Superheroes are a weird enough convention without them hanging out and having adventures together. Superman is powerful enough that there’s frankly very little you could do to help him out, and Batman’s nighttime escapades are pretty much a solo pursuit, but there are characters who for various reasons like to mix socialising with their crimefighting. The definitive model for this group endeavour remains the Fantastic Four, whose shtick is that they’re very much a family — a married couple and her brother, and the husband’s best friend. Along with Spider-Man, which was co-created by Steve Ditko, the FF — devised with Jack Kirby — established what made Marvel comics unique in the sixties: their characters experienced recognisable emotions, and being super powered complicated their lives.

That simple but revolutionary formula has stood the test of time, and resulted in all kinds of permutations. These days, the X-Men are the world’s best known superheroes, and their angsty antics have formed the basis of an impenetrable soap opera that’s now into its fifth decade. And you thought Eastenders was complicated?

Shedding new light on the format is not easy, but it’s a subgenre that’s massively popular so there’s no shortage of creators involved in…well, it’s hardly reinventing the wheel. But they’re trying out new tyres on the existing one. Two recent variations on the theme I’ve checked out are writer Matt Fraction’s The Order, and Captain Britain and MI-13, scripted by Paul Cornell.

I want to like Matt Fraction, having been entertained by the columns he wrote when he was breaking into comics some years back. But the idea of Fraction is better than the reality: I never really took to Iron Fist, which he co-wrote with Ed Brubaker, and his much-lauded Casanova did little for me. What comes up for me is the sense of his background working in media — no surprise then that one of the main strands of The Order is that the team is effectively a boyband-style franchise, team members auditioning for a slot and being powered up for their one year duration in the line-up.

You can see the wires in Fraction’s scripts, and though there’s some very smart thinking involved in some of the characters, there’s no real emotional engagement. If anything, he shies away from that crucial aspect of storytelling, instead dropping in quotes from a range of books he’s read and using other distancing techniques. Hence the following monologue: “I was gonna go on this big long lecture about Vernadsky and Teilhard and the transhuman consciousness and all that crap — but really? Who cares. You don’t care that I did my homework, right.” No Matt, I don’t, and I like it even less when you get all meta about it.

It’s interesting, since the going meta thing is an accusation that can be levelled at some of Paul Cornell’s work. But he gets round it since a very human heart beats in his stories, keeping them grounded even when things get truly out there. So, Captain Britain and his chums take on an invasion of vampires based on the moon, Dracula leading the swarm from a flying battleship. This is truly fantastic stuff, Cornell relishing the chance to get his artists to bring some insane concepts to life, perhaps a blessed release from the straitjacket of the work that he’s done on the likes of Casualty in the past.

Cornell also brings a socially conscious sensibility to his work that’s refreshing in a medium where most female characters exist to be kidnapped and motivate their lovers to acts of bloody revenge. Excalibur, once carried by King Arthur, is wielded by a young Muslim woman, and her cricket-loving father gets to be one of the story’s true heroes. There’s a big canvas here, and Cornell delights in populating it with details that sparkle and surprise.

The superhero team remains a ridiculous idea, and that’s fine. Better to celebrate that ridiculousness with truly epic stories than hamper it by bringing media-savviness into things. There is a place for such things in comics, but best when it’s done with a sharper eye, as it was in Pete Milligan’s satirical take on mutants as celebrities in X-Force.

One of the criticisms about comics aimed at them by those who’ve not read any for a good while is that they’re just for kids, as if accessibility to children somehow automatically means they’re written at a very basic level for novice readers. For one thing, it’s simply not true — but I wish it were true more often. The logical conclusion to be reached from comics being dumb is that it’s fine for films based on comics to be dumb. And that’s a shame, doing neither audiences or creators any favours.

