The premise of Bonekickers - that archaeologists discover evidence that seriously unsettles the accepted version of the past - is one I was perfectly happy to accept. And that fact that it was brought to us by the people who devised Life on Mars was potentially promising. I was never as ardent a fan of the latter as many: I thoroughly enjoyed the Gene Hunt bits, but frankly they could have come out of Viz.

Anyway, what really annoyed me about the Bonekickers pilot episode was being told what to think about the characters. One expert introduced another as ‘Google with a beerbelly’ and that was supposed to pass for characterisation. Only, in my book at least, characterisation is based on behaviour that leaves a conclusion in the viewer’s head, not a summation of that person delivered by another character. So that annoyed me. Then it happened again, and I realised this was no accident, but an intentional attempt to give ersatz characterisation that was unearned by what I was actually seeing. And that bugged me.

Which isn’t to say there wasn’t any characterisation going on. There were a few stereotypes in evidence, mostly in the form of a media academic who wrote books about sex in history that were adapted for Channel 5, and that clearly made the author an enemy. The heroes were our boys and girls in the trenches, with trowels and, err, spectrographic analysis machines. And if they weren’t larger than life enough, there are also some descendants of the Knights Templar running around, and I have a horrible idea that the whole thing is going to develop into some kind of Da Vinci Code scenario. Which is fine: once I sussed that, and had tired of wincing at the sub-CSIisms and clunky dialogue, I stopped watching and instead put on a DVD of some sublime live music and had a fantastic evening.

So, what to make of all that? Well, I’m pleased that the BBC is spending money on something that isn’t an emergency service drama. That’s definitely a good thing. I’m less pleased that they went to the purveyors of one left field hit to find another, when there are any number of writers and production companies out there who could have come up with something else. Or maybe they did go that route, and weren’t happy with what they came up with. I’d be fascinated to read the brief for what became Bonekickers anyway, and see if anyone else came up with anything for it.

Overall then, 10/10 for trying, 3/10 for execution. I seriously doubt that I will be watching future episodes of Bonekickers. And I do hope that someone, somewhere, hits the bullseye in terms of delivering a post-watershed hit for a large audience: I appreciate it’s not an easy task.

So, what makes you scared? Venturing into the dark? Noises that you can’t explain? Zealots? Fucking enormous monsters with sucking tentacles? All of these and more are to be found in The Mist, Frank Darabont’s third outing with a Stephen King adaptation after The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, and his first on the author’s home ground, horror.

It’s refreshing to see a horror film with a moral centre to it, and that’s what raises The Mist above most horror features you’re likely to see. A bunch of random Americans are trapped in a supermarket in the mist, and something is out there. More than one something in fact. And the longer they stay in the supermarket, the greater the tensions within the group. Consistently, it’s what people do that provides the real scares within the story: there are creatures sure enough, but it’s easy to claim that they’re acting by instinct. We’re supposed to be the ones with the capacity for reason, and that’s the first thing to go when people are under pressure.

We’ve all been in situations where things have got tense with the people around us. But we’re usually able to leave those situations, claiming other engagements or priorities. Part of King’s simple genius in this story is that there is nowhere to go…except into the unknown, about which the one thing that is known is that it’s highly dangerous out there. Imagine a dinner party with a high complement of arseholes, and the only way you can leave is to face a pack of werewolves while you’re armed with just a fire extinguisher. That’s pretty much what the characters in this story are faced with.

What with the setting being a supermarket, and there being a cross section of people there, it can’t help but feel like a microcosm of America itself under threat. And, true to life, the scariest part is when a good chunk of the people there fall under the spell of a deranged evangelist who perceives what’s happening as the realisation of all the really messed up Ray Harryhausen/Michael Bay style stuff that the Bible promises at the End of Days.

The protagonist and a few of the saner people there escape the supermarket rather than be stuck there with the zealot, driving through the mist and the monsters it contains, hoping to find an end or an answer. They come across neither. And what happens instead has to be one of the bleakest conclusions to a film I’ve seen in a long time. Which perhaps explains why the film is showing just twice a day at the cinema where I saw it, and was only selected at all because of the persistence of the film programmer at the cinema.

