Alan Moore never intended to become a maverick cult hero of comics and graphic novels. But over the last quarter century, he has become a master storyteller -- and perhaps the greatest comic writer in history -- in a world that, before he came along, was only safe for good-guy superheroes and happy endings.

After getting expelled from high school at 17 for selling LSD, Moore spent the late 1960s working menial jobs before he decided to try his hand at becoming a writer and cartoonist. By the late 1970s, he was working steadily for U.K. music magazines and newspapers on his own comic strips.

After stints at DC and Marvel Comics in the early 1980s, Moore decided to focus his attention solely on writing. His big break came in 1986 with the publication of Watchmen, first published as a serial for DC Comics. It was later collected and republished as a graphic novel: Watchmen, illustrated by David Gibbons. The novel centers on an alternate United States, mirroring the constant threat of nuclear annihilation of the Cold War era, where superheroes of the past and present wrestle with real philosophical issues, making them all the more human and dysfunctional. Moore's dark sense of humor, satirical dialogue and use of mature themes changed modern comics forever.

Moore continued his complex oeuvre with the celebrated graphic novels V for Vendetta, The League of Extraordinary Gentleman and From Hell. All three of those works have been adapted into Hollywood films, much to Moore's dismay, since he doesn't own the copyrights to the characters.

In the summer of 2006, Moore released Lost Girls, the long-awaited, three-book, 30-chapter pornographic novel that he and his wife, comic artist Melinda Gebbie, have been working on for 17 years. Beautifully drawn by Gebbie and written by Moore in their first collaboration, Lost Girls takes place in 1913 in an Austrian hotel along the border of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Moore imagines the lives of Dorothy Gale from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Alice from Alice in Wonderland and Wendy Darling from Peter Pan as grown-ups brought together in a love triangle that goes beyond graphic novel erotica. These three well-known characters cathartically tell their life stories while engaging each other sexually on almost every page, purging demons, repressed fear and sexual anger amid the chaos of World War I.

"Lost Girls is the single most beautiful artifact that I've ever been connected with," Moore told Playboy, speaking by phone from his home in Northampton, England. "This is the only project of this scale -- or of any scale that I've ever worked upon -- with a woman, which is a bit of a shameful admission considering I've been working in the comics industry nonstop for the past 26 years." In his conversation with Playboy, Moore sketches out his views on pornography as art, sexualizing beloved fairy-tale characters and the horror of our own genitalia.

Playboy: Your latest book is selling out all around the world. Yet it isn't available in Europe -- England in particular. Why is that?

Moore: There was a copyright issue. The Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital was gifted something by [Peter Pan] author J.M. Barrie. I believe their position is that they were given the rights to Peter Pan in perpetuity, although that does run out in this country on January 1, 2008. Now the rights and wrongs of who owns the copyrights notwithstanding, if it's evil pornographers versus a hospital for sick children, you're backing a loser from the start by going with us. We thought it would be best to simply wait until 2008. Also it did turn out that Great Ormond Street had objected to having the J.M. Barrie characters connected with a work that involved sex. They said this was why they didn't want to be associated with Lost Girls.

Now whether they also sent a lot of writs winging across the Atlantic to Michael Jackson's house when he decided to change its name to Neverland, I don't know. I'd like to think that they did. Or perhaps when Walt Disney decided to overtly sexualize Peter Pan by casting a kind of nano-scale Marilyn Monroe Tinker Bell. Putting all that aside, that was their stated reason for not wishing Lost Girls to appear. However, it did turn out that they were also planning on publishing their own sequel to Peter Pan, which apparently does feature Wendy as a grown-up woman and various references to the First World War, so that could have played some part in them not wanting our book out in competition -- although I don't really think they're for the same market. One is a children's book and one is Lost Girls. That said, it's not going to hurt us to hold out for another year in England and Europe.

Playboy: How did you eventually decide on this format for the book?

Moore: My wife Melinda said, "This is my absolute mad dream of how these books should look." We wanted to send out a strong signal that this should be treated as art, that it was not throwaway or sleazy or any of the other things that the readership might expect pornography to be. Melinda was very insistent that it be produced in this beautiful format that was redolent of the very best children's books of the late Victorian era, the early 20th century. Given that we were talking about in some instances quite hardcore pornography, we saw no reason why this shouldn't be dressed up in an incredibly refined and beautiful fashion.

Playboy: There's a line in the book that puts forth a "make love not war" mantra. Was this a conscious decision?

Moore: One of the things that we remarked upon after finishing the book was what a profoundly '60s agenda Lost Girls was actually carrying out, even though it was coming out in 2006.