The Green Hornet is an example of where that assumption of dumbness takes you. It’s a truly facile film, dismally scripted, with only a fraction of the signature wit and visual style that characterises director Michel Gondry’s other work. Much of the responsibility for this state of affairs is Seth Rogen’s: he stars in and co-wrote the movie, putting in a pisspoor performance as — you guessed it — one of those males stuck between adolescence and adulthood that Hollywood seems so fascinated by (see also Owen Wilson and the whole sorry crew of menchildren who make careers bringing to life the dilemmas of males who are, like, fathers but still, like, want to skate and get high with their similarly dimwitted pals).

Anyway, Rogen has to step into the shoes of his responsible, mature, and dead father, which somehow leads to him fighting crime with his inherited sidekick Kato. It’s all too pitiful to detail, so I won’t. You can pretty much predict what beats the story will hit as it stutters along. I slept for about fifteen minutes, finding more entertainment in my sleeping mind than was presented on the screen, and realising that Couples Retreat has taught the film business nothing.

From films to comics, and I was hoping for something of substance from a collection I picked up of Christopher Priest writing Captain America and the Falcon. It pretty much demonstrates the issues involved when a writer attempts to be too smart for the medium he’s writing for. Which is weird, since I’ve followed some pretty out there stuff by writers like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison before now: what is it with Priest (the name he adopts for this stuff, first names being for wimps I guess)?

Right, you’ll have no doubt heard of Captain America. The name pretty much says it all: he’s a patriotic hero. And over the years, he’s had adventures with a black guy called The Falcon. With me so far? Good, because I’d say that’s all you need to get by. Only, Priest scorns the known and drags the reader headlong into a tale that…a tale that what, exactly? I’ve read it cover to cover, and I still don’t get much of it.

So, there’s Captain America himself, who was created by the army’s supersoldier experiment. Only the navy had a go too, at creating a — stick with me — supersailor who is known as Anti-Cap. With me so far? Things are about to get out of hand. Right, the baddie is Modok, who is a justifiable fan-favourite villain, what with being an overgrown head strapped into a flying chair. Only, Modok has learned how to kind of mentally email himself round the world and inhabit other forms. Leaving a vacancy in his own body, which he sublets to…oh, I forget who.

Anyway, Modok’s power is to mentally confuse the characters, and in a fourth wall twisting feat he also succeeded in confusing this reader. Maybe that was Priest’s intention. At any rate, he’s written one of the most perplexing comics I’ve come across. Cap and Falcon are having fights, only they each believe they’re taking on different opponents, and are costumed according to when those conflicts happened — Falcon sometimes wears his fly 70s duds, Cap thinks he’s taking on skull-headed Nazis while Falcon reckons they’re suited assassins. It takes a mighty brain to keep up with it all, and Priest brings on three in the shape of the Marvel Universe’s top scientists: Bruce Banner, Reed Richards, and Henry Pym. They couldn’t explain what was happening any more than Priest could, so really I don’t know what the point of all that was. Except that Priest clearly thinks he’s very clever, and doesn’t want children reading his comics.

Enjoyable though some of their output is, you don’t associate Marvel Comics with socially committed work. Sure, there are those who claim that Civil War had interesting political facets, but let’s be honest — Watchmen it wasn’t. And that’s fine: comics can be whatever the people making them want them to be, whether that’s the off-kilter dreamworld of Jay Stephens or the retro noir of Darwyn Cooke’s Parker reinventions.

Still, it’s a surprise to find a work as politically engaged as Captain America: Truth, a subversion of the patriotic icon by writer Robert Morales and artist Kyle Baker that puts race centre stage. This is, forgive the hyperbole, a work of some significance. The equivalent DC story would reveal that Superman is the sole survivor of Krypton because he’d killed and eaten its other inhabitants. You fuck with icons at your peril, but when it’s done with the edge, the passion, the dignity of Truth then the job is worth taking on.

Make no mistake — this isn’t some faux-controversial headline grabber in the manner of Mark Millar’s fan-baiting projects. This comes from an earlier time, in 2003, when Marvel was struggling to redefine itself and in the process created some genuinely out-there material under the stewardship of the company’s president of publishing and chief operations officer Bill Jemas.