If that’s the case, that makes things bleaker still: are we so desperate for screenings of the film version of Sex and the City and Kung Fu Panda that we can’t stomach a film with some real intelligence and an unpopular viewpoint? Hopefully not: the recent success of No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood demonstrates that there is a taste for grown up films with bleak conclusions, but maybe in the summer months we’re expected to subsist on a diet of vacuous blockbusters. And that really is a horrific thought…

Tonight’s episode of Dr Who, the season finale, was a joyous confirmation of Russell T Davies’s status as the show’s reinventor. The key is in his regeneration of an old franchise that had gone to seed in the hands of people embarrassed to be charged with running a science fiction show for all the family, and the way it’s now positioned front and centre at the heart of BBC1’s role as a national and international broadcaster.

Make no mistake, in these days of shows tailored to demographics, and a BBC determined to establish a foothold in every conceivable social grouping, Dr Who is a hugely important series. While everyone else is talking narrowcasting, Russell has managed to reaffirm the importance of television as an experience shared across generations and subcultures.

Not only is Dr Who a show with a mission, it’s one with a message. It’s a series about the future of our species, and at a time when we’re bombarded with bulletins about global warming, economic downturn, intolerance and the rest, Dr Who is pointing to a multi-ethnic polysexual future in which difference is accepted and every individual can make a difference. A bit Pollyanna-ish perhaps, but I’d rather the next generation were growing up with that as a vision than whatever they’re gleaning from a diet of Resident Evil and Happy Meals.

OK, so every episode has not been one of unalloyed success, and some of Russell’s scripts have been among the clunkiest since the show has reappeared. But when he does well, he does better than well, and this evening’s barnstormer was an example of why Russell T Davies deserves whatever accolades can be sent his way.

In 65 fabulous minutes, the series finale managed to combine a thwarting of a(nother) Dalek plan to defeat the Doctor and destroy the universe with a whole bunch of subplots relating to the extended family of companions and chums that he has accumulated since coming back to our screens. Everyone got their moment, from swashbuckling bisexual Captain Jack to Bernard Cribbins, in his role as Donna Noble’s grandfather. And Donna got the biggest moment of all, which fully justified her surname: Everywoman became Wonder Woman, if only for a short while, before the cosmic clock was reset and all returned to normal. There’s nothing more noble than a sacrifice like that, and sacrifice is what Dr Who runs on.

Oh, and Rose came back, had to return to her parallel world, and did so in the company of the Doctor, or at least a half-human iteration of The Doctor, who’ll be able to settle down and live and love and die with her as a mortal. What more could you ask for? You can’t accuse Davies of skimping on emotional scenes, and he relished every opportunity to shoehorn them in: anyone who watched the show without a tear coming to their eyes at some point is a Cyberman, for sure.

Juggling those emotional pay-offs with the structural demands of the plot was a hell of a feat, and demonstrated Davies’s abundant skill as a writer at the same time as getting across his underlying belief that quality drama can be life-affirming…too many people mistake misery for seriousness, and if Davies demonstrates anything it’s the power of truly popular drama to touch the lives of its audience.

Where the dynamic of art and society is concerned, I’m very much of the belief that art can have social value. Not that all art should seek to have social merit, but that it can absolutely be a valid part of the debates that society has with itself about issues affecting some or all of its members. Today’s Guardian features two stories where art and politics have intersected with interesting results…

Over in America, Indiana teacher Connie Heermann has been using the book The Freedom Writers Diary, filmed recently with Hilary Swank, to inspire a class of underperforming teenagers. The stories it contains are written by young people from the inner city, whose lives have been turned round partly as a result of their creativity. And, guess what, it contains some swearing. Despite getting the assent of 150 parents to using the book, one of the school’s board members objected to some of the more potty-mouthed content, with the result that Connie has been suspended from her job without pay for 18 months, and the book effectively banned from the school.

I was lucky enough to have had an English teacher with Connie’s vision. We were bored to tears by the first few pages of Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae, and responding to our agonies he went and got us Kes instead. It was a breath of fresh air, and reading something concerning the life of a boy our own age living in what was recognisably our own world was a liberation. I’m pretty sure there was a bit of swearing in there too, but thankfully the school board never intervened. That same teacher was passionate about the work of George Orwell, and it’s maybe because of that baptism in socially engaged prose by a committed and articulate advocate that I became fascinated by the interaction of the world and the writer.

It’s always interesting when an interest group claims to be unfairly represented by a work of fiction, and this week it’s the turn of that underprivileged bunch, barristers. Their bone of contention is the excellent series Criminal Justice, which unfortunately for them is written by one of their number, Peter Moffatt, who could be fairly said to know a thing or two about the horsetrading that goes on in the legal system.

