SANTA MONICA, Calif. — For a guy being grilled about cartoon squids and superhero genitalia, Zack Snyder is looking pretty comfortable.

And why wouldn't he? Snyder is in his element: chatting about comic books at a computer store, surrounded by laptops and geeks.

The 42-year-old director is making the case for his film, "Watchmen," before a standing-room-only crowd of fanboys at an Apple store. He has slides, videos and a few secrets to spill to help sell his adaptation of a graphic novel once considered too dark, violent and sprawling to become Hollywood hay.

Coming from any other director, the pitch might seem desperate, particularly in front of a group of devotees who love to test — and deride — a filmmaker's knowledge of the illustrated arts.

But after the unexpected success of his last film, "300," another graphic-novel adaptation, Snyder has become something of a nerd king, an auteur for comic-book fans who consider him one of three directors (along with Sam Raimi and Christopher Nolan) who can be trusted with their beloved material.

Privately, though, Snyder knows such standing is tenuous. He's aware of how skeptical even his faithful are about a movie version of one of the most revered graphic novels ever.

Not that the challenge dissuades Snyder. If anything, he courts the doubters who have been hounding him since he made the jump from television commercials to feature films five years ago to remake George Romero's "Dawn of the Dead."

"I actually got death threats for doing 'Dawn,' " he says after the presentation, which ended in wild applause from fans who showed up as much to see the director as the footage.

"Can you believe that? Death threats. Over a movie. People were so angry that I'd touch something that was such a cult favorite. You always are going to get people who want to cut you down, especially when you make risky movies."

Still, it's hard to underestimate the gamble of "Watchmen," a three-year production that marks Warner Bros.' $100 million bet that the genre is flop-proof.

"Watchmen," though, is not your typical caped-crusader story. The graphic novel's fan base remains relatively small — certainly not large enough to make the movie profitable. Most moviegoers would have a hard time naming one character from the books.

Add to that bone-splintering violence that makes "The Dark Knight" look like a Saturday installment of "Super Friends," and Snyder finds himself with an R-rated film that will be a measure not only of the genre's popularity, but also his own.

"At first I didn't want to make the movie," he says. "I was like everyone else. I didn't want to see Hollywood (mess) it up with some watered-down story where the good guys win, the bad guys lose and no one really gets hurt. Then I figured it ought to be someone who knows and loves the material. And if I didn't do it, someone else would."

Certainly people tried over the years. Written by Alan Moore in 1985 as a 12-part comic book, the story of jaded crime fighters fed up with mankind was hailed almost immediately as a masterwork, a "Catcher in the Rye" for the Reagan generation.

Later compiled into a graphic novel, the book became the first anti-comic, a chronicle of flawed heroes coping with inner demons as wicked as the villains they chased.

"When I was in college, people would say to me, 'You read a lot of comics, don't you?' " Snyder says. "I'd hand them 'Watchmen' and say, 'Just read this,' to show them I wasn't a dork."

"Watchmen" reveled in vice. Daring and preposterous, it features frontal male nudity, murder and attempted rape among superheroes and an alien squid that destroys half of New York. Time magazine listed it among the 100 greatest novels of the 20th century.

But the subject matter and scope of the story (which includes a stint on Mars) stymied studios unsure how to adapt the tale's graphic violence and sexuality, as well as the special effects the story would require.

Having bounced from studio to studio, "Watchmen" required legal wrangling as well. Twentieth Century Fox sued Warner Bros. last year, claiming it still owned some of the rights to the property. The studios settled out of court last month for an undisclosed amount.