It’s amazing what you can do with words and pictures on a page. Comics have such potential, and creators are still finding new ways to work with the way that images and text combine. Sure, there are some tried and tested means of using the form, but what’s exciting is that there is still room for new methods, new effects.

I’d been planning to read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home for a while, having read lots of praise for this autobiographical graphic novel. I’m glad that I picked up my copy in a charity shop for what I typically spend on a latte, as I’ve rarely been so annoyed by a text. It purports to be a graphic novel, and there’s no shortage of blue chip reviewers singing its praises, but I’m sceptical about how many of those who love it so are truly readers of comics.

Bottom line is that Fun Home is not a graphic novel. It’s an illustrated memoir, with the emphasis on the text. There are pictures, sure enough, but they support and amplify details of what’s there in the form of words. Which in my eyes counts as entry level stuff, and in no way merits the kind of plaudits this book has got.

Sure, it’s welll-written. No disputing that. But in no way does Alison Bechdel explore the possibilities of the comic form. No artful or ironic juxtapositions of form and content here. This is an illustrated memoir, no more and no less, which may help explain its popularity with audiences less used to the beautiful possibilities available to graphic novelists. If you really want to see how this kind of stuff should be done, check out Eddie Campbell’s beautiful mixed media adaptations of Alan Moore’s autobiographical writing The Birth Caul and Snakes and Ladders. Compared to those, Fun Home is child’s play, and the work of a bookish and conventional child at that.

Where Alison Bechdel makes the mistake of treating art as a mere adornment of text, Christos Gage pursues another dead end in Area 10, a collaboration with artist Chris Samnee for the Vertigo Crime imprint. Gage has written for tv and film, and Area 10 ultimately comes across as an illustrated screenplay.

Sure, it’s a more interesting choice than the static one made by Bechdel, but it’s a no less limited approach to the exploration of the possibilities of the comics medium. It’s a well paced thriller, and its twists and turns are straight out of a skilfully executed three act structure…but that’s all it is.

To really make the most of what can be done on a page with words and pictures takes more thought than these creators were inclined to apply. Which is fine in terms of not scaring the horses, but fails to really get to grips with a medium that offers so much to the curious creator.

Take a look back to the roots of comics, and the amazing work of George Herriman in the newspaper strip Krazy Kat. Unconstrained by knowledge of the medium because he was too busy inventing it, Herriman’s ability to juxtapose the different elements of a page led to the creation of paper poetry admired by James Joyce and Picasso among others, while still being accessible to a mainstream audience.

Looking at the majority of comics these days, it’s clear that most creators have retreated from risk and stayed with the clearly depicted linear narrative in their pursuit of a means to get by. Which makes some sense, but makes most comics fairly unsatisfying to read. Books and films are wonderful media in their own right, rather than a role model for comics to aspire to. Thankfully, there are creators who have a fascination with what they can achieve with the means at their disposal, and recent years have seen the rise of Chris Ware, whose award winning Jimmy Corrigan is a far deeper and broader example of what can be done in two dimensions than the limited horizons demonstrated by Fun Home and Area 10.

So, you’re an alien with a lifespan in millenia, and you’ve used that time to mastermind your own twisted eugenics programme on a backwater planet where your peoples’ battle against an enemy race is still being played out centuries after the resolution of that war back home. All you need to reach the next stage of your plan is for someone to kill you. Which should be simple enough, given the number of enemies you’ve acquired over time, and your skill in manipulating people to your ends.

Only, when it comes to it, things aren’t that simple. You just can’t get the help some days. Even when you’ve choreographed an alleged enemy into being with you while he holds a gun and swears he’s going to blow your head off, he never actually gets round to realising his threat. So, you wind him up even more. And he says he’ll kill you. And the bastard still doesn’t do it.

That wonderfully twisted scenario comes in one of the chunks of writer Joe Casey’s contributions to the mythology of Wildcats. Dark, and delightfully realised by artist Sean Phillips, it beats to a different drum than most comics I’ve seen, and gave me a real appreciation for Joe’s writing talents.