So, what’s the big deal with Truth? Simply, that its creators go back to Captain America’s roots to reveal that before Steve Rogers became a supersoldier, black servicemen were experimented on to establish the efficacy of the serum used. That’s an interesting premise anyway. What takes it further is its connection to undeniable reality — the Nazis are now notorious for their views about racial purity, but they were commonplace at the time. America and Britain both did dreadful things to keep the genepool clean, sterilising the mentally frail and subscribing to ideas on eugenics just as much as Hitler did in his plans to create a master race.

For a comic like Captain America, where the villain of the piece is more likely to be a moustache-twirling Frenchman called Batroc the Leaper than institutionalised racism, Truth is something radically different. Which itself is a point: superhero comics are singularly ill-equipped to deal with the intricacies of serious issues, especially in installments of 22 pages including two fights and a chase.

All the more reason to praise Truth, for laying out with slow burning power a story which outlines the wrongs done to America’s black servicemen in World War Two — treated as second class citizens, and only allowed to have blood transfusions from other black people, so as not to taint whites with the blood of the Negro. Strong stuff, but especially so for a company that prides itself on the one size fits all metaphor of mutants as persecuted minority — not a bad idea, but typically facile in its execution.

Typically, more mainstream comics fans were affronted by Kyle Baker’s art for the project than any of the ideas it contained. He can and does do the kind of detail-rich emphatically muscular characters that so many superhero fans need to see to recognise what’s before them as being something they want to read, but opted on this occasion for a more cartoony style. It was an intentional choice: Baker wanted to reach black readers who weren’t checking out comics, and figured his apparently simple linework, reminiscent of cheap tv animation and graffiti, would do the job better than dudes in figurehugging lycra. But as this cover makes clear, that simplicity made for powerful iconic imagery.

I’m not the first person to hanker for the days when Marvel was putting out work of this calibre. Sure, it was all part of a — successful — experiment to revitalise the company when it was in the dumps, but does it really take crisis to provoke a business to create work of genuine social and creative merit? What if…that were the intention on an ongoing basis?

It’s worth checking out things that are outside your normal territory to see what you can learn from the efforts made by creators off whatever your beaten track is. Which is why I picked up a graphic novel that’s an adaptation of — no, make that a prequel to — a computer game. I am pretty much a novice where electronic gaming is concerned, but it’s a field that does interest me. Dead Space drew me first because it’s attractively packaged. It’s also by two creators on my list to check out: writer Antony Johnston and artist Ben Templesmith. The latter I know through his excellent collaboration with Warren Ellis, Fell. The former I know of only by repute.

There’s an interesting lineage to Dead Space. Go far enough back, and it’s in the tradition of the horror story. More specifically it’s a riff on the zombie — a creature known more through Romero’s movies than any literary heritage. And it’s set in space. Which takes us into the realm of Alien and its sequels, which it has very conscious echoes of. Mysterious artefact? Check. Alien with unusual life cycle? Check. Religious dimension to the relationship between humans and aliens? Check.

Which isn’t to say that there’s plagiarism at work, just that some elements work really well with particular stories, and these go a doozie when you’re looking at science fiction horror. Look back a few decades and you’ll find the same ingredients in Lovecraft’s work, particularly tales of Deep Ones — The Shadow Over Innsmouth comes to mind — who were so called mainly they lived in the depths of the ocean rather than because of the intensity of their thinking. As with Alien, there’s some weird breeding habits involved when you date a Deep One. And the tradition is continued in Dead Space, though here the transformation into a monstrosity happens after death — a demise which the creepy artefact conveniently drives you to.

The third film in the Alien sequence was set on a penal colony where some of the prisoners believe the resident extra-terrestrial is Satan. That’s echoed in Dead Space with a Scientology-style religious movement who believe the artefact to hold special significance in their theology. You could see in there a metaphor in which the conversion of the believers into zombies is to do with the nature of faith as a kind of intellectual death. Alternatively, you can accept that there’s going to be corpses in a story of this kind somewhere down the line, and these are the guys who supply them. Sometimes a zombie is just a zombie, even when it’s a fancy alien-created one hacked into life through some handwaving about DNA.

