Marshall McLuhan was famous for fifteen minutes way back when for trumpeting ‘the medium is the message’, and he had a point, even if no two people can agree precisely what it was. Right now I’m thinking of business models to support an online project, the collaboration with Andy Tudor that I mentioned recently, and like McLuhan in that it involves thinking about the nature of media, and in particular how to create a commercially viable project in the online age.

Getting the model right is important, and what’s interesting with the online scene is there’s no definitive ‘how to’ that will produce the cashflow you’re looking for. Well, that’s true with offline work too — the mainstream comics model is one based on revenues raised from monthly publication. But in recent years that trend has been joined by another, for collecting serialised works under one cover. So you can buy an anthology of Daredevil issues for instance. And that in turn has led to a change in the way that writers conceive of their work: many now ‘write for the trade (paperback)’, which allows them more time to develop a story that works in 120 or so pages with rising and falling arcs and all that stuff you read about in McKee, rather than being five cliffhangers followed by a concluding issue.

The serialise-and-anthologise model works because the costs of producing the comic are covered by the audience that buys monthly comics, meaning the profits from the collection are gravy, and increasingly part of the money that creators make for their work. But that’s only one way to do it. As book publishers have entered the graphic novel field, it’s become common for writers and artists to be given advances for the work they’re going to do.

Warren Ellis is a canny thinker about the economics of the comics business. Interested in creating work that’s experimental by mainstream standards, he collaborated with publisher Avatar to create the Apparat line of comics. The first wave of Apparat were single-issue sized, and the downside of that is they tend to exist in a shop only so long before they’re removed from the shelves. So, next time round, the Apparat titles — one of which is reviewed here, and others of which I may well cover in time to come — were done as 48 page ‘graphic novellas’. Never mind the nomenclature: what it means is that these slim volumes are on the shelves long term, not restricted to the ‘this month’s titles’ selection but filed alongside Watchmen and Persepolis and the other anthologised collections and original graphic novels. Meaning you can buy Frankenstein’s Womb or other graphic novellas at your convenience rather than having to get it in a particular short calendar period, and that Avatar, Ellis, and his artists can benefit from the shelf life of their brainchild. Smart thinking.

Ellis scored again with another Avatar project, the online comic Freakangels. A serial produced in weekly installments of several pages like the 2000AD comics Ellis was familiar with in his youth, this collaboration with artist Paul Duffield is a big hit online, and has also spawned successful anthologies. And it may be that the concept of the story was geared to the audience that Ellis and Avatar have cultivated: Ellis’s online presence attracts a significant number of young people into alternative lifestyles, and the Freakangels themselves are the ultimate outsiders, misunderstood even by their peers. That comment, by the way, is by no means a criticism: what sense would it have made for Ellis to launch into a comic about the Lakeland poets in their twilight years? It’s easier to write with constraints than utterly free of them, and creating work for an identified audience is one constraint that makes a great deal of sense.

It’s not just Ellis that Andy and I have been learning from — the recent piece on Alex de Campi and Christine Larsen’s Valentine has prompted us to think of what’s possible as well. And those are just two examples of the way that the digital scene is changing the way that forward thinking creators conceive of developing profitable properties.

The idea of graphic novel as polemic is an unusual one. Most comics have nothing much to communicate beyond a certain level of visceral hit from striking graphics. Which is fine, as far as it goes. But the medium is capable of literally anything. And writer Warren Ellis is one of the minority of authors working in the comics mainstream with a real commitment to expanding its boundaries.

Fascinated by the possible futures that science presents, Ellis has a particular interest in the space programme. That obsession combines with his rabblerousing tendencies in the Vertigo graphic novel Orbiter, a collaboration with artist Colleen Doran published in 2003. The date is important: Orbiter was written just before the space shuttle Columbia was lost, and seven crew with it. Orbiter was always intended to have a propagandist element: that tragic coincidence gives it an added significance, making the graphic novel a clarion call for the resumption of manned space flight.