I’d read a lot about Joe Casey without actually reading any of his comics. He’s an interesting interview subject, talking passionately and with disarming frankness about the medium he loves and has never quite fitted in with. Sure, in the course of his career he’s written for iconic series like X-Men and Adventures of Superman, but he’s just as focused on a wide range of less well-known, but frequently applauded, titles such as Godland, Automatic Kafka, and Milkman Murders.

So, he’s written all that stuff, and somehow I didn’t pick up an actual Joe Casey book until I came across a second hand copy of Vicious Circles, the second collection of his run on Wildcats. I’d previously enjoyed Alan Moore’s take on the aliens and superheroes series, and had heard good things about Joe’s take on the title — all of which added up to justification for finally parting with money to check out some of Casey’s work.

There’s a delicious dark humour running through that scene with the alien overlord failing to get an enemy to murder him. Similar delights run through the collection. An android character is beautifully depicted — while his more stylish colleagues sport dark suits and smoke enigmatically, the android dresses like a stereotypical American tourist, in shorts and a colourful shirt. His speech patterns are similarly naive.

Clearly, whatever else might be going on, Joe Casey likes to enjoy himself while he’s writing. That makes a real difference to the finished comics. For all their powers, Casey’s characters have very credible motivations. And Casey is clearly a bit bored by the repetitive nature of the superhero comic. This second volume lays the seeds for what a lot of people reckon is his best work, which shifts Wildcats from being about people hitting one another and instead explores another means of using power to change the world: corporate enterprise.

All that’s to come, and I know now that I’ll go out of my way to find Casey’s other work on Wildcats. And, who knows, maybe I’ll check out more of his work too. Casey’s in an enviable position, as one of the Man of Action collective of writers, of being able to pick and choose what comics work he does, thanks to the financial stability that the team have achieved through developing Ben 10 and other hit animation shows for kids. All of which suggests that Casey’s interest in corporate affairs is not merely academic: getting Ben 10 off the ground is a major achievement, involving interacting with networks and merchandising manufacturers. It’s an impressive feat, and one I’d like to emulate.

I got into a lovely conversation with someone earlier, a woman who spotted my Page 45 bag as I went up to buy a smoothie at the till she was working behind, and recognised me as a fellow comics geek. We were still talking an hour later, joined by a couple of other people too, in a freewheeling chat about how race and class and sexuality are depicted in stories. Which all sounds very po-faced, but the conversation was anything but: views and examples and counterexamples were exchanged in a very friendly fashion, without the animosity and entrenchment that such discussions can often lead to online, where there’s no visible connection between the views people express and the manner in which they articulate them in person.

Brought up in the eighties in the Caribbean, my new acquaintance loved comics and only had access to those published by Marvel and DC — there was no market for indies, or at any rate no one speculated on the possibility of one. She became a big fan of the X-Men as written by Chris Claremont, at a time when I too was engrossed in their adventures. But J had a whole different take on the characters thanks to her sex and race. This was at a time when Claremont was arguably one of the more progressive writers in the medium, making a point of creating powerful female characters in his stories, which also featured considerable ethnic diversity.

For all the kudos Claremont received for the wider spectrum of characters he wrote about, there was a distressing undercurrent to what happened to the female ones. More than once, one of his heroines would begin to explore her sexuality — usually signified by a change to a stereotypically ’sexy’ outfit — and discover that her powers were boosted as a result. Only, such explorations inevitably ended up with them turning evil not long afterwards. It happens once, and it’s a story. More than once, it kind of creates a pattern. One which says something about its creator — and has a particular resonance for a young woman of colour reading what happens when one heroine after another discovers lingerie and genocide in quick succession.

