In 1986 the legendary comic book author changed the genre forever with "Watchmen," a 12-part serial in which superheroes turned rapists, racists and flunkies of Richard Nixon are hunted down in the days before World War III. This series was read by people who'd never read comics before and never would again. It influenced a generation of comic book writers to turn cowled and caped men into emotional invalids who were fighting crime in lieu of substantive psychotherapy.

It was also what turned Moore into the medium's first pop star, bigger than the characters on the page. Now, he is using that status on his latest endeavor: a whole line of comics meant to reconstruct the superhero, to make him and her again worthy of our attention.

This is not just an aesthetic concern. Having established the "direct market" in the 1980s to better serve the existing readership, giving comic shops earlier access to books than newsstands, the comic book industry set out on a decade-long pursuit of self-destruction. Between 1990 and 1993, the number of comic shops in North America rose from 3,000 to 10,000, fueled by customers' misguided hopes of financial reward. Forty-eight million comics were sold in April 1993, helping sales for that year to reach $850 million.

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Thus began a series of events that concluded on a Saturday night in January with me sitting in the dark, sobbing into a pillowcase, drinking a bottle of He'brew beer that I'd saved from a friend's Hanukkah party and listening to Merle Haggard. I had taken on the antiquated custom of arranged marriage, in its modern incarnation, and it had beaten me into a state of previously unfathomable self-pity that happened to include very bad beer.

This was new terrain for me. I am Indian by birth, but I grew up as a white kid in southwest Ohio. I drank beer in open fields in high school and still consider my greatest adolescent achievement the night I walked into the homecoming dance with the prettiest girl in my senior class. I worship Johnny Bench. And until last December, the prospect of an arranged marriage was an abstract idea to me, the appropriate narrative vein for someone else's story; my grandparents', my parents', even my sister's, but never my own.

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