The story is simple at heart. A space shuttle believed lost returns after ten years. But of its original crew, only one person remains. And at first sight he seems to be crazy. On top of which, there’s the business of the shuttle’s transformation. What set out as a creation of metal and circuitry has returned with a layer of flesh covering it, and dust from the surface of Mars. And the more the scientists examining the shuttle come across, the less relation its journey has with the laws of physics as they’re accepted.

It’s time to think weird, then. To explore alternative ways of thinking that will help explain what’s happened to the shuttle and its crew. There’s a danger at this point of Ellis losing his readers in semi-digested technobabble, but I managed to keep up with it well enough for it to seem sort of feasible. What wasn’t so convincing was the psychologist managing to connect with the pilot — we’re told that she’s clever, but I wasn’t dazzled by their interaction. The ending was a bit abrupt for my tastes, too, though I can see exactly why Ellis brought things to a halt at that point.

That’s a minor quibble though — overall Orbiter is a successful story. Colleen Doran’s contributions are an important part of that impact — she’s as much a NASA geek as Ellis, making this a script she was destined to draw. Apparently it’s helped her career, too: many editors were blinded by her gender and she was often given supposedly female-friendly material to draw. No more: this hard edged science fiction tale opened the eyes of many in the industry.

Seven years since it was published, Orbiter seems just as timely. Obama’s suspension of America’s space programme gives Ellis and Doran’s creation a new relevance. And I’d like to see more work in comic form that has a didactic purpose: the medium is underutilised at this point, and it would be good to see a graphic novel as powerful in its effect as the 1960s television play Cathy Come Home, which led to the formation of the homeless charity Shelter.

Warren Ellis is sometimes criticised for his appropriation of science in comics stories. But that makes a pleasant change in an industry where one of the main genres — superhero stories — is known primarily for cannibalising previous superhero stories, as a result making many continuing titles near-impenetrable to outsiders. Given the choice between more variations on the theme of Shiny Thong Man and stories which draw on politics, science, or other influences, I know which I’m more interested in. And if Ellis’s continued success riles the more conservative contingent of the comics reading audience, then so much the better.

Smelly heck, adventure fans, have I got something for you. Whether you think of yourself as a comics fan or not, I’d strongly recommend you check out the online escapades contained in Valentine, a comic for the online age set in another one entirely. It’s the tale of Valentine Renaud and his friend Oscar, caught up in Napoleon’s doomed Russian escapade of 1812…or that’s how it starts anyway. Pretty soon, things kick off in a more fantastic direction, broadening the arena of the story and bringing even more fabulous pulp and mythical goodness into the equation.

Bringing this fun and excitement to readers are writer Alex de Campi and artist Christine Larsen. I’d come across de Campi through her excellent collaboration with artist Igor Kordey, Smoke, an espionage thriller featuring an albino protagonist. Hmm, shades of Elric maybe. And the doomed Melnibonean once again comes to mind as Valentine Renaud is entrusted with carting a magical sword about by a French general. Hey, Michael Moorcock has influenced many and worse writers than de Campi — like Oscar said, “Talent borrows, genius steals.”

Valentine is a steal in more than one way. It wears its influences on its floppy white sleeve, bringing to mind everything from Three Musketeers to The Flashing Blade, and it’s done with such joy and style that the familiarity is fine. Besides, coupled with Larsen’s art the whole has a fresh feel — this is fluid artwork that delivers the goods in terms of depicting character, place, and action, which is pretty much what’s required in a comic. Plus, some of the colour work is spooky: the bad guys’ red eyes really pop out on a screen against the prevailing tones.

