In the coffee bar of the 1976 Comics Convention at the NEC in Birmingham, a bearded American introduced himself to my mother: “I’m Chris Claremont.” Then he turned to me: “I write X-Men. Do you read that?” I was eight years old, but I suddenly realised, with some regret, that penning stories of spandex-clad mutants wasn’t a suitable job for a grown man, and wasn’t going to impress my mother either. I have been a comics apologist ever since and, as such, realise I and my brethren are about to be called upon once more. The hour is at hand. Avengers assemble!

Once each decade, the mysterious moon of the comic-book industry draws near the greater gravitational mass of popular culture. In the late 1980s, Tim Burton’s Batman film, Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust fable Maus, and Alan Moore’s evisceration of superhero myths, Watchmen, suggested something stirring in sequential storytelling. But still sales fell and comics continued in the downward spiral that saw even Marvel, the owners of Spider-Man and Hulk, narrowly escape bankruptcy in the 1990s and reclassify as a “doll and stuffed-toy” company.

The forthcoming flurry of interest is easily explained. The movie adaptation of Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World comic, a portrait of teenage neuroses, was an autumn sleeper hit; the Hughes Brothers’ cinematic take on Alan Moore’s From Hell, in which Johnny Depp battles a conspiracy to conceal the identity of Jack the Ripper, is released next month; Chris Ware’s meditation on father-son relationships, Jimmy Corrigan, won a Guardian first book award; Spider-Man soon swings into multiplexes, and there’s a Hulk movie in preproduction, with Ang Lee to direct the incredible green metaphor for the divided self. But will all this breach the hermetically sealed hull of comic-book culture and draw new readers into this overlooked art form?

“In a word, no,” says From Hell’s writer, Alan Moore, in his hypnotic Northampton burr. “Everyone in the industry thought the Batman film would tell people how great comics were. But what happened was some people went to a Forbidden Planet store and bought Batman toys. Maybe some of them bought a Batman comic. And then they found that the comic was nothing like as exciting as the film.” But Marvel comics, which revolutionised the genre in the 1960s, is keen to capitalise on the forthcoming Spider-Man movie by winning actual readers as well as flogging “dolls and stuffed toys”. Brian Michael Bendis’s rewriting of the Spider-Man stories, Ultimate Spider-Man, erases 40 years of impenetrable continuity and returns the character to his teens, a useful starting point for new readers. Where once the orphan Peter Parker’s Aunt May fed him cookies, now she offers advice on safe sex.

Moore’s pessimism is perhaps unwarranted. Comics are currently the best they’ve been for years. Marvel recruits left-field writers to address the atrophy that engulfed its most famous titles. DC, home to Batman, publishes books with an alternative slant through its Vertigo line. And the independent scene boasts the victories of Ghost World, From Hell and Jimmy Corrigan, each subtler and more diverse than the 1960s countercultural ethic of the “comix” underground would allow. But these high points are but the tip of a slag heap composed largely of unreadable books, available only from specialist shops stuffed with Tomb Raider soft toys and soft-porn comics. Are movie adaptations the manna that comics need? Can they prime potential long-term readers?

Typically, Moore hasn’t yet seen the adaptation of From Hell, but he may rent it on video. “I saw a three-minute trailer, which was a weird experience. It looked beautifully photographed.” He confesses to an annoyance with “the fallacious modern notion that making a movie of something somehow validates it. A Michael Crichton book, for example, is a template, with characters blank enough to be inhabited by any actor and a schematic sequence of events, so it makes a good film. But, as a rule, adapting from one medium to another is dodgy.”

Moore need not worry. From Hell is a decent movie on its own terms and is daringly experimental by Hollywood standards. Those familiar with the comic will see some shots storyboarded directly from Eddie Campbell’s illustrations, but the film loses the mystical subtext of the book, which includes 42 pages of footnotes and reduces Moore’s Ripper to a cinema psychopath, rather than a man driven by religious beliefs and political expediency. “I don’t know if people who like the film would necessarily like the book anyway,” Moore concludes. “It’s in black-and-white, for a start.”

Moore remembers the moment in 1987 when comics, like comedy five years later, were the new rock’n’roll. Today he is content trying to produce work he is proud of and has many satisfying sidelines. His spoken-word William Blake biography, Angel Passage, is currently
available on the Re: label, and he describes his current line, America’s Best Comics, as a “Trojan horse”. Titles such as Top Ten and Tom Strong “look like superhero comics and are designed to sell in the superhero marketplace, but import ideas from the fringes”. Promethea, in which a teenager is possessed by a Wonder Woman-style heroine, is, for Moore, “a magical drone disguised as a superhero comic”, reflecting his fascination with occult esoterica. In contrast, he thinks “Jimmy Corrigan is a marvelous book, but it’s unlike anything else, so it will have no effect on the mainstream and won’t necessarily get people into comics”.

It’s Moore’s enthusiasm for the comics medium’s inherent virtues that has seen Marvel’s new editor-in-chief, Joe Quesada, make a pilgrimage from his New York skyscraper to Moore’s Northampton home to convince him to sign on with Spider-Man and company. Quesada is something of a radical in comics, aiming at actually producing better books, rather than hoping to ride the coat-tails of movie adaptations and cash in on the merchandising. Letting Moore loose on Marvel’s classic characters might prove mainstream comics’ cultural worth once and for all. Apologists need never apologise again. But would he do it? For a moment, I smell a scoop that would set fandom buzzing like Peter Parker’s Spider sense. But “Joe Quesada? He seemed like a nice bloke,” was all that Moore would say.

TEN GREAT GRAPHIC NOVELS

From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995 by Joe Sacco
Ghost World by Daniel Clowes
Box Office Poison by Alex Robinson
Preacher: Gone to Texas by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon
Berlin, City of Stones, Book One by Jason Lutes
Fortune and Glory by Brian Michael Bendis
Hey, Buddy! Hate Collection by Peter Bagge
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill
Ultimate Spider-Man Volume I: Power & Responsibility by Brian Michael Bendis