These things matter. They might not be noticed so much by the white males who constitute a large part of the mainstream comics readership, but to J they sent out a consistent and negative message about what women are like. No great surprise that she stopped reading comics for quite a while, though as much as anything that had to do with the ascendancy of Rob Liefeld in the nineties and the industry reshaping itself in his misshapen and crosshatched image.

J came back to comics, saying it was Marvel’s Civil War event that drew her back in, and Mark Millar’s Ultimates that persuaded her to stay. She was and is more persuaded by the relative diversity of the Marvel Universe compared to DC’s fictional sandbox, where attempts to introduce a wider ethnic mix are short term, as the company concentrates on what it supposes its core (white, male) audience is, and once again offers them (straight, white, male) icons. I’d like to think that good will yet come of the integration of black writer Dwayne McDuffie’s creations from his imprint, but right now the jury is out.

Is it any better over there in the world of indie comics? Hmm. J at least is not convinced. Exactly how many of Alison Bechdel’s Dykes To Watch Out For aren’t either at college or are graduates or even professors? I’ve joked before that the reason I’m not bi is partly because of all the workshops you have to go to, but is it really true that you need a degree to be a lesbian?

It can sound pompous to suggest that writers have duties of any sort. But I believe it’s important to create in whatever fictions you write characters who are truly representative of people in society at large. Fiction is a mirror in which people should be able to see themselves, and if we’re not considering what we do we’re at risk of perpetuating a world in which non-white children try and bleach their colour away, homosexuals struggle to find counterparts for themselves in books and on screen, and women wonder whether they’ll ever be defined by anything beyond their relationship status.

You’ve got to hand it to Warren Ellis: the man has a way with an interesting setting. And in Ignition City he’s come up with one that’s a summation of one strand of his fascinations. The titular location is a seedy sprawling urban blemish on an artificial island created to house the remnants of Earth’s dwindling space programme. That alone sounds great, and artist Gianluca Pagliarani does a sterling job conveying the rusting hulks of rockets and lunar freighters, home to former space heroes who eke out a hand to mouth existence in return for food pills that give them long term bowel problems.

But don’t get carried away with the physicality of this place: Ignition City is really a venue for ideas to take form. In this case, it’s a way for Ellis to contrast the glory days of science fiction, when futuristic rocketmen soared through the cosmos zapping aliens they came across, with today’s more cynical pluralist world, where those same aliens now run foodstalls that offer a healthier diet to the hasbeen rocket jockeys than the food pills they complain about so much.

Into this decrepit setting comes Mary Raven, a young woman seeking the truth about her father’s death. Starstruck since childhood by the astronauts and cosmonauts who were part of her dad’s world, Mary is understandably appalled by what’s become of the once shiny suited men, not least because it looks like one of them is responsible for killing her father.

It all kind of works, but not with the finesse that say Orbiter and Fell pull together. Having established what Ignition City is like, I feel that Ellis spends rather too much time indulging his partiality for somewhat gross scenes — the sort that his audience love but which contain some of the most tiresome of his writing tropes — and not enough on a more effectively plotted story than the yarn he actually delivers. Which is a shame: Ellis firing on all cylinders is a fine thing, and I’d like to see it happen more often.

Anyway, I’m glad that I ended up paying less than £5 for Ignition City: I can sympathise with Avatar Press, one of the smaller comics publishers, but a lot of their collected editions are close to the £20 mark, and I’m not sure that enough of them are worth it. In practice, it seems that Ellis’s Apparat novellas for Avatar, including his first brilliant collaboration with Pagliarani, the superb Aetheric Mechanics, the historical piece Crecy, and reflective literary tale Frankenstein’s Womb, are — with their smaller page count — better indicators of what Ellis can achieve when he truly disciplines himself, than some of his larger projects.

Ignition City ends at a point where Mary Raven has rallied the moribund spacetrash residents and got them fired up in a way that they’ve not felt for years. It’s a reasonable resolution, and it points to another installment of the story to come. Will I stick around for it? The jury is out. The writing is fairly lazy at times, and Gianluca’s art is variable — his background work is often excellent, but at times his figures and faces aren’t consistent, and there’s a mismatch in styles between characters and setting that I can understand from a pragmatic viewpoint but deprives the reader of the richer experience that could have been were the elements integrated more happily.