It’s all very enjoyable, Johnston’s easy facility with dialogue raising the standard of the story well above the perfunctory. He’s ably partnered by Templesmith, whose impressionistic art works better in this context than a lot of more static and detailed artists would have (I hate to think what Ethan Van Sciver would have done with this script). Between them, they ensure the story moves fast and is well paced, plot points established casually and the flow of it all working really effectively. It’s not groundbreaking, but people coming to a comic that’s tied in to a violent computer game almost certainly aren’t looking for metacommentary and avant garde technique. Not, at least, unless it can be tied in to cool ways of fucking shit up. And there is plenty of that herein, especially in the blood-drenched final chapter.

Dead Space is a confirmation of Templesmith’s talent, and — for me — an introduction to Johnston’s. On the basis of this high-octane chunk of thrillpower, I’l be inclined to seek out work from both in the future, especially if they’re working together. Next time, let’s see what they do without the necessary constraints of a game tie-in, and do whatever their own thing might be.

Some years ago, I was caught in a loop of developing short film projects that never went anywhere. Many of them were collaborations with a particular filmmaker, and the ideas were ones we both had interest in. The territory we marked out was invariably low budget and naturalistic. Which is all very well, but there are other aspects to what stimulates me.

One week I decided I wasn’t going to do any of that stuff, but instead came up with a science fiction epic of humungous scope. The concepts were grand, the characters larger than life, the setting literally out of this world. It was a liberating experience after writing so much grounded material to do something that soared off into the stars.

My intention was to develop the project in comic form, and I wrote the first episode of what was supposed to be a 2000AD series for what came to be called Dadtown. A curious title that I like, chosen because of its thematic connection to the story: it begins with our teenage heroine’s revolt against her father, the corrupt mayor of a space colony. And builds from there to explore the relationship of the colony itself to Earth.

I duly showed the script to a comic artist friend, who rated it highly. Only, what with him being good, he’s got a load of professional work to be getting on with, so I set about finding my own artist. And, after some searching online, found a guy in America who seemed pretty much perfect. His portfolio had illustrations that demonstrated the kind of gritty futuristic look that would work for Dadtown, with a manga twist that took it somewhere else. I liked it, and he seemed excited by the material.

So I waited.

And waited.

And then contacted him to ask what was going on.

And never heard from him again.

Hey ho. This is apparently a familiar story, but it was a new one to me. And I got busy with other projects, and put Dadtown to one side. I went back to it, realising that it could be realised as an animated film. Or even a series. The story naturally breaks down into three acts, each different and bigger in scope than the preceding one, so it could be developed as an intense one-off story, or a prolonged experience of three seasons.

And then Avatar appeared. Large aspects of which bear strong relation to what I’d done with Dadtown a decade before. Only, Jim Cameron got there first. For a while, I figured that was the end of the road for Dadtown. Anyway, I had other projects to be getting on with. But nothing is wasted, and out of the blue I realised I had a way of getting it back on the go again.

The way in was a favour for a friend. A businessman he knows is putting together a football-themed comic, and wanted artists for it. To help out, I Twittered for some, and the call was repeated by others. A few artists indicated their interest, and I pointed them in the direction of the football gig. Then had a lightbulb moment: artists who can draw football comics might be interested in drawing other comics.

I know, I was slow on the uptake there. But when I made the connection, I looked back at who’d responded, and one name stood out. Not a name I’m going to mention for now, but if this develops as I hope, then you’ll hear about him soon enough. We’ve not met yet, but I’ve seen his work, and it’s good. And knowing that he works as an animator gives me confidence in his ability to deliver the goods in a professional manner. Result.