Fast paced and urgent, the story moves along at a rate of knots, a new twist coming along every few panels. The use of digital technology is inspired: you’re never lost as you read the story, and there are some lovely subtle touches making maximum use of the new medium’s possibilities. In which regard, you might want to note that Valentine is available on Kindle, iPhone, and phones running Android. Not only that, but de Campi has made sure it’s available in 14 languages: not bad for a one-woman (plus pals) operation. It’ll also soon be available to read online thanks to Comixology, and a dead tree edition should be with us for the autumn.

There’s not much more to say about Valentine itself, except why on Earth aren’t comics publishers producing work of this calibre already? Superhero comics are moribund for the most part, and there are some decent crime comics being published, but when was the last time you read a good piece of pulp fantasy in comic form? I’m aware of Mouse Guard, but something inside me squeaks when presented with anthropomorphic characters unless they’re in Krazy Kat.

If anything — and it’d be interesting to know what de Campi makes of the comparison — Valentine has something of the early days of Sim and Gerhard’s Cerebus about it. Not the weirdass monotheistic stuff that brought the series to a much-needed end, but the liberating fun of the aardvark’s early days. (And yes, I know that I’m kind of confusing my own argument about animal protagonists here: contradictory opinions are all part of the service.)

Valentine has already and deservedly made a name for itself, and hopefully de Campi and Larsen will make oodles of money out of their project. Help them, and yourself — pop over here to find out how and where to purchase the story. Unlike printed comics, digital ones don’t go out of print — you can start whenever you like and read as much as you like, and I urge you to do exactly that if you’re at all enamored of the camaraderie of men on horseback, swordplay, and the interplay of history and legend.

Back in the day, DC Thomson’s comics were free of the names of those who wrote and drew the stories they contained. Children would be confused by the information, so the editors said, and be drawn out of the tales they were reading. More to the point, it meant that the writers and artists were anonymous, making it harder for them to build up a fanbase and use that as leverage to ask for more money, or be talent spotted by rival publishers.

This resentment of the people who wrote and drew the comics that the publishers made money from is a typical attitude of the industry, even today. Marvel and DC like to hook their readers onto characters, and the fact that they and the people chronicling their adventures are largely interchangeable means that creative talents can be switched from one title to another without much impact on sales. And as a system, it works. Particularly if you’re the publisher.

In the sixties, all that started to change when fans started to organise, and wrote to and hung out with the people who created their favourite comics. In turn, some of those fans went on to become a new generation of talent in the seventies working for those same publishers — often with not much more ambition than to follow in the footsteps of those they’d admired. Pop will indeed eat itself.

Fast forward to the 1980s. A band called Pop Will Eat Itself celebrated a comics writer whose capabilities were well in advance of his predecessors. Alan Moore knows the score, said the Poppies. Like them, he was a working class product of pop culture, who referenced high and low art in his work. (One of the Poppies, Clint Mansell, has gone on to become a celebrated film composer, collaborating with the Kronos Quartet for the soundtrack of Requiem for a Dream. Alan Moore’s recent work includes The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which imagines a world based on myriad fictional sources from Camus to Ian Fleming.)

Moore was, and arguably is, most known for Watchmen, his seminal collaboration with artist David Gibbons. It is a work of singular impressiveness, perhaps genius. There sure as hell wasn’t anything like it in comics before the 12 issue series appeared. And it’s appeared ever since, in a number of graphic novel editions, including the superduper paving slab sized one that I invested in the other year. Watchmen is also a truly lousy film, one which Moore had nothing to do with. And he’s taken that stand further, relinquishing his financial rights to the work he created for DC and passing it on to his artists, to give him more time to concentrate on projects that truly matter to him: Jerusalem, an epic novel charting the history of the world as seen from Northampton, and the internationally distributed fanzine Dodgem Logic.

And now DC are planning spin-offs of Watchmen. Prequels and sequels, but you can bet nothing else that equals the brilliance of the original. And DC know that. Which is why led by Paul Levitz they never made such a crass move. Now under Dan DiDio, that’s precisely what they’re doing. Making DiDio even more of a numpty than Simon Cowell, who believes the world wants and needs his banal music, and the preening wannabes who perform it.