Truth is I want to like Ignition City more than I actually do. The idea of a town populated by grizzled space hacks is more entertaining than the reality Ellis delivers. It’s a conceptual space more than a realised one. I appreciate the idea, and the effort that went into it — but more effort could have made Ignition City a truly unique story.

You could say that Sweet Tooth starts where The Road ends. The latter story follows a father and son travelling through a post-apocalyptic landscape and finishes when the father dies and the son carries on with a new guardian he hopes he can trust. Sweet Tooth starts with a similar situation, the young boy in the charge of a mysterious man who promises a haven beyond the forest where he’s always dwelt, away from whatever apocalypse has visited the world.

Only, The Road and Sweet Tooth, for all their similarities, are worlds apart too. Cormac McCarthy’s book-cum-film is an established modern classic by an author at the top of his game. Jeff Lemire has made a small but perfectly formed impact in the world of comics with previous work for what amounts to a boutique publisher, and Sweet Tooth is his first ongoing series with Vertigo, part of Warner Brothers — he’s still in the early days of his career.

McCarthy’s tale dodges the label science fiction in the same curious way that 1984 does — it’s a fable for our times. But one clear choice by Jeff Lemire puts his work in the realm of the fantastic for most readers — he gives his young protagonist antlers. And — like Wolverine’s claws, or Dracula’s teeth — those accoutrements define him as being part of genre fiction as far as a general audience is concerned.

In practice, there’s clear tonal consistency between Lemire’s work here and his earlier more overtly naturalistic stories. The story is in large part concerned with childhood and family secrets, and the artwork and writing both border on the archetypal…or naive, depending how you want to look at it. At any rate, the young hero’s antlers in practice make this no more science fictional or fantastic than the stories of Ray Bradbury, another creator whose relationship with genre is interesting.

Though it’s set in the future, the story has the feel more of a fable than science fiction. And the pace and style further support that conclusion. You could sum up the story thus: ‘a mysterious stranger takes a young misfit from the forest where he lived with his father to a place described as a haven for those of his kind’. And that’s what happens, and takes fives issues of a comic to unfold.

Clearly, we’re involved in a different kind of storytelling than the model used by many comics creators. Titles like X-Men rely on information-heavy narratives with plenty of opportunity for drama and melodrama. They thrive on conflict and exposition, with the plot swinging this way and that following breathless revelation after breathless revelation. Which is fine when you’re in the mood for that kind of thing, just as Big Beat (remember that?) is fun to listen to when you’re wanting something kinetic and splashy.

Just as Frank Sinatra rewards a closer listening than Pendulum, so do some stories benefit from a gentler kind of attention. Sweet Tooth is the antithesis of the crossover event-driven comics mainstream, a small still pool to their raging New York intersections, and Out of the Deep Woods, the recently released first collection, is something to be relished when you’re in a mood for something subtle and atmospheric.

Oh, the story has its share of incident — and even gunfire if you’re concerned about missing that food group in your entertainment diet — but fundamentally it’s a very different kind of comic than the sort Mark Millar concocts mostly with the aim of getting another film deal. And that’s to be encouraged, at a time when so many people seem to be thinking of comics essentially as illustrated pitch documents that will secure them the attention of Hollywood.

Have a look at this, the script for The Losers. Based on the excellent comics series by Andy Diggle and Jock, this adaptation by Peter Berg and James Vanderbilt is a great model for anyone keen on the kind of high octane action fun that tends to do so well at the box office worldwide when it’s done properly.

In particular, let’s look at the first eleven pages. There’s a masterful job of tension and release done from the off. Opening on what seems to be a scene of someone suffering in a desert setting, a lightning reframe reveals that the anguish was bogus, one of a small group of friends goofing around over a game of cards. Which in turn acclimatises us to the tone of what’s to come: already we have experience of tension being turned into laughter.

