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.

At a time when Marvel are attempting to persuade their existing readers to part with even more money for intricately interconnected titles incomprehensible to those of us who haven’t read the last five years of their comics, DC come up with a genuinely bright idea.  Wednesday Comics is a weekly anthology consisting of single page installments of stories in a broadsheet-newspaper size collection, 15 stories in all.

It’s a fresh and bold attempt to do something different of potential appeal to anyone with a vague interest in the medium, and the publisher has smartly decided to put some major talent into the project, as well as some of its signature brands: Batman leads on the front page, and you’ll find Superman and Wonder Woman in there as well as a bunch of lesser known characters.

Yes, the sniffy might say that it’s far from an original concept: this is essentially a 21st century reinvention of the comics supplements that many newspapers ran in decades past.  But it’s still an exciting move in industry terms, and one I hope will pay off for DC.  Necessarily, the first issue covers some ground repeatedly, what with having to introduce characters to readers and fill in back stories to a greater or lesser degree, but as the title progresses through its twelve-week run, I’m sure the contents will become even more diverse than they are at present.

What’s fascinating is seeing how different creators play with the new space they’ve been given.  The Batman story, by 100 Bullets creators Azzarello and artist Risso, is fairly conventional in its use of the page, and nonetheless looks striking.  Next up, David Gibbons and artist Ryan Sook take us back to the days of Prince Valiant with their take on the Kirby hero Kamandi, with blocks of narrative text within the panels giving the page a very different kind of rhythm.

Paul Pope does a fine job on spacefarer Adam Strange, designing a symmetrical page that emphasises its depth, and has flying monkeys for added value.  The Flash probably uses its page most inventively, split into two stories, one on the hero himself, the other focusing on his wife, in a story that will see the two overlap in some interesting fashion somewhere along the line.  Stylistically, it makes the former look like a fairly standard — albeit impeccably illustrated — superhero strip, while Iris West looks more like a romance or true life tale.  Writer Karl Kerschl and artist Brendan Fletcher are to be congratulated for this fascinating choice.

Two of the best strips are saved for last: Demon and Catwoman get a page gorgeously drawn by Brian Stelfreeze with subdued and effective colours by Steve Wands.  The only shame is that it’s written and not drawn by Walt Simonson, whose energetic design-conscious art I’d have thought was perfect for pages this size: here’s hoping that happens in the future.  Last up, Kyle Baker’s Hawkman has probably the largest single panel in the whole comic, a striking image of a martial Hawkman surrounded by his avian allies.

With 15 stories, some are going to appeal more than others.  Ben Caldwell’s Wonder Woman looks fantastic, and gives us the busiest page with nearly 50 panels, but the writing doesn’t convince as yet.  And I suspect Neil Gaiman’s Metamorpho, though it looks poptastic with Mike Allred artwork, could be a touch too kitchsy to be truly engaging.

Still, those count as minor quibbles.  Overall, Wednesday Comics is one of the most enjoyable and fun comics I’ve seen for a while: no convoluted grimness here, just colourful and enjoyable storytelling by some of the finest creators in the business.  Here’s hoping its twelve week run is continued when the beancounters have got the results in on this first incarnation.  Editor Mike Chiarello can take a bow: this is quality stuff, well conceived and delivered in almost every respect.

Even in the heat of my teenage comic collecting, I never found much to admire in Green Arrow.  Oh, I came across him when he was in team titles, such as Justice League of America, but couldn’t muster the enthusiasm to pick up any of his solo appearances.  What’s swung me around, and why I’ve recently bought a Green Arrow graphic novel, is the creative talent behind it: writer Andy Diggle and artist Jock.

Diggle and Jock were the British creative team behind the highly engaging political action thriller, The Losers, which is soon going to be a feature film and could well be a fine one in the right hands.  Diggle also had a knack for stripping down occult antihero John Constantine down to his essentials, making the character’s Hellblazer comic better than it had been for a long while.  So, put Diggle and Jock together again, and we’ll get to find out if the adage that there are no lousy characters, only unimaginative creators, is right.

The writer and artist have done a Year One with Green Arrow here, meaning they’ve gone back to the character’s roots with fresh eyes, as Frank Miller and David Mazzuchelli did to devastating effect with their Batman: Year One way back when.  And the good news is, they’ve done a fine job.  Diggle takes his cues from action movies more than superhero comics, and spins a taut yarn about playboy Oliver Queen playing at extreme sports and having no concept of life until he comes across a drug-running scheme operating on a tropical island.

All a bit James Bond so far, and that’s fair enough, though Jock’s lean angular linework and David Baron’s simple but inventive colours give the pages a contemporary feel.  It’s expertly paced stuff, as Queen learns that his hired help is in league with gorgeous-but-deadly heroin smuggler China White, and seeks to parlay his extreme sports skills into the ability to survive long enough to triumph over the woman who has enslaved the island’s population to producing opium for the drugs trade.