Make no mistake: like the film Watchmen, anything that appears bearing that branding is going to be karaoke. Remember that phrase means ‘empty voice’. And sure as hell the comics shit out of DC’s sphincter will bear no more relationship to Alan Moore’s Watchmen than an Oasis tribute band does to The Beatles at their height. But people will buy them, and some of them will enjoy what they read, for the same reason that millions eat at McDonalds when actual burgers are available elsewhere. All of which is a reminder that, for the majority of publishers, the lowest common denominator is what it’s about — even if at least some of the creators signed up to them aspire to writing and drawing work of lasting worth.

I have an odd relationship with fictional vigilantes. Call them superheroes, and I’ll read what they get up to. But a character who’s out to right wrongs at the visceral level and does so without powers, I find creepy. It makes no sense, unless it’s that unpowered vigilantes steer perilously close to the real world, in which taking physical action to right wrongs is fraught with moral issues. And, at the same time, some of my favourite prose in recent years has been provided by Lee Childs, whose Jack Reacher books are about a former military cop who gets involved in all kinds of righteous causes and resolves complex problems with firearms and fisticuffs.

Thing being, that Reacher is pretty cultured underneath it all. And has leftish sympathies unusual in the genre. Which makes him the poster child for frustrated liberals everywhere, an appealing fantasy in a world where Sarah Palin is taken seriously and assholes online argue that it’s pointless supporting plans to restore Haiti because the people there ‘won’t stand against the ragheads with us’.

But I draw the line at Marvel’s Punisher comic. Its protagonist, Frank Castle, is a grizzled Vietnam vet who goes out and kills heaps of people on a regular basis. Not much fun to be had there, though there was a legendary run by writer Garth Ennis that I have yet to check out. Anyway, the series has been reinvented under editor Axel Alonso, who has attracted interesting new talent to chronicle Frank’s mayhem — not least my friend, artist Laurence Campbell. And the thing is, Laurence is such a talent that seeing him apply his skills to The Punisher is like Steven Spielberg turning his hand to tv movies and ending up with the tremendous truck yarn Duel. His sophisticated visual sensibilities ensure that even when you’re reading a run of the mill tale about a psycho gunman taking down some drug dealers, it looks like a Michael Mann film, when The Punisher is more usually on a par with Michael Winner’s dismal Death Wish.

Laurence told me about a new Punisher comic he’s illustrated, written by fellow Brit Rob Williams. And it’s a doozie. The title, Get Castle!, correctly indicates that this is a homage to the superb Get Carter. Storywise, it follows Frank from New York to the valleys of Wales as he tracks down the killers of a friend’s son and takes them on. Oh, and those killers are SAS members, so you know there’s going to be some serious mayhem later. Excellent, and a fitting complement to The Hard Way, the Jack Reacher book I’d recently read, in which Reacher comes to Britain. Cathartic violence ensues.

Much the same comes about in Rob and Laurence’s comic. Of course Frank takes down the SAS guys, after getting to know the local territory and community, and the lowlife who live there. He checks out the local drugs scene, and the dialogue and behaviour come across naturalistically rather than as if portrayed by people who only know what they’re depicting through copying films and comics. Laurence’s art is grounded in reality too: no insane muscles here, or London buses travelling through Brecon: things are as they should be, and Lee Loughridge’s colour work gives the whole a suitably dark feel, acting on the page like a good colour grade does for the screen.

What elevates the story beyond its effectiveness as a routine thriller is the subtleties that artist and writer bring to their work. Laurence’s contributions you can get a sense of here in an interview with both him and the writer, but Rob’s take a while to sink in. It’s in the repetition of the phrase ‘I paused’ that the writer conjures something that strays potently beyond the boundaries of how these scripts are typically written. Each repetition presents a choice point for Frank Castle, a moment when he could go one way or the other. And it’s the insight into those moments that gives the story its power — and a very effective open ending, which you can see as light or dark, depending. Personally, I saw it as offering hope. But the next creative team taking The Punisher will take it all back to square one, as these things pretty much always work out in serial fiction.