The game isn’t played for money, but for weapons. Deadly sexy weapons. Owned by deadly sexy guys, described with magnificent economy: Cougar being a ‘Sniper Rock-God’ is a particular favourite. They’re passing the time while on their way in a truck to a mission, effortlessly swapping the kind of snidely funny lines that men everywhere wished they exchanged with their buddies.

That mission? To use a laser device to target an Afghan prison for destruction from the air. Only, there’s a complication. Kids. And having seen one of our heroes with a tattoo of his own child, it’s reassuring to know that these guys have standards where this killing people business is concerned: they have no intention of letting children die.

Only, there’s a lethal air barrage on the way to the target. And our heroes decide with barely a pause that they’re going to get in there before it arrives, and save the kids. Which counts as a good indicator of their convictions and cojones — and provides the audience with a glimpse of the mad killing skillz that these guys have.

In short order, the guys off the forces guarding the prison, and discover a group of abused children. To underline the fact, a pervert is caught in the act of readying himself to sexually assault one of the kids, which means it’s ok to kill these bastards, and confirms that our guys — and by implication the audience — are on the side of the angels.

But wait, there’s something more. In one of the prison cells, an unspeakably tortured American asks if the newcomers will off him. And reveals that he knows the badass who’s sent them on this mission, and refused to rescind the order just because there are kids on the premises. In fact, this whole operation is about designating the prison a target so this guy — an American behind enemy lines, betrayed by his commander — can be killed.

Naturally, our guys put the poor sod out of his misery, before heading out of the prison complex at speed — because of course the airstrike is on its way, raining death and destruction on anyone the gang haven’t already disposed of. Meaning an opportunity for some high speed driving, barely in time to escape destruction from above.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m exhilerated. And massively impressed. In just a few pages a worldview has been created, and characters who articulate different aspects of it through their solid teamwork. Prowess has been shown, with weapons ranging from old fashioned knives to the newest of guns. Camaraderie has been displayed, in a way that musketeers of old would applaud. And a sinister enemy has been identified, who we strongly suspect will turn up in the story again, and whose corrupt and cowardly actions provide motivation for the band of brothers to take action against.

What more could you want? Frankly, if this doesn’t impress you, nothing will. This is an excellent adaptation of very strong source material, translating Diggle and Jock’s comics creation into mainstream cinema with finesse. I was already looking forward to the film. This screenplay will give me plenty to think about before that happens, not least because I’ve got my own action-thriller-with-a-twist I want to write, one of these days.

Dr Who has a built-in refresh switch with the protagonist’s habit of regenerating. Gives the audience a chance to respond to someone new, buff up the franchise for the contemporary audience, as is happening at the moment with Matt Smith. But what do you do when a superhero is arguably in need of a new approach? The readers can be very dogmatic about their relationship with the man in the costume…is it possible to maintain that rapport while reinventing it?

That’s the challenge Grant Morrison took on when developing his take on Batman. He’s one of the great icons of all time — does he even need a rebranding? Maybe, maybe not. But when the results are as captivating as Morrison’s version of Batman & Robin, you’ll get curious about why more comics aren’t as fun as this, regardless of whether there’s been some reinvention going on.

I’d checked out some of Morrison’s earlier work on Batman, but it didn’t seem to have the vibrancy that I typically associate him with. All of that culminated in an apparent death of Batman, for which DC also pulled in big gun Neil Gaiman to do a special issue that rapidly appeared in an overprived hardback, leaving me feeling that the dominant theme of this renewed focus on the Caped Crusader is money.

