It didn’t arrive fully formed in Moore’s mind. It grew…

Alan Moore: We’d got this situation, and originally we intended it to be a very superior superhero book, but by the time we were into it — issue 3 say - it became clear to us that we could have done it without superheroes. The elements that we started to play up then were ones that were nothing to do with superheroics. The superheroes become icons, symbols of power…

Once issue 3 was in the bag we knew it all. I think there were a lot of elements of serendipity and that’s a whole article in itself. This was the magic of Watchmen.

In terms of what we felt we were doing, in that occasionally you’ll be doing something and by accident you hit it right every time that’s a really wonderful feeling. With Watchmen all of these little coincidences started to creep in.

There’s something of Alan Moore in every character. But he encourages you to draw your own interpretations.

Alan Moore: All the characters in Watchmen have a bit of me in them. I mean, Dr Manhattan has, Rorschach has and Veidt has… Probably Dan and Laurie as well, to a degree.

Amongst the many other things I was trying to say in Watchmen was just that in this world we live in, with all its disparate characters and ambitions there are probably no two people who want the same thing. The world doesn’t work like that anyway. If there’s a central line in Watchmen it’s “Who makes the world?” Then again, that’s just my opinion.