The longer people hold on to the idea that Alan Moore defines intelligence and quality in comics, the harder it will be for writers of equivalent magnitude to take their place alongside him. The field of comics is small enough that it’s only got room for one genius writer, so for now Grant Morrison and Pete Milligan and Ed Brubaker and Jason Aaron have to stand to one side for the big beardy miserablist. And now another writer has come up with a work of ferocious intelligence easily the equal of anything that Moore has done.

I’d come across Mike Carey before, and checked out a collection of his Lucifer series for Vertigo, which didn’t do anything for me. Reheated Gaimanisms from what I could see. Then I started hearing good things about The Unwritten, the first collected edition of which has just appeared. And it’s good. Better than good. Carey wrote it, and Peter Gross provides art which relishes body language and sets the tone perfectly.

Fiercely intelligent, and fun with it, The Unwritten is a classic case of having your cake and eating it. Centred on Tom Taylor, a young man who was the model for his father’s fantasy character Tommy Taylor, the story explores the intersection of the father’s fictional milieu, reader response to it in the form of fan websites and conventions, and the nature of fiction itself. Hey, you can’t fault Carey for lacking imaginative ambition.

Tom’s life is deeply entrenched in fiction, having been brought up with encyclopedic knowledge of how real locations and fictional events dovetail. His version of the world is equal parts raw sensory experience and literary history, and there’s a psychogeographical aspect to the story that accelerates when Taylor travels to the Swiss castle he was partly raised in, also the birthplace of Milton’s Satan and Shelley’s Frankenstein.

The comic is similarly rich, layering a well-paced adventure story that sees Taylor attempting to unravel the truth about himself: can he even rely on his belief that he’s the child of his parents, or was he adopted? Alongside that drama, there’s a wider picture unfolding which seems to involve genuinely magical forces. And a kind of postscript to the first storyline suggests the battle lines of this conflict were drawn a long time ago, and involved Rudyard Kipling for one.

This is a story that could only have been written by someone who’s been writing for some time: the meditations on writing, awareness of industry types, and sheer knowledge of the field says as much. And I’m glad that it’s delivered by a creator who works in comics: the pulp roots of the form, and the conventions which Carey abides by, make the story a lot more fun than it might have been in the hands of an overly serious prose writer. Or maybe it’s just me that found Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum ponderous and dull compared to the fleet science fiction take on much the same stuff peddled by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea in their Illuminatus trilogy.

Tremendously enjoyable, the effect of The Unwritten is like reading a fantasy comic that’s got its own built-in publishing history and fan response, all wrapped up in the same issue. If you’ve got any interest at all in how fiction comes into being, the interplay of life and art, how readers respond to texts for good and otherwise, then The Unwritten will appeal to you immensely. Speak it quietly, but the text parts of Watchmen were kind of dull, and that pirate stuff was like being hit over the head with a blunt metaphor: here, the different strands combine to create a web you’ll love being part of, and will want to return to.

A lot of people rate The Winter Men very highly. On the back page of the graphic novel, the likes of Warren Ellis, Brian Vaughan and Joe Kubert line up to sing its praises. A flick through its pages and it’s easy to see why: John Paul Leon’s art has never been better, capturing life in Russia and Brooklyn convincingly in intelligently-designed pages that flow like a well made thriller.

A man brings a helicopter down by throwing a rifle into its rotors. A table full of Russian gangsters welcome someone to their feast. A young girl’s hand sears an imprint on a wall. A lorry full of Coke explodes. There’s no shortage of visual drama, and with it a cleverly constructed story that looks back to a Russian programme to develop super-powered citizens, and to the present when the legacy of those days is played out in grimy international deals: art forgery, murder, and — most significantly — child kidnap.