How many ways are there to tell a story? And in choosing different means, do we arrive at the same place, or are we in fact creating other stories altogether? I ask because I come across and can utilise different approaches according to my intentions, and sometimes encounter stories where the combination of narrative and means to express it makes for an unusual effect.

Case in point: the first volume of Son of the Gun, written by Jodorowsky with art by Bess, a handsome Humanoids hardback I picked up for just £5 in a Forbidden Planet sale. I’ve got some limited experience of Jodorowsky through seeing his film Santa Sangre, a kaleidoscopic yarn involving circus folk, psychedelia, incest, and — somewhere in there I swear — a dead elephant.

No surprise then that lurking between the covers of what seems to be a crime yarn, is something rather more twisted. The writer’s mystic and mythic preoccupations have been fused with an otherwise conventional story, and the effect is fascinating. The tailed protagonist Orlando is raised by a midget whore and whelped by a dog, growing up to be the fiercest and brightest of a gang of street thugs, before ultimately being crucified in the desert. Even Scorsese at his most florid hasn’t taken his fascination with Catholicism so far — here we’ve got the fusion of Last Temptation and Goodfellas that he shied away from.

The thing is, it works. The mixture of mythic and street material is highly effective this way round. What doesn’t work for me is when inherently mythic material is presented in the manner of street level storytelling. No surprise that I’m thinking Brian Michael Bendis at this point.

I loved his work on Daredevil, where the mix of guilt, obsession and street crime works just fine, and suits his dialogue tics. A word about those actually: much is made of Bendis’s love of David Mamet, and there’s some overlap. But where Mamet’s dialogue is always moving the story forward, Bendis all too often circles round and round without momentum. Which is exactly what you don’t want when you’re writing characters like Captain America and Thor. Those guys are heroes, icons, living myths, and work best when treated as such. Having them stumble over their words and circumlocute to no good end is bad writing, plain and simple.

That’s not just my take on matters, it stems from research. A seminal bodyworker called Moshe Feldenkrais spent his life examining the way we use our bodies and neurology, and created exercises to minimise what he called ‘parasitic’ thoughts and movements. Leg twitches, hums and hahs, all the stuff that characterise ‘normal’ interaction — but which we can learn to reduce. And if that’s possible for you and me, you can bet true heroes operate at that level and beyond.

This is something that Grant Morrison gets — and Kevin Smith doesn’t. Morrison’s Batman is the ultimate a human being can aspire to, a billionaire who has reached the pinnacle of physical and mental perfection. Smith’s contribution to the Batman mythos? He had him piss himself. Which works fine at the level of teenage sniggering…but that’s pretty much the level Smith’s work is stuck at, for all his attempts to include some moral fibre in Dogma.

Someone else who gets it is Walt Simonson. His run on Thor embraced the epic in every sense, from the larger-than-life dynamism of the artwork to the galactic scale of the adventures his hero engaged in. And even when he worked on a smaller scale, with Thor turned into a frog, there was still a sense of true fantasy about it. No stumbling over words and Woody Allen style self-consciousness: Thor represents the divine.

I’m all for mixing things up, learning from different styles and genres. But that includes recognising when a particular approach is going nowhere, and hasn’t been pursued before for good reason. But what do I know? Bendis comics sell by the truckload. All very well. But that’s the point when we can look at the distinction between popular appeal and mass appeal. The Beatles were the first, creating art that elevated themselves and touched peoples’ lives. Oasis are examples of the latter, aping the surface aspects of what the Fab Four did without ever expanding that template or creating work with real resonance.

It’s easy to intimidate or weird out your audience. Get up on stage with a sneer and a wall of feedback and you can pretty quickly get a reputation for being some kind of sonic terrorist. Actually moving people with your work is another thing entirely. Some of my favourite art in every media is created by people who appreciate avant garde approaches, and use them in the service of emotionally-charged work.

In music, that description encompasses the work of some of my preferred artists, from John Coltrane to Mogwai. Filmmakers such as Coppola and Jim Jarmusch offer such a combination. And in comics, one of the names that comes up when I think of an equivalent is Peter Milligan.

