When was the last time you came across an artwork that made you reevaluate the medium itself? Two come to mind: DJ Shadow’s debut Endtroducing, a piece of music made almost entirely from other pieces of music, and Hell by the Chapman Brothers, an art installation made of 5000 mutated toy soldiers in a grotesque scenario that has special resonance for anyone who spent their teens playing wargames.

Comics though? Well, we all know about Watchmen and the fancy pants artwork of the likes of Dave McKean, but those are pretty much more sophisticated versions of what was happening in the medium already. What Jonathan Hickman has done with The Nightly News is something else again.

Not the least of Hickman’s accomplishments is that his graphic novel is eminently readable by people with no previous experience of comics. In some respects The Nightly News will go down better with a general audience than those whose perceptions are blinkered by what passes for mainstream in the comics medium.

It’s a grown-up satire about the media that will go down well with fans of Douglas Coupland, Chuck Palahniuk, and Bill Hicks. That fact alone distinguishes it from the great majority of what you’ll find in a comics shop. And even better, it does so in bravura style, in the process serving up a new take on what can be done with the comics page that leaves pretty much everything else years behind.

Jonathan Hickman is the sole creator of The Nightly News, and it couldn’t have worked any other way. What’s immediately apparent is that his vision of what to do with a page is light years away from the usual illustrative paradigms, whether skilfully rendered muscle men, or sketchy indie charity cases. Instead, his starting point is design: smart, clear, and contemporary.

Sure, there’s room for illustration in Hickman’s take on comics — the story features a range of well-depicted characters — but the first thing you notice is that the page looks more akin to a piece of clever infographics, the sort of thing that newspapers put together to explain the credit crunch or the collapse of Madonna’s wedding. His skill at guiding your eye across the page is considerable, which is more than can be said for some of the hotshot artists working for Marvel and DC.

For all that design finesse, you’re constantly captivated by a thoroughly engaging story about a cult intent on killing journalists for their part in messing the world up. Part of the fun is Hickman’s sheer gung-ho delight in his conceit: there’s real zest in his depiction of the slaughter of an assortment of hacks and anchors, and you can’t help but be captivated by the easy appeal of the cult that’s targetting them. The simplicity of the cult’s worldview is part of its attraction in a world where the media is in so many ways complicit with the corruption it reports on. In the age of the citizen journalist, we are all embedded — and the cultists are doing something definitive about that.

Sure, it’s nonsense. But it’s intelligent, skilfully perpetrated nonsense of a very high calibre. The fact that it redefines what a whole artform is capable of in the process is almost incidental. I have high hopes for the future work of Jonathan Hickman. Sad then, that he’s co-writing a series for Marvel with Brian Bendis. An inevitable career move in an industry where supporting yourself is hard, or a brazen sell-out that should be met with a hail of bullets? I’ll sleep on that one. For now.