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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.