Peter Milligan is — simply — one of the finest writers in comics. His command of character and story ensure that however outlandish his concepts — and they can get pretty out there, as seen in Rogan Josh, his psychedelic collaboration with Brendan McCarthy, and the pretty much indescribable Hewligan’s Haircut, with Jamie Hewlett — there is a potent emotional kick to go along with the weirdness. He takes risks, and sometimes fails…but I’d rather read someone genuinely committed to challenging themselves than a writer whose eye is always and only on market share.

Recently, Milligan’s series Greek Street ground to a premature halt. I’m not too sad at its loss: the mix of Greek myth and the London underworld never really gelled, though there were of course some moments of wonder along the way. But hey, no-one got hurt, and hopefully a few people will be inspired to check out some more of the wayward writer’s work.

If they do, it’s likely that they’ll check out Milligan’s run on Hellblazer. A third trade paperback collection has just come out, continuing to chronicle the adventures of middle-aged magical miscreant John Constantine. I’ve very much enjoyed the series under Milligan’s stewardship, which follows in the vein of its forerunners: occult tales with a political edge, with the ongoing theme of the protagonist’s guilt at the way he’s led so many friends to sticky ends.

What Milligan brings to the table is a more nuanced approach to the writing than some of his predecessors. Constantine falls in love with a doctor, and getting involved in his life results in her death. He ventures to India to purify himself so he can resurrect his love, but in a lovely twist the woman who reappears in his life isn’t the doctor but a gangland boss’s young daughter — exactly the sort of woman Constantine likes to think he wants nothing to do with. And that’s the beauty of this story — Milligan is good at getting under John’s skin, and the contradiction between the safe woman he tells himself he should love, and the volatile troublemaker who turns up, highlights the faultlines in the middle-aged magus’s life.

There is more to enjoy. Picking up on some of the threads he explored in Rogan Josh, the India collection explores the relationship of Britain and India from colonial times to the present day, with a tale that has its roots in the bad behaviour of a Victorian man in days of Empire, and also takes in Bollywood, demon-summoning bindis, and the business of how to resurrect someone who wants to stay dead.

Milligan convinces because of his ability to get inside his character’s heads and hearts. He did it brilliantly in identity-shifting thriller series Human Target, he did it in ways that staked out his career in Shade, and he’s doing it again — in a lower key way, suited to his protagonist’s age — with John Constantine in Hellblazer. If you’ve read Constantine’s adventures before and dropped them, this is a great time to be picking them up again. If you’ve never been tempted to follow the adventures of the underworld wide boy, this is a fine time to get on board.

I wasn’t expecting much from Red, the star-studded comic adaptation that’s doing surprisingly well at the box office, after reading a few dismissive reviews. But, whatever. I like me a bit of action hokum, and this one promised Helen Mirren with a machine gun: what better entertainment on a Sunday afternoon? Besides, it’s based on a Warren Ellis comic, and though his principal involvement seems to be buying his daughter a pony on the proceeds, I was still curious to see how the translation had worked. At the very least, the comic’s distinctive covers have been a strong influence on the film posters — artist Cully Hamner should be proud of his work, especially in an age when poster design tends to the anodyne.

Things started promisingly, with a mildly flirtatious chat on the phone between the Willis character and a much younger woman dealing with his pension payments. Cute, and I liked the way she moved her face: there’s something of the silent movie star about Mary-Louise Parker I reckon. A sweet opening, before the mayhem that swiftly follows as oodles of heavily armed badasses descend on the home of former black ops specialist Frank Moses (Willis), allowing him to demonstrate his considerable chops at self defence while wearing a dressing gown. Oh what fun.

And that pretty much set the template for what followed. Moses kidnaps Mary-Louise — for her own good you understand — and they play out a slow courtship while she’s got her mouth gaffa-taped shut and he’s dodging bullets. In due course, the gaffa tape comes off and sassy talk commences, the two of them beginning to bond and in the process extending the cast to take in Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, and Helen Mirren.