Timothy Dutton, the head of the bar (which itself is an interesting choice of language to describe what is in effect a cartel for bewigged justice dispensers) claims that Criminal Justice in no way, shape or form resembles the way that yer actual barristers conduct yer actual law. And you’d like to think he’s right, what with the tactics used by the show’s barrister to stall, to persuade, and bamboozle its youthful protagonist.

Unfortunately, there’s a wealth of evidence to suggest that this portrait is in fact highly representative of what goes on in Britain’s legal system, and that Dutton is flipping his wig about someone with inside knowledge writing about it in a show that’s attracted respect in part for the authenticity of its detail. Funnily enough, there have been no complaints from jailbirds about the portrayal of the brutal anthropology of incarceration. Sure, as Moffatt acknowledges, he’s writing a piece of television drama that is enthralling and entertaining, but there’s no denying the research that’s gone into it.

Where these two stories are concerned, I’m hoping there’ll be more to come. It’d be lovely to think that public outrage could help Connie Heermann get her job back from the knuckle-draggers who took it from her. And I’m sure further elegantly worded asides will be exchanged between Peter Moffatt and his former lords and masters about Criminal Justice, which continues until the end of the week.

So, I got round to seeing Wanted, with a writer friend who I have occasional ‘man dates’ with where we go and see films together that no self-respecting woman would be seen at. And so far we’ve picked on films that have their origins in comics, what with the pair of us being comics geeks. Only, after Wanted I’m left wondering why studios persist in going for the big whizzbang kind of comics, when the medium has so much more to offer that could bring something fresh to the screen…

I’ve not actually read the series that Wanted is based on, having very mixed feelings about its author, Mark Millar. He did a pretty fine job on The Ultimates for Marvel, reinventing some of the company’s core characters for a new cine-literate generation, but I find his grandstanding hype and mixed-up politics put me off much of his other work. Plus, there’s the feeling that he’s better at the big shocking concept than the actual delivery.

The idea behind Wanted is simple enough: what if you found out you weren’t just an average citizen, but had amazing abilities, and could use your powers to shape the destiny of the world? Classic adolescent powertrip stuff in other words, and that’s pretty much the film in a nutshell. Beyond that, it’s spectacle piled on top of spectacle, connected by some frankly ludicrous ideas. Trains crashing into canyons while people fight on board. Secret mind powers that allow you to bend bullets round corners. A lorryload of rats wired up to explode the baddy’s base. The baddy’s base itself, to all intents and purposes a castle in a previously overlooked medieval quarter of New York. Riffs from Fight Club and The Matrix recycled blandly like the soundtrack’s generic guitar attack. It’s all kind of fun at the most superficial level, but five minutes after it had finished we were discussing something else entirely, since the whole was utterly devoid of content.

All is not lost though. There are some fabulous comics out there coming to the screen sooner or later, and the one I’m particularly keen to see is Y: The Last Man. Brian K Vaughan’s series for Vertigo is now available in full as ten trade paperbacks, and there are more ideas of consequence in there than have troubled Millar for his whole life.

The core concept is that one man and his pet monkey somehow survive an apocalypse which wipes out all other males of every species. It’s a big dumb B-movie conceit, and Vaughan knows how to write action-packed stories with cracking cliffhangers. But he also knows how to populate them with characters you care about, and ideas that drive stories which zig when you think they’re going to zag, and consistently pulse with intelligence regarding issues of gender, politics, and the practicalities of living in a post-apocalyptic world.

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against action blockbusters and in particular ones based on comics. I absolutely loved Iron Man, and am really looking forward to Christopher Nolan’s next Batman film. But there’s an awful lot of chaff out there that could be replaced if studios forgot about looking at the big names in comics and searched around some more for quirkier talent.

And maybe that’s starting to happen: Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s stunning animal action escapade We3 is coming to a cinema soon enough, with Morrison himself writing a script that’s received considerable acclaim from those who’ve read it. Andy Diggle and Jock’s excellent political thriller Losers is on the way too, or was when I last heard anything. Let’s hope those films do their source material justice, and maybe even send people from the cinemas to book shops or comics stores to pick up the stories that inspired the films.

