The great romantic space opera of our time, starcrossed lovers crossing the stars with only their child, a ghostly baby-sitter, a mother-in-law, and a big walrusy thing they got for the blubber but kept as a pet to keep them company. Keeping a low profile, sort of, with Marko taking baby Hazel to the park and Alana appearing on a sort of massive superhero soap opera transmitted across the galaxy, is putting a strain on their relationship, but it's the far-off birth of a new Robot prince that is the catalyst for the next disaster to overtake their lives. Disasters overtake their lives with terrible but entertaining regularity- now we're into the difficulties of keeping a family together when there's war all around and you're fugitives from almost literally everybody in the universe. This is wonderful and addictive and constantly fresh, exciting and unexpected.

It'd be difficult to find a comic out there with a premise as dementedly original as this one, or one that follows through to the outer limits of the surreal logic of that premise. Tony Chu is a cibopath - whenever he eats something he gets sensations of what that thing experiences when it was alive. Since Chu is also a cop, this sounds like a particularly odd pitch for a procedural, special powers being used to solve weekly murders. It starts out that way, sort of, but by the time we reach the end of volume one, it's already heading out for shores unknown to any police procedural ever seen on this planet before.

In the world of Chew, chicken has been banned after an outbreak of avian flu. After a bloody encounter in a chicken speakeasy reveals his gift, Chu is drafted into the FDA, whereupon things start to get really weird and sinister not to mention grotesque and violent, but mostly hilarious. Poor Chu's gift is a terrible one, but the story twists and turns and veers of constantly in unexpected directions and can go from madcap to heartbreakingly horrifying in a single panel transition. At the end of this volume one, Chu is sorer, sadder, but not much wiser about what the heck is going on. Chew is a wild ride, and it's barely getting started.

The ending of volume one of Southern Bastards came as something of a shock - not quite as much of a shock in a post-Game Of Thrones world, but still. The story built to it, foreshadowed it, earned it, and still it was a punch to the gut. Almost as shocking, in a quieter way, is what comes next - a volume devoted to the life and character of the villain, the guy who may epitomise the book's title, though in fact there's no shortage of the type in these pages.

So, four issues humanising the biggest bastard of the book, who starts out as a lonely, bullied, abused boy with only one way out and no-one to get it but himself. We end up knowing way more than we want to abut him, feeling way too much for his suffering, empathise too much with his need to make something of himself - too much because he's still a murdering bastard, even more of a murdering bastard than we already knew, though we may have suspected. As a piece of work it's a brilliant achievement by Aaron and Latour - relentless, unflinching, but also as funny as is it is savage. Southern Bastards is probably the best crime comic being currently produced.

By the way, read the introduction if you can. I had no idea who Ryan Kalil is, but about a third of the way in it takes off into a whole strange and indecipherable language that becomes a kind of poetry. He's a football player, and football is central to Southern Bastards, but if someone like me, who has a knowledge of sport that's in negative figures, can enjoy the hell out of it anyway, so can anyone.

I've always been of the opinion that Bryan Talbot's Adventures Of Luther Arkwright edged out Alan Moore's Watchman as the great monumental comic of the eighties, for all that Arkwright was messy with underground new ave influences as opposed to the stunning, but sterile, formalism of Watchmen. Anyway, Talbot's on my pantheon of greats, and I've been looking forward to trying out his Grandville series, combining as it does, according to the blurb, Conan Doyle, Rubert The Bear and Quentin Tarantino. So what we get is a post-9/11 alt-history steampunk adventure with sex, ultra-violence and anthropomorphic animal characters and tons of references to animals in art and comics. It's an absolute blast as Inspector LeBrock, quintessentially British badger detective and tough guy investigates the apparent suicide of a diplomatic aide, an investigation that takes him to the French city of the title and a wide-ranging conspiracy that implicates the most powerful in French society.

Admittedly the dastardly plot is VERY post-9/11 but there's no denying the amazing vision and dazzling art and the fantastic energy and dark humour, the wonderful homages and cleverness of the vision.

Having a dastardly villain decide to go after a hero with a diabolical plan to dismantle their life and their mind, leaving them crushed and broken, too pathetic to kill, or, if you do kill them, check the body, isn't even new to Batman, let alone to superheroes in general. You're nobody until your life has been dismantled by a cackling and/or calculating mastermind leaving you to crawl back from the wreckage to inflict justice and revenge having learned a few valuable lessons about, if nothing else, the demands of narrative to repeatedly inflict punishment and destruction on long-running characters just to shake things up and keep things interesting.