All good stuff, except for Bob. I call him that because he reminded me with his black coat, stout physique, and facial plumage of a not-so Silent Bob, as portrayed by Kevin Smith. The noise came from the conveyer belt of snacks he reached into his lap for when he came and sat next to me half an hour into the film. Willis introduced his paramour to Malkovich’s acid casualty assassin and Bob offered tribute by hoovering up a tube of Pringles. As one notable supporting actor after another popped up on screen, he drew up litres of Coke from a firebucket sized container through a primary coloured straw.

Fuelled by sugar and caffeine, Bob became energised as the film continued, occasionally adding his own critical commentary to the action. As he did, I became increasingly angry. I was annoyed at him sitting next to me at all. And especially half an hour into the film. I suspected him of having finished another film in the multiplex and chancing another one without having paid for it. Usually the culprits are teenagers, but Bob was around thirty.

As the scale of the conspiracy became clear — the vice president was involved, and the roots of the story were in misguided American foreign policy — I found myself wanting to talk to Bob. To wait for the film to finish and ask him what he meant by coming in and sitting where he did, when he did. I realised there was no way I could prove whether he’d bought a ticket short of asking him to show me one, the etiquette for which I was unsure of. I judged him, found Bob to be emblematic of fannish entitlement of the worst sort. Yes, this was just the kind of leech that would read pirated comics online with no intention of buying print versions, and to add insult to injury fail to pay for a ticket for the film version of the story he’d clearly enjoyed.

Only…when it came to it, I let Bob leave before me just as I do the arses who talk through the film or who take calls during it. Inspired though I was by the righteous brutality of Willis and crew, it looks like when it comes to being a cinema vigilante, I just don’t cut the mustard.

Sometimes, you have an idea that you know is a solid gold winner. That’s how Mark Waid must have felt when he conceived of Potter’s Field. Like many great concepts, it’s elegantly concise. On a small island off New York is a mass graveyard containing unidentified bodies, their gravestones marked with numbers. But one man makes it his mission to put names to the dead, and risks his life to do so.

Simple, huh? Brilliantly so. And there you have it. Add a protagonist in the pulp tradition of Will Eisner’s Spirit, and a superb artist in the form of Paul Azaceta, who draws from that same inky well, and you’ve got a winner of a comic, four issues of which are collected with supplemental material in a collection published by Boom! Studios. This is the first work of theirs I’ve checked out, and on the basis of Potter’s Field I’m likely to investigate other titles they’ve put out.

Our hero goes by the name John Doe, the same name applied to the unknown corpses whose deaths he investigates. His motivation is uncertain, his commitment unquestionable: Doe is a man with a mission, though thankfully has no mission statement to accompany it. He accomplishes his task through the intelligence given to him by a network of informers, and is handy in a fight — which is useful seeing as there’s a lot of people who’d like to see him as dead as the people he represents.

It would be fair to say that Waid isn’t doing anything original here. But neither is Lee Child in his Jack Reacher novels, and I’m addicted to them. In fact, they share an approach to storytelling that gives both characters their charm. Doe and Reacher are all about righting wrongs, whatever it takes, and doing what’s necessary despite the personal cost involved. Both characters hark back to Chandler’s battered but honourable P.I.s, men who might wear tattered coats but whose hearts shine pure and true.

That said, there are interesting modern elements brought into the stories. The two-parter at the core of the collection has a fascinating take on 9/11, previously decent cops who pocket money from the bank accounts of unidentified Twin Towers victims, and further pursue the path of greed in the years following by mutilating the bodies of corpses to anonymise them, again to allow access to their finances. It has the stink of truth about it, the first part anyway, the follow up being a writer’s logical continuation of an established pattern that feels right even if it hasn’t happened. What might not have happened in reality can still be an authentic comment on human character.

None of this would work without the sublime artwork of Paul Azaceta. A highly capable storyteller with a strong sense of place and a bone-lean style, his work leads your eye across the page in style, and is ably supported by Nick Falardi’s adept use of colour.