Writer Robert Anton Wilson once posed an interesting question along these lines: what does it say about our society that we have so much drama about the police on television, and so little about landlords? Given the plethora of crime drama on our screens, it’s a valid question to raise, and much of it is anodyne stuff indeed, holding out the promise that the boys and girls in blue will keep us safe from harm, and giving vicarious immersion in supposedly dangerous subcultures.

All well and good for what it’s worth…but then something different crops up and forces you to look at crime drama anew. American shows The Wire and The Shield have done a fine job at exploring crime and punishment in more complex ways, and now BBC1’s all-week special Criminal Justice is performing a similar function.

Interesting that the series is written by a former barrister, Peter Moffat: his immersion in the actual legal world, rather than genre television, was very apparent. The wealth of compelling detail, about how people conduct themselves in and around a criminal case, had a feel of absolute authenticity that’s lacking in shows like The Bill, keen as it is to put a rosy smile on the face of police operations. Here, instead, we saw cynical cops and can’t-be-bothered-cops, and the script felt that much more alive and credible for them.

At the heart of the story is a young man, Ben, who may or may not have killed a young woman, Melanie, who waltzes into the cab that he’s borrowed from his dad to go and see a mate, and which they then travel to the seaside in. Melanie is very much the dominant figure, and it’s her house they end up at, and specifically her bed, after an evening of ecstasy, tequila shots, and knifeplay. It simply shows the effect one charismatic person can have on another less sure of themselves, and on this occasion it ends in tragedy.

It was a joy to watch a piece of intelligent drama that drew from reality and presented it simply and honestly. Agendas were apparent, and everyone’s perspective was valid and comprehensible: no cardboard baddies here. The nearest the script got to clunkiness was when the superintendent in charge of the case had a row with his boss about resources. I don’t doubt the facts and tenor of what was said, but it stood out as potted argument for the audience’s benefit in a script that was otherwise free of exposition.

This wasn’t crime drama that relied on forensic detail and esoterically motivated killers: no need for such attention-grabbing tactics. Instead, it was a story about human beings getting caught up in something messy and ugly, and trying to sort it out as best they can. It all made for a refreshing and fascinating hour of television, and I’ll be doing my best to catch the forthcoming installments.

It was getting stuck with a feature treatment the other day that made me realise I needed to be bringing more to it. I was happy with the general feel of the story, very happy with the ending, and happy that I’d devised an opening to it that set the whole story up nicely. Happy happy happy. Only, something was missing. And that something was a particular kind of depth that would enable me to piece together the elements of the story that I was having trouble figuring out. At which point one of the things I’ve learned to do is turn to mythology. Which is not something I have any special expertise in, so I sometimes ask friends who I believe may be able to help out. And that’s when someone came up with the realisation that the story I’m telling has its roots in the story of the Minotaur.

Now, what with myths being told and retold over the centuries, they tend to have several versions available, which can help you pick out what’s particularly relevant to your story, and what’s not so important. And one consistent element of the stories that resonated with me was the character of Ariadne, who gives the hero Theseus a ball of thread so that he can find his way through the labyrinth that the Minotaur lives in. Hmm. In my story, a psychological thriller, the Minotaur is a good way to think about the protagonist’s internal conflict rather than a real beast he has to confront. But the notion that a woman helps him deal with that conflict makes a lot of sense, and was already implicit in the story in the form of a character he meets when he’s at a low ebb. Expanding her role makes all kinds of sense, and for her to present him with a ball of thread works too. And I realised, that too was already present in the story I was working with. She doesn’t give him an actual ball of thread, but she leaves him with something seemingly whimsical that becomes a valuable clue at a later point in the story. Bingo.

Interesting that in looking into the legend, I realised that some of the key elements were already there in the story I was working on. Which if there are indeed only so many stories, is no great surprise. Personally, I don’t believe that there are just so many stories…but I do believe that there are particular patterns of interaction that are ripe for development as stories, and which the ancients got to first.

The other part of the Minotaur story that interests me is what happens later on, which is wonderfully tragic and human and messed up. On the way home, the ship Theseus travels in loses its white sails in a storm, and instead has its black ones raised when the ship comes in to dock. His dad, seeing the black sails, believes them to be a message that his son is dead, and leaps off a cliff, grief-stricken. Powerful stuff. And I’d like to find a way of weaving some of that, somehow, into the tale I’m telling, which has no ships, storms, or sails, but does feature people who, like all of us, misread messages with sometimes catastrophic consequences.