So, Queen gets to find purpose in life, and hone his athleticism and combat skills, and there’s even a kind-of-credible explanation for his unlikely abilities with a bow: as a child, Oliver was introduced to the man who coached a screen Robin Hood in his archery skills, who reckoned that the youngster was the greatest natural bowman he’d encountered.  Now, with survival at stake, and social justice in the mix too, Oliver fulfils that early promise to become a lethal archer, picking off his opponents with improvised arrows.  Sure, it’s kind of hokey, but it works, and that’s what matters.

Green Arrow in this incarnation is to comics what Jack Reacher is to multi-million selling paperbacks: a hero you can drop into pretty much any kind of situation where fighting skills, a knack for survival, and a moral compass are what make the difference between the forces of evil triumphing and good enduring for another day.  So far it doesn’t seem that DC have followed up this Year One, which came out in individual issues in 2007, with a series that picks up where Diggle and Jock have left off — but maybe there’s hope for that in the future, or for a feature film that follows the template this collection establishes.

Andy Diggle is now working over at Marvel, and I’ve yet to be inclined to pick up any of his work there as the publisher seems determined to get creators to tie all their stories together in ways impenetrable to the casual audience.  I love the comics medium, but nothing kills it for me surer than ‘events’ which bring different titles together, and spawn new ones in their wake: I follow writers primarily, artists to a lesser extent, and I want to see them creating stories that make sense in their own right, rather than contributing their pieces to what amounts to a clumsily moving pulp format Rubik’s Cube that disintegrates when exposed to critical intelligence.

My first run-in with DC Comics was when I was maybe 9 years old, and got ill while staying with my gran in Devon.  To keep me occupied while I recovered, she dug out a box of comics that one of my uncles had collected, and I was soon immersed in a Justice League/Justice Society team-up.  I didn’t have a clue what was happening, but I found it captivating all the same, as brightly coloured characters run and flew around.

For some reason, some of the characters existed as two versions: the Flash for instance had one incarnation in which he wore a tin hat, while another version of him was helmet-free.  Apparently, the two Justice teams inhabited parallel worlds, and I latched on to the idea that people had alternate versions of themselves.  Maybe in another universe, there was a young Adrian who also wore a helmet.

This notion of a multiverse in which superheroes from different realities duked it out with cosmic evil sat pretty well with me, gorged as I already was on mythical characters from different cultures who in some ways seemed to be versions of each other.  The Greeks and Romans had gods and heroes who were comparable, so why wouldn’t there be more than one version of Superman?

And while my tastes in comics have grown more sophisticated over the years, it’s good to report that there are still creators who can tap into that kind of primal chaos and pull out new stories from it.  Grant Morrison is a master of this kind of stuff, and he has sussed that the trick to this kind of writing isn’t to pit good against evil and resolve it with zaps and thumps, but to create vast tapestries of ideas that only mighty heroes have the stature to play a part in.  Which is just what Final Crisis is all about.

There’s a breathless urgency to the writing: Morrison chooses to cut between different groups of players and not make the connective tissue as clear as some would prefer it.  A brave choice, and one that works for me: I want to be dazzled and mystified and not have everything spelled out for me in this kind of writing.  It’s absolutely appropriate for larger than life fiction that the concepts are too big to fit into your head the first time round.

I couldn’t begin to tell you who all the characters are who turn up for this adventure.  But plenty are needed, because the deadly deity Darkseid is recreating himself in every human on Earth through high tech villainy, and that surely calls for Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman to get all their pals involved in the fight back against his tyrrany.

It’s mindboggling stuff, and thankfully the art team, headed by J.G. Jones and Doug Mankhe, are up to the task of conveying the multi-dimensional scale of what unfolds.  Just don’t ask me to explain it to you at this point: we’re a million miles away from credibly plotted linear tales at this point.  Instead we’re sailing close to the edge of comprehensibility, on a voyage of the imagination that’s only possible because of Morrison’s sure hand at the tiller.  He likes it here, in this heady space where men become gods and time and space buckle in response to the epic deeds that are done.

What grounds the story, for all its hi-falutin conceptual and linguistic/artistic fireworks, is Morrison’s ability to convey characters with recognisable emotions amid the stuff of legend.  You want to cheer on both the characters you’re familiar with, and you’re led to empathise with a character who’s used to being a bad guy but who joins the goodies given the scale of what’s at stake: his journey is convincing, involving, and that gives you an investment in the story.

I can’t pretend I get all of what’s in Final Crisis, but I was thoroughly entertained in reading it, and really that’s what counts.  Grant Morrison is an exceptional writer whose love for the comics form has provided some of the best reads in the last twenty years.  His ability to handle both epic and personal material with equal flair is unusual, and a mark of just how talented a creator he is.