Potter’s Field displays a rare synergy between text and art that’s not seen nearly enough in mainstream titles, and it rates as one of the finest comics I’ve seen in a long time. Quite why the market for these things is dominated by witless self-involved crap that means nothing to people who’ve not been reading comics for twenty years already I couldn’t tell you, but Potter’s Field is a beacon of excellence, rooted in pulp traditions and executing them with intelligence and finesse.

Boom! are publishing some superhero titles, but they’re apparently good ones, as you’d expect with Waid writing them. They’ve also got quite a portfolio of licences, publishing comics for Pixar, Disney, and The Henson Company, which is sensible from a business point of view, and — again — reports about the quality of those comics are good. At the same time, they’re pushing the boat out in other directions with adaptations of Philip K. Dick books and original work by creators from the small press scene. Fingers crossed it’s a model that works for them, and results in more quality titles for readers.

The story of gay characters in comics is an unhappy one, mostly because of messy assumptions about comics being read by young boys I suspect. Well, for one thing that’s a bogus claim if you look into actual ages of contemporary comics readers. And for another it’s irrelevant. The active question here is: do we want our comics to be representative of society at large or not? And if the answer to that is yes, then you can’t really get away without depicting gay characters.

I’m less interested in the underground/small press scene — which has always provided voices for dissent and difference — than with mainstream comics. As in, the stuff pumped out by Marvel and DC. And the sad truth is, that though the seventies were a time of ‘relevance’ for comics, in the work of creators like Don McGregor and Doug Moench, that tag extended to race and drugs but did not really address matters of gender and sexuality. Which may or may not be a comment on the difficulty of gay creators working in the mainstream — I don’t know enough to hazard a guess.

Such a shame — the whole issue of teens struggling with powers and having a secret identity seems to provide plenty of scope for gay characters. But they’re few and far between. Marvel made some effort with a character called Northstar, but of course as the only gay hero in town he had to experience a superhero version of AIDS written in florid style.

Fortunately, help was at hand. In reinventing some of Wildstorm’s properties in the hope that they would sell, Warren Ellis devised the heroic team The Authority, which featured amongst its ranks gay analogs for the well known crimefighters Batman and Superman. Written by Ellis at least, their relationship was just one aspect of the whole, and didn’t receive undue or salacious attention: it simply was what it was. Sad to say, the same couldn’t be said for some of the writers who followed Ellis in recounting the adventures of Apollo and Midnighter.

But now Wildstorm has ceased to exist, or at any rate parent company DC has taken the brand away and not yet announced what will be done with the various titles it spawned, though something will doubtless happen in due course. So where can eager readers be sure of finding stirring manly action that realises the homoerotic potential of pulp fiction?

Step forward Devlin Waugh. Written by John Smith, and capably illustrated by artists ranging from Sean Phillips to Steve Yowell, Devlin is a big pink kiss on the stern helmet of all that Judge Dredd represents. It works because there’s something perfectly British about Devlin, who in his capacity as a paranormal troubleshooter for the Vatican is well on his way to being a pulp hero. Add a bodybuilder’s frame and Terry Thomas moustache, and he looks quite the picture. And he’s queer, whether you like it or not. Unapologetic in his taste for pretty young men, Devlin — a champion flower arranger and cat breeder — is an aesthete above all else. He holds fights up while he’s choosing which cravat to wear, insists on travelling with fine bone china and inspirational art even in the desert heat, and has a sizzling line in biting putdowns for every occasion.

Devlin Waugh works as a character because he’s just as ludicrous as Judge Dredd, whose world he shares. But where Dredd’s reference points are bikes and boots and bullets, Devlin’s are those of the fop, the dandy, the in your face queer who isn’t going to go away because he makes you uncomfortable. He’s fast become one of my favourite characters, and it was good to hear that 2000AD readers are big fans of the camp Catholic — Devlin Waugh is second only to Dredd in their affections.