Something that characterises Morrison’s outlook though is a delightful lack of cynicism, and all this time working on Batman has resulted in a very fine take on Batman & Robin. In the absence of Bruce Wayne — who the characters believe dead but I can inform worried readers is merely way back in time, working his way back to the present via a series of one-off comics set in different eras — former Robin Dick Grayson has stepped into his mentor’s Batshoes. He’s a different sort of Batman, a younger man unencumbered by the darkness that runs through Bruce’s life. Accompanying him, Bruce’s son Damien, who as his name suggests is a bit of a handful: he’s Bruce’s son, brought up by his mother, herself the daughter of one of Batman’s arch enemies, R’as al Ghul.

What this means is an interesting new dynamic: a Batman who’s unsure he’s worthy of the mantle, and a Robin who’s convinced he could do the job better. Ah, the arrogance of youth: little sod is only ten years old, but he’s already worked out how to make the Batmobile fly. If I was Batman I’d be worried about sarin gas booby traps in the Bat-toilet.

All of this is brought to amazing life by artist Frank Quitely, the greatest of Morrison’s collaborators. He’s there for the first three issues of the Batman & Robin comic, which comprises the first half of the just-released hardback, and will return in the future. The other half is illustrated by Philip Tan, who is perfectly good, but a more conventional artist than Quitely, whose sense of three dimensional space and how to utilise it to create compelling images is extraordinary, and combined with a fundamentally European style ensures his comics look outstanding.

A hero is defined by his villains, and Morrison comes up with a doozy in Professor Pyg, a psychotic surgeon who creates his own flunkies through grafts, transplants, and other operations you’d not get on the NHS. He and his retinue speak the lingo of travelling circus folk, which gives rise to some lively dialogue, and Pyg’s insanity gives his words an extra twist. Pyg, I’m sure, is named after Pygmalion, in which Henry Higgins turns flower girl Eliza Doolittle into a lady — Pyg does something similar, only with more scalpels than in the George Bernard Shaw version of the story.

Fine entertainment, Batman & Robin is all about kinetic thrills, and there’s not much more to it than that. Except given that Morrison is the writer you’ll also get interesting characters and quality dialogue. How long it will last I have no idea, given that Bruce Wayne is on his way back. But while it lasts, enjoy what’s on offer.

A few days ago, in chatting to a friend, I compared comics writer Mark Millar to Malcolm McLaren. And with McLaren now dead, I’m going to explore that comparison some more. What I’d got in mind was their ability to hype projects that tend to collapse under more than a minute’s thought. But that’s fine, because a minute counts as an attention span these days, and both men have demonstrated their ability to occupy young minds perfectly well for that duration.

This is something I’m especially conscious of having seen Kick-Ass. I’m pushed to know what to say about the film other than it’s crass and entertaining, and if you’re in the mood for that then it’ll provide empty calories perfectly well. There is blood and there is swearing, and it’s all done with a laconic attitude. And it took a good deal of thinking to make it that way, lest you think I’m being dismissive.

Just as Stan Lee and Steve Ditko bottled sixties teen angst and distilled it to come up with Spider-Man, Mark Millar and John Romita Jr (himself the son of a classic Spidey artist) have concocted something entirely in tune with 21st century adolescence. The teens in Kick-Ass are plugged into Facebook and Myspace, victims of street crime, and are considered gay by their objects of desire. A world away from the dilemmas that young Peter Parker was faced with, and there’s no sense of the aspirational aspect of Parker’s character. He wanted to do well at college, and as a press photographer, and had a sense of duty when he became a superhero. In Kick-Ass, the protagonist is motivated by nothing more than the desire to be as cool as the characters he’s grown up reading about in comics.

If Millar is McLaren, then Kick-Ass is his Bow Wow Wow. Huh? Well, just as the controversial element of that manufactured band was 13 year old singer Annabella Lwin, the real stand-out character in Kick-Ass is Hit-Girl, an 11 year old brought up by her father to be a killer vigilante.