Asked by a follower what makes for good spiritual practice, one guru said ‘A hard job, and a lousy marriage’. The same thinking applies where writing is concerned: the only genre in which we enjoy someone else’s fun vicariously is pornography. In any other form of writing, readers are there to see the protagonist suffer in artful ways, and it’s the writer’s job to choreograph their miseries.

Now, that description may sound mean. But it also contains a lot of truth. People follow the adventures of characters that interest them, and want to experience them going through hell on their behalf. Somewhere behind this notion, perhaps, is the understanding that if someone else has a dreadful time and comes through it, then maybe you the audience can experience the payoff without having to go through hell personally.

And yes, there’s a strong religious streak to this, which explains why some very successful writers have religion in their lives. Jimmy McGovern is a classic, and look what he puts his characters through in the first episode of The Street. A man and woman living in the same road start having a casual affair behind the backs of their partners. The man knocks down the woman’s daughter in his car when he’s preoccupied by memories of their lovemaking. Now, that’s shitty enough, but where McGovern’s Catholicism takes this beyond the realms of The Jeremy Kyle Show is in what happens next. The man is let off in court for what happened as it was an accident, but the woman still wants to punish him. So she reveals first to her husband, then to her lover’s wife, that they were having an affair, so he can experience some form of suffering, one which brings in a notion of divine punishment for their adultery. Nice one Jimmy: I’d love to read The Catholic Herald’s review.

Not that guilt is confined to followers of Rome. Comics writer Brian Michael Bendis is Jewish, and describes his basic approach to plotting as putting the characters in the worst form of situation for them as individuals, and making it worse still. And with all the baddies in the Marvel Universe available to torment his heroes with, you can believe Bendis enjoys putting his protagonists through the wringer.

All very well, but what’s the point of all this suffering? Once again we’re back in the realm of spirituality: the function of torment is to help people learn. There’s a line in a Robert Fripp song that David Byrne sings: ‘Remain in Hell, without despair’, and that pretty much sums it up. However dismal this place is, we can learn to find something of value
outside us or within, that enables us to keep functioning.

So, suffering is about learning, and learning is about developing capacities that you lack. One particular take on it is to be found in the Tarot card The Tower. It looks pretty scary, showing two people being flung out the window of a tower that’s struck by lightning. Now to decode the image…

There’s a long tradition in dreams and art of buildings representing people, so a building being destroyed is to do with the destruction of a personality that’s been built up over the years. Pretty scary stuff to experience. But where that leaves those who’ve been flung out is with the opportunity to rebuild, this time choosing the building blocks of their life rather than just cementing in the ones that nature and nurture provide. It’s about beginning again, unshackled by the past, basically.

So, quality suffering enables its victims to make new choices in their life. Something we’d all want, to some degree or other. And which helps explain why we find the suffering of others so fascinating in our fiction. Not to mention, depending on the genre that the suffering is happening in, that it allows for the possibility of exciting car chases and giant gorillas. And who doesn’t love a big monkey?

I’m half way through watching Clocking Off, and it’s interesting seeing what Paul Abbott is doing here that not enough writers are doing elsewhere. For those of you unfamiliar with the series, it ran on BBC1 in 2000, and consists of six self-contained dramas, Abbott’s sneaky way of bringing back the single play to television. Each story is set in and around the world created by Mackintosh Textiles and its employees, and features a stellar cast of names you’ll recognise from Dr Who to Life on Mars, stopping by at Coronation Street and Queer as Folk.

What’s immediately clear is that Abbott has a knack for coming up with stories that get to the heart of his characters’ lives. The stories they’re caught up in are without a doubt the biggest things that are happening to them, then and maybe ever. A man who’s been missing for more than a year comes home to his family with amnesia to discover he spent the missing time with another wife and child. A woman sets her house on fire to ensure her partner sees none of the money from it, and finds unexpected love with her next door neighbour. A teenager with learning difficulties has an affair with his boss’s wife.

There’s an epic scale to the emotions underpinning the stories, which ensures the stories are much more than soap opera. You come to know and care about these characters pretty quickly, partly through what’s at stake for them, also because there’s a lightness of touch brought to the dialogue which stops the scripts being Heavy With Significance. It feels like actual people talking, and they’re just as tongue-tied as the rest of us when it comes to grappling with the huge stories they’re caught up in.