Writer Brett Lewis is new to comics but takes to the medium with ease. His skill is weaving different strands so that, as the story moves forwards, we also discover more about the past and the people whose lives were shaped by it. Front and centre in all this is Kris Kalenov, a man whose life is defined by violence and politics, whether formal in the formal sense of state machinations or the intricacies of criminal life.

Lewis is in command of the story throughout. He’s clearly thought through the material not only in a linear way — what unfolds makes sense in that respect, with the requisite thrills and spills you’d expect of a thriller — but in terms of character and theme too. Ideally this should be the case for any writer, but Lewis knows how to enrich every interaction to ensure it works at a couple of levels. Writing this skilful is rare in comics, and not encountered much more often in novels or films.

A good point of comparison here is Jason Aaron’s Scalped. Aaron has a similar control of his material, and both like to come in at stories from unexpected angles. And that’s praise indeed, Scalped being perhaps the finest comic on the market. No sign of Lewis diversifying into mainstream projects for Marvel or DC as Aaron has though — perhaps he has other ambitions, though I’d love to see him write comics again.

While I don’t doubt that it’s all down to nothing more exciting than photo-referencing, it’s good to see that the sequences in Brooklyn and back in Moscow can be easily distinguished. There’s a matter of fact quality about John Paul Leon’s art that adds to the credibility of the story: he draws people with lived-in faces, who seem to move like real people do. A world away from the nonsense that passes for art in most superhero comics.

The Winter Men also reminds me of The Shield, another tale about a morally compromised protagonist. The fact that I’m comparing it to such high quality work tells you about the regard I hold this graphic novel in. Another point of comparison: Howard Chaykin’s seminal comic series American Flagg, with which it shares a corrupt setting, sharp dialogue, and an interesting approach to structure.

You’ve got the idea by now: The Winter Men is good stuff. If you’re at all interested in thrillers, in contemporary Russia, in international crime, in post-WW2 history, this is a graphic novel I can guarantee you’ll get a lot out of. And if you’re someone who’s sniffy about comics, let this be the one that changes your mind about a medium.

I’ve just started to read the novel House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds, and the short piece preceding the first chapter has done lovely things to my head. “I was born in a house with a million rooms,” it starts, “built on a small airless world on the edge of an empire of light and commerce that the adults called The Golden Hour, for a reason I did not yet grasp.”

In that first sentence, there’s more imagination than I’ve encountered in some whole volumes. It’s something that interests me at the moment, having just read Jonathan Hickman’s graphic novel Pax Romana. Again, imagination is the keynote: under the control of the Vatican, a military force is sent back centuries in time to ensure the dominance of the Holy Roman Empire. Boom: when did you last come across a concept with that kind of scope?

Somehow, Hickman deals with that idea and its ramifications in one slim volume. Yes, you could say that the scale of the thinking is so big he doesn’t do his story justice. Hickman uses the device of a narrator recounting events to a young listener that enables him to skip through chunks of detail. What would be a chunky trilogy in the hands of some authors is a regular sized graphic novel for him. The emphasis is on ideas and their resolution, with several sections pretty much text-only recounting the arguments of the time travellers about the ethics and practicalities of what they’re doing.

For me, it’s interesting to compare Pax Romana with the much-feted Asterios Polyp. By striking chords familiar to readers of well-received ‘grown up’ books, and demonstrating a facility with realising intellectual conceits in graphic form, Mazzucchelli has won support from those who feel that comics should aspire to mainstream notions of the highbrow.

Hickman will never be reviewed in that way. Especially now that he’s banging away playing with Marvel’s toys. Hopefully he’ll continue to come up with creator owned work demonstrating greater imaginative flair than needed to get a group of guys in tights to beat the snot out of another similarly clad gang.