McLaren had a knack for spotting the coming zeitgeist, as he did brilliantly with Buffalo Gals — which introduced turntables as an instrument to many — and Double Dutch — a whiff of Johannesburg packaged without the coffee table element that was part of Paul Simon’s dabbling with African sounds. Millar has a similar capacity to see what’s on the horizon and respond to it, drawing attention to what he’s doing so you know he’s the man with the plan. And, like McLaren, he knows the value of a collaborator, working with artists at the top of their game — Bryan Hitch on The Ultimates, and various other fan favourites on one spectacle after another.

Note the distinction between spectacle and spectacular. Rarely does Millar’s work live up to the exuberant hype he puffs it up with. The exception is Red Son, an imaginative and well-executed alternative version of Superman had he landed in the corn fields of the Soviet Union rather than America. That project brought together Millar’s interests in politics and comics, and is very well-regarded. But it hasn’t sold that much, and Millar’s career trajectory is all about hitting the big numbers. Which is all well and good, and he’s got it down to a fine art — there’s something about his work which resonates with the core comics readership. But as with McLaren, that’s a skill more to do with identifying a demographic than conjuring up something of substance.

Go see Kick-Ass and enjoy the hell out of it. There are thrills and spills aplenty, and it’s delivered with verve by director Matthew Vaughn and his co-writer Jane Goldman. Just don’t expect to have anything to think about afterwards — Millar likes to wind people up, but it works mostly on the Barnum principle (‘You can fool some of the people some of the time…’) rather than because he’s saying anything that bears investigation.

I was recently approached to run a one-off class on Narrative and the Marvel Universe. How bizarre and beautiful is that? A chance for me to get my geek on in the biggest way, showing off knowledge of Marvel Comics that I don’t normally have the chance to display, and ally it to what I’ve learned about stories and how they work.

Really, any consideration of Marvel’s fictional universe has to start with the means by which it was produced, and the reasons for some of the choices made. Rewind to the 1960s, and Stan Lee was one of a handful of creative titans in what was described to readers as the Marvel Bullpen, a legendary place where Stan ‘The Man’ Lee would hang out with artists Jack ‘The King’ Kirby and Johnny ‘Ring-A-Ding’ Romita.

Accounts from participants say that comics would be created as follows: Stan would have a rough idea for a plot, and act out some of the key scenes. The artist’s job was to turn that brief into a fully pencilled story. Then an inker would go over it so the art could be reproduced, and Stan would add dialogue and captions. It was a production line process, all about efficiency. And it meant that artists were fully co-creators of the material they drew, even if legally Marvel tried — and try — to claim otherwise.

Artists would embellish the stories with details that Stan hadn’t envisaged. Apparently The Silver Surfer came about when Kirby drew a character soaring through space on a cosmic surfboard, without Stan having asked for one. Quite where his cod-Shakespearean speaking style came from, I have no idea. Anyway, the point is that the production process itself created the characters and world(s) they inhabit. Add to that the audience’s desire to see characters fighting and chasing, and that accounts for much of the contents of the comic.

Stylistically, Marvel’s comics were very different from DC’s. Where DC stories happened in an imaginary world, Marvel’s most definitely occurred in New York. And that air of supposed realism applied to the characters too. Rather than being cut entirely from heroic cloth, Marvel’s heroes were tormented. Spider-Man had dear old Aunt May to look after, a college course to keep up with, and girl trouble. The X-Men were misfits and freaks brought together under the roof of what, for all the money that went into it, was a school like the one readers went to, with the same rivalries and traumas.

A few years into the publisher’s success, and new creators were needed to come up with new titles. These were often youngsters who were not only comics fans, but communicated in their work a wider appreciation of their culture and times than the first wave of comics creators. Steve Gerber and Doug Moench brought a fuzzy social awareness to the comics they worked on, and had a more distinctive personal style than the writers who came before them. They were a product of their time, influenced by underground comics and 70s American cinema. Just as much a product of his era, Jim Starlin took Marvel into the stars, creating stories on a truly epic scale — in their very different ways, Starlin and Gerber wrote about America’s personal growth movement.