What with Paul Abbott being the man who brought us Shameless, you can expect recognisable social worlds and people who behave like human beings, not as pawns representative of their class or theories based on some or other psychological text. And, like Frank Gallagher, some of these characters have their say at length, which feels fine and natural when most of the script features short exchanges of dialogue. One lesson from that is don’t be afraid to let your characters talk about what matters to them sometimes: why let Alan Bennett have the monopoly on monologues?

Another lesson is harder to quantify. In the third story, teenage K.T. is besotted with his lover, the factory boss’s wife. And the factory boss knocks K.T. over with his car, hospitalising him. Only, the boss doesn’t at this point realise that it’s K.T. having the affair. So, Abbott has got him to do what’s expected in a situation like this - put his wife’s lover in hospital…but without realising that he is her lover. There’s karma there, which is dramatically satisfying, but ignorance of the truth makes the situation far more interesting than had the situation been done by the book, with the boss punching the lad’s lights out for messing with his missus. There are other neat twists and turns that have similar effect: the boss loses it with his foreman, who he suspects of being his wife’s lover…which he was on a previous occasion, but is no longer, meaning that he’s both innocent and guilty at the same time. Good stuff, dramatically.

Those kind of nuances are typical of the scenarios that Abbott contrives. A man falls for his neighbour and her kids, and wants them to be part of his life - only she doesn’t want to be responsible to any man, even one she does love. They reach a happy compromise by a circuitous path, which makes their credible ending that much more satisfying.

That quality of reaching a conclusion only though trials and misfortunes, some of them age-old, others relevant to the society we live in now, is characteristic of Paul Abbott’s work. And helps explain why he’s a key figure in modern British television drama, and I’m sure will remain so for years to come.

What with its cast of a gifted and dysfunctional faux-family raised by an eccentric millionaire and his manservant, you’d think The Umbrella Academy was created by Wes Anderson, he of The Royal Tenenbaums and other films about emotionally distant cod-aristos. But no, this collection of the first six issues of the comic is scripted by none other than Gerard Way, driving force behind the band My Chemical Romance.

It’s a handsome volume, published by Dark Horse, beautifully illustrated by Gabriel Ba. His elegant Mike Mignola-influenced linework is what impressed me most about Casanova, the Matt Fraction-written series about a superspy which has so far failed to make an emotional connection with me, and I’m not sure is much more than the sum of its very apparent influences. Colours are by Dave Stewart, who once again demonstrates that modern colouring has come into its own thanks to digital technology.

The Umbrella Academy is a fine piece of work, one I’d been recommended by Laurence Campbell, a superb illustrator doing a fine job of bringing a noirish vision to The Punisher for Marvel. Laurence knows my tastes in comics, and this particular recommendation was spot-on.

To get the obvious comparison out of the way, Gerard Way’s writing most resembles that of Grant Morrison, who provides the introduction to the collection. That is, it veers into some pretty leftfield territory in terms of concepts and execution, but is grounded by credible and touching relationships. Thus, the first installment features an attack by an animated Eiffel Tower, and the overall story arc is about a piece of music that, when performed, will bring about the end of the world.

It’s a highly accomplished piece of work that manages to include some comicbook staples - talking monkeys, weird powers, sinister plots - with credible stuff about families and relationships. The story centres on the children of the titular academy, a bunch of them adopted by eccentric inventor Reginald Hargreeves after a series of spontaneous births by women who were unaware that they were even pregnant. The emotionally distant Hargreeves raises the kids to standards that they cannot but fail, even with their uncanny powers. After saving Paris from the menace of a zombie-robot Gustav Eiffel the Academy disbands for a decade until their mentor’s death brings them together again.

The sense of loss and need for connection between the disparate Academy members is palpable, and brings real emotion to what could otherwise be mere spectacle. There’s heart as well as fizzbang at work here, and some very smart touches in the writing, such as the way that each chapter ends on a tangential coda taken from some statistics or a quotation. You can trace some of the devices back to Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius stories, the big influence on Casanova, but Way handles them with an authority that I don’t personally find in Fraction’s work there, all the more powerful for using them occasionally and not throughout the story.

The Daily Mail complained about what it felt was the pernicious influence of emo bands such as My Chemical Romance, and fans responded by picketing their offices. Maybe someone should tell them that Gerard Way is writing comics too, and they’ll start a new moral backlash against them that we can all picket them for.