What makes Hickman stand out is his design sense. His use of info graphics informs his storytelling choices. Timelines are part of how Pax Romana functions, Hickman laying out significant narrative events in paragraphs tracing a sequence from the appearance of 21st century troops in the 4th century BC to 1421 AD in the amended timeline, when man has a colony on Mars.

Of course, big ideas don’t have to be confined to science fiction. Dave Sim and Gerhard did 300 issues of Cerebus without a rocketship or raygun, and with plenty to say about politics and religion. Berlin, by Jason Lutes, is an ambitious sequence of graphic novels about life in pre-WW2 Germany. Brian K. Vaughan’s Pride of Baghdad is a commentary on war in Iraq in anthropomorphic form.

Those examples are well and good, but the market continues to gravitate to giving a diminishing audience more of what it thinks it wants, rather than exposing it to tastes of difference. Comics readers are like toddlers who turn up their noses at any new food offered them, and twenty years later are stuck eating peanut butter sandwiches, baked beans and fries, with can of Coke in hand, still baffled by the notion of vegetables or spicing.

Or maybe it’s worse than that. There’s a fine true tale about a radio station that started up in Florida that was only going to play Led Zeppelin. And before they started up properly, they did test broadcasts, playing only Stairway to Heaven and one other Zep classic for several days. On encountering this on their radios, local police came round to the station armed for trouble, since clearly a diet of such uniformity indicated the presence of a madman…

I’m just saying.

One mark of a skilled creator is the ability to capture truths of their craft in few words. Years of learning go into producing what can come across as truisms, making it all the more frustrating when novice creators ignore the wisdom of their elders and insist on learning things for themselves. Hey, we’ve all done it. And the truth is, it takes a certain degree of experience of your own to recognise someone else’s wisdom.

In this case, the pearls are produced by cartoonist Kyle Baker, one of the industry’s leading talents, in this interview concerning his contribution to DC’s Wednesday Comics, reviewed a while back right here. Anyway, the critical bit of the piece, which is well worth reading in full, is found in this nugget about the character Hawkman, whose adventures Baker chronicles in the weekly comic:

“The big challenge in writing for a hero who carries a mace and sword is that these are not defensive weapons. There is no ‘stun’ setting on a mace. A mace is designed solely for smashing bones and tearing flesh. As a writer, I can’t give Hawkman a human adversary. It would be cruel. If the plane hijackers had been normal human beings, Hawkman would have bashed their skulls in and stabbed them. Even though the hijackers have shot the pilot, the punishment exceeds the crime. On the other hand, beheading a giant space lobster with a sword seems quite all right, even heroic. A man using a mace to battle a T-Rex seems positively sporting.”

Baker makes his point with humour, and there’s a danger that it obscures the very pertinent points he is making. So I’ll spend a while demonstrating in a pedantic fashion exactly what makes his comments so smart and relevant to anyone who fancies calling themselves a writer.

The bottom line is, design a story so that all the elements integrate. An antagonist should be well matched to the protagonist, preferably one step ahead of them for the majority of the story until the hero finds whatever it is that will enable them to prevail. In Hawkman’s case it’s a whacking great mace. It could just as well be the realisation that their opponent has power only because an implicit acceptance of their right to bully, and conquering that interior glitch will enable the hero to win on the outside too. Different genres have their preferences for whether the critical moment happens on the inside or the outside, and it’s often clear that each reflects the other: if Hawkman can’t fly it’s likely to be down to inner conflict, even if the story wraps it up in magical or science fiction trappings.

Put Hawkman in a story where emotional nuances count for more than wingspan and martial prowess, and you start to realise the limitations of the character. Unless you’re a writer of Alan Moore’s calibre that is, and can go on to uncover layers to Hawkman that readers had never previously suspected, but your story convinces them were there all along. Only, you’re probably not Alan Moore, so I suggest you save such deeper character work until you’ve got some of the basics under your belt.

