen. The primary colours of Dave Gibbons's art danced in my head – everything else seemed grey and unreal. No other book ever took hold of me like that. That evening I went home and finished it. Then I was no longer sick. Only bereft.

It's not easy to convey to someone who doesn't read comics just how Alan Moore has dominated the field since Watchmen. He took something very American – the superhero comic – reinvented it (more than once) and sold it back to them. A list of his most famous works (Swamp Thing, Miracleman from Hell, Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) reads like a list of classic comics of the past 20 years. When he fell out with the largest comics publisher in the world, the New York based DC, he found a home with an American independent publisher, Wildstorm. DC dealt with this defection in a remarkably straightforward way – they bought Wildstorm in order to get him back (an experience Moore describes as like having 'a really weird, rich stalker girlfriend'). All this without ever leaving Northampton.

Alan Moore is a peculiarly unsung triumph of British culture, and Northampton, where he was born in 1953, the son of brewery worker Ernest and printer Sylvia, is where you must go to find him. A long line of fans, film producers and directors have made the journey before me. We meet in a pleasant Italian restaurant in the basement of a city street. The restaurant has rather low, vaulted ceilings and Alan Moore is very tall; he seems to loom in the confined space. It is, however, an entirely affable, unthreatening sort of loom.

Photographs of him always make the most of his wild eyes, Rasputin-like hair and the magician's rings upon his fingers. In person, his expression is more mischievous than wild. And photographs can't convey the voice. Nowadays, we're accustomed to writers with bland, London-ish accents. Moore speaks undiluted Northampton. Which perhaps explains why a three-hour conversation with him about pornography and magic seems homely and down to earth – almost comforting.

In a career with more than its fair share of stormy periods (after watching several of his comics transformed into deeply mediocre movies, Moore now refuses to have his name credited on any film adaptations of his work or to accept any money for them – including the Watchmen film currently being made by the director of 300) he has now produced his most controversial work so far: Lost Girls, a three-volume, 16-years-in-the-making comic about sex. His collaborator in the project is his wife, the San Francisco artist Melinda Gebbie, who has been drawing sexually charged subjects since working in underground comics in the 1970s. There can be no doubt of the importance of Lost Girls to Moore and Gebbie. In one very concrete sense it has changed their lives: they met to work on the book, began a relationship and were married earlier this year. It's his second marriage; he has two grown-up daughters, Amber and Leah, from his first (Leah writes comics with her husband, John Reppion).

Moore had been thinking about ways to talk about sex in comics long before Lost Girls. He'd first tackled it in the 'Rite of Spring', an issue of Swamp Thing in which Alex, the lonely plant-based life-form, and Abby, his human lover, tenderly make love. (If you're wondering what sex with a self-aware vegetable is like, it's more psychedelic than anything else – 'A tide of emeralds engulfs me.') 'After a couple of years, it had hit me that it might be possible to do a story about sex that didn't involve a swamp monster,' he says. 'It was an outrageous, wacky idea?…'

In Lost Girls, three oddly familiar figures arrive at a hotel in Switzerland on the eve of the First World War: Alice, a world-weary lesbian; Wendy, a repressed middle-class wife; and Dorothy, an American girl brimming with sexual energy. They are, and are not, the girls from Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and The Wizard of Oz. In Lost Girls their stories are re-imagined as elaborate sexual awakenings – sometimes frightening, occasionally tender. Make no mistake, this is not delicately erotic fiction; it is pornography. Almost every spread contains images of an unapologetic, uninhibited sexual act.

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