Even so, Batman RIP isn't the Caped Crusader's first spin on this merry-go-round, but it's Morrison, so as the Black Glove tear our hero down, triggering post-hypnotic commands implanted years before by Dr Hurt to cause a mental breakdown in Bruce Wayne's mind, it turns out that Batman, who plans for everything, planned for something like this, and it's actually pretty extraordinary.

The action and the ideas flow fast, there's a new version of the Joker, born in the last Morrison collection, it's tricky and tricksy and plays games with narrative and character is dense with allusion to stuff in and out of continuity - specifically the Black casebook, full of Batman adventures too crazy for regular continuity. As a Batman reader I'm fairly casual, but I didn't have too much difficulty keeping up, though maybe it helps that I'm familiar with Morrison.

The last two parts of this are great, but set off from the rest and disjointed in terms of the overall flow. Feels like there's a beginning and an ending missing. I get the impression that with multiple Batman titles and Final Crisis all going on things get very muddled. Hopefully somewhere in the next couple of collections it'll get glued on properly.

It's volume five and the major themes of this series have become actualised, or perhaps just become so flippin' obvious that even someone like me, reading for the cool characters and relentless plot twists and reversals, finally actually noticed them. Sacrifice and violence, both personal and political, selfish and selfless, whether any sacrifice is truly selfless, whether all violence is fundamentally corrupting. Plenty of people doing horrible violent things for supposedly noble reasons. Marko and the Robot Prince chasing their families, Dengo murdering and kidnapping to stop an unjust war and trying to join up with Revolutionaries who do more of the same on an even larger scale, and Sophie and the gang off looking for dragon sperm to save the Will and, yes, I really love this series.

The fractured alternate-future nations of America are being pushed to war by the House Of Mao - the mother of Death's child confronting the Chosen while Death searches for their lost son. Between the politics of millenarian cultists in power and hi-tech warfare and the three horsemen of the apocalypse setting out to kill Babylon and Death and his witch-friends in a bloody confrontation on the spiritual border of magic and reality, this smooth, stylish apocalyptic western moves slyly through epic moments on its way to the end of the world. Hickman and Dragotta are a powerful team and this mad sci-fi fantasy end times saga is a real favourite.

Whether it's earning a few badges or going for a picnic, things are never simple or straightforward for the Lumberjanes. Jo, April and Ripley are tripped up by their own ambitions and enthusiasms and learn a valuable lesson about dialing things down a notch sometimes, while Molly and Mal follow a bear-woman through a portal to a sort of dinosaur dimension and have to steal back a pair of magic glasses from a velociraptor nest before they can get home. They also learn a valuable lesson. I think.

More madcap fun and frolics, cute, sweet, fun and funny - it was certainly a nice way to start this rather dour December day.

Warren Ellis writing a story about a team of cranky experts in fields both esoteric and technical investigating scary incursions and outbreaks around the world? Must be the nineties again! Except it's not, it's the now, Ellis has always surfed as close to the leading cutting edge of thought and tech as he could with often startlingly original results. Here he's joined with Declan Shalvey on art with amazing results as Professor Marie Kilbride reassembles her old team while dealing with a strange occurrence to do with a missing archaeologist and two security men, a rock with strange acoustical properties and, possibly, spriggans. It may all be her fault. She and her team injected a strange consciousness into the internet in the hopes that it would prevent development and innovations from stagnating. Instead something out there is is using ancient folklore and modern technology to make the century interesting. Because the century so far has been such a yawn.

With Ellis in top form in terms of storytelling and cutting-edge ideas and Shalvey's frankly astonishing art, beautifully coloured, and a terrifically spooky mix of alien AI and old British folklore this makes for a great read, even the various instantly identifiable Ellisisms in terms of character and dialogue seem refreshed and renewed and fit for purpose. Bits of it are even set in Dublin, and the Big Smoke never looked so good.

I think Batman actually died in Final Crisis, a big mega-crossover that hasn't arrived from the library yet, but this dovetails nicely with the end of Batman RIP - ex-Robin Dick Grayson and current Robin and Bruce Wayne's son by a queen of assassins Damian Wayne take on the mantle of Batman and Robin, and it is not a easy ride. Grayson is unsure of himself and Damian's a bit of a git. Nonetheless, this turns into a brilliantly readable pairing, replacing the father-son dynamic with a older/younger sibling one to fantastic effect. This volume is still early days in the relationship, but it's delightfully sparky and snarky and their villains are right monsters like Mr Pyg, or challenges to their, er, more ethical approach to vigilantism, such as Red Hood and his sidekick Scarlet, who murder criminals with aplomb. It all looks amazing, particularly the cartoony realism of Frank Quitely, and is merely the opening salvo in a long and enjoyable saga.