That said, mixing things up is interesting. You might not want to go as far as seeing Hawkman undergo therapy (though a gangster’s explorations of his psyche fuelled The Sopranos perfectly well), but there’s inherent interest with putting a winged barbarian in a setting where diplomatic skills count for more than swordsmanship. That could lead to humour, or the realisation that Hawkman is a lot cannier than most readers would initially imagine. At any rate, the capacity to surprise the reader is to be cherished — as much as fans like their heroes to go and do the things they’re most known for, mixing things up from time to time is a good thing. Remember Indiana Jones shooting his sword wielding opponent? Worked a treat because of audience expectation that Indy would reach for his trusty whip. If we didn’t know Indy used a whip, it’d just have painted him as a less stylish hero, and that wouldn’t do. The more work you put into setting things up well, the more fun it is when you mix them up later.

It’s the little touches that make the difference in Asterios Polyp, the first graphic novel by Batman: Year One artist David Mazzucchelli.  On the surface things are pretty straightforward, the storytelling smooth and effective and as friendly as Charlie Brown to readers who haven’t spent their lives reading comics.  The subtleties are there though, and they do exactly what they should do: help convey character and mood effortlessly, as the story of architecture professor Asterios unfolds.

Much of the tale is concerned with the protagonist’s relationship with wife Hana, and there are simple and beautiful devices to communicate the state of play between them.  Reunited after divorce, their intimacy is quickly rekindled — something we know less from their verbal exchanges than the fact that the tails of their word balloons entwine.  But the balloons themselves are of different shapes and contain different fonts, which capture some of the speaker’s character.  None of this is rocket science, and this is hardly the first graphic fiction to indicate character through lettering, but the cumulative effect of Mazzucchelli’s choices is elegant and convincing.

But what of the story itself?  The nearest comparison I can make is to the films of Wes Anderson.  That is, the protagonist is a well-to-do academic who isn’t as smart as he fancies himself, who inhabits a world of eccentric characters.  Asterios is an architect in a purely conceptual sense: he has won competitions for his designs, but never had a building constructed from one of his plans.  He seems to see no problem with this situation, if only because his peers include similarly self-regarding underachievers.

In the latter category we have two contenders: pompous dramaturg Willy Ilium, who Hana serves as a kind of PA — the poor woman is forever overshadowed by male grotesques — and dishevelled composer Kalvin Kahoutek.  The three of them are immersed in debates about the nature of art, not forgetting to put one another down in clever ways: it’s like the relationship of psychiatrist Frasier with brother Niles.  I kind of enjoyed this stuff, but there’s a degree to which I can only tolerate fictional creations along such lines, and it’s not for much longer than I can stomach their real life counterparts.  Your mileage may vary.

Fortunately there are other characters to spend time with: odd couple mechanic Stiff Major and his pillowy wife, self-declared goddess Ursula, who Asterios lives with for a while, and the punk band who inhabit their orbit.  They ground the book a bit after the hifalutin’ stuff with the intellectuals, but Mazzucchelli is still just as interested in concepts and wordplay.

I’m hoping if Mazzucchelli does another graphic novel — and his talent is such that I’d be at the start of the queue — he’ll moderate some of his fixations and concentrate more on engaging narrative.  Maybe it’s just my desire to be immersed in bigger chunks of story, or frustration with his admittedly well-depicted characters, but I found the segmented style of the book — vignettes that capture incidents and emotions across the course of its protagonist’s life — a little unsatisfying.

Ultimately, the style of Asterios Polyp fascinates and convinces me more than its content.  Mazzucchelli is without doubt a hugely gifted cartoonist, but he has yet to convince as a storyteller.  That said, this graphic novel is definitely worth a read, as an example of a state of the art piece of graphic narrative.  Whether its creator goes on to do something more to my taste, or other people plunder the techniques he employs, Asterios Polyp is a beautifully designed landmark in the history of the graphic novel.