The Marvel Universe has always been a pretty catholic place. It encompasses crime-ridden Hell’s Kitchen where blind martial artist Daredevil patrols the rooftops. The farflung reaches of the cosmos where the Guardians of the Galaxy fight alien evil. And the swamps where muckmonster Man-Thing trudges. Take a step back, and you’ll see what’s going on: Marvel doesn’t just publish superhero comics. It continues to this day with titles like The Punisher to draw on its pulp roots. And though the core titles might be the likes of The Avengers, there’s always room for science fiction and horror titles too.

Ultimately, it’s about satisfying fan demand, and finding new fans. Which is why there are initiatives like the Ultimate titles, a revamped Marvel universe suitable for 21st century novice readers. And why, from time to time, there’s been room for titles like Dracula and Master of Kung Fu when the market can support them.

The Marvel Universe is constantly evolving, through the interaction of forces including market size, success of films featuring Marvel characters, the rise and fall of fan favourite creators. You can’t look at the comics themselves without appreciating how they came to be that way.

There’s something about the work Jeff Lemire that brings to mind the work of two of my favourite creators. With writer Ray Bradbury and singer-songwriter David Sylvian he shares a genius for evoking landscapes haunted by childhood, by love and loss and growing old. And he does so in the form of comics that he writes and draws, a chunky collection of which are to be found in Essex County, an anthology published by Top Shelf.

Lemire is Canadian, and there is a distinct sense of place conjured up in his lyrical linework. The Essex County of the title is the setting for three interlinked stories set in an imagined rural Ontario drawn from Lemire’s own upbringing. Place and time are as important as the characters he crafts. A young boy who imagines he is a superhero, brought up by his uncle, with whom he has no real connection — his emotional life is experienced with a former ice hockey player. The truth of their relationships is uncovered slowly, and reveals layers of pain and confusion that echo from past to present.

With linework akin to that of Ted McKeever, and powerful full page images of people in relation to their environments, the stories have a distinct folkloric feel, poised somewhere between the everyday and the eternal. The tales reach back into decades past, but the emotions go back further still, dealing with timeless emotions and situations.

Autobiographical comics — or at least the majority of autobiographical comics I come across — tend not to interest me. Their authors have not led lives that interest me, or want my pity, or lack insight. Exceptions are few and far between: I love Eddie Campbell’s Alec stories for their idiosyncrasy, and suspect that what I value about Lemire’s work is its universality. I’ve never played ice hockey, and have no particular interest in it beyond the bloody thrills to be enjoyed in the film Slapshot, but a story in which one brother loses a fight in order to enrage his brother into seeking vengeance for him — on the ice — is one that I can empathise with.

This is deceptively simple work. It can be read quickly, but stay to relish the effect of the subtle lines, the inventive transitions that lead from present to past, from then to an eternal now. The words are straightforward, but powerful. This isn’t just rural Canada — it’s ancient Greece, it’s Shakespeare’s England, it’s right here and right now with the bullshit and tinsel stripped away, and only primal truths left.

Essex County is my first and only encounter with Jeff Lemire. He’s now working with DC imprint Vertigo on a series called Sweet Tooth, which seems to add a magical realist element to his repertoire of archetypal situations and emotions. The setting is a post-apocalyptic world and the protagonist a youngster called Gus who sports a fine pair of antlers. It’s been getting excellent reviews, and I’ll be picking up the first collected edition when it appears. Also for Vertigo there was The Nobody, a graphic novel riff on The Invisible Man which got mixed reviews.

Where does Lemire go from here? I’ve a feeling that with his unique art style, and his ability to write too, he could follow in the footsteps of the equally indefinable Paul Pope. Certainly, it would be good to see someone emulate Pope’s breadth of vision and involvement in a range of compelling projects, each driven by a singular if indefinable obsession. I use Pope as an example in the best sense — not someone to emulate for his career moves and project choices, but for the clear passion which infuses everything that bears his name.