A deeply enthralling children's adventure set on and off the Galway coast. A missing father, legendary treasure, hard-bitten rogues, danger on land and on sea, all told with realism and romance, written with beautiful clarity and perfectly-crafted prose, a vivid portrayal of Irish rural life and coastal and village fishing communities and lovely illustrations by Richard Kennedy. Some of the story-telling conventions creak a bit, but the writing raises this book several levels, this is surely a classic of children's literature.

The second volume of the Roman Mysteries series goes like a rocket, as Flavia and friends travel for a nice peaceful holiday near the city of Pompeii, AD 79. While they poke around at a few mysteries - an odd riddle, an elusive blacksmith - Vesuvius sleeps peacefully - until it doesn't. Not only are the mysteries solved, they're solved while trying to escape a massive volcanic eruption. The characters are downright adorable, the action is superbly orchestrated and paced, the eruption and the race for survival are epic and dangerous and dark. Superb.

Felix sets out from his unhappy home in northern Spain to travel to England in search of his father's family with nothing more than a handful of words deciphered from his Father's unreadable letter. With only a stubborn mule for company he crosses the mountains and has one adventure after another, with only his wits and ingenuity and a talent for music to win him through. From feuding villages to trapped oxen to a forbidden duel, from jail to a strange mountain village to danger on the sea, this is a thrilling and exciting tale filled with unexpected encounters and marvelous characters.

A wild epic tale of adventure and magic, as the Morrigan, the goddess of three aspects, returns to the human world, Galway, specifically, ready to wreak havoc and only Pidge and Brigit stand a hope of thwarting her, even though they were only a pair of young children and have no idea how. Nonetheless after a curious encounter in a bookshop, and a pair of strange neighbours take up residence in a nearby greenhouse, Pidge and Brigit set out on a dangerous and thrilling journey into another world in search of the one thing that can defeat the Morrigan. Hunted relentlessly by the eponymous hounds, the children are aided and assisted by a series of strange and sometimes noble and sometimes hilarious characters, many of them straight out of Irish myth and folklore. In fact, this may be the greatest work of Irish children's fiction to use so much folklore so well, or at least the best I've read so far. Much of it is incredibly charming and funny without being twee. Some of it is very strange and solemn and scary, and somehow the O'Shea mixes the different tones seamlessly, without ever jarring the reader, creating an evocative and unreal atmosphere where anything can happen, and probably will.

Nausicaa departs from the besieged town and heads south to find the answers to the mystery of the southern forest. Kushana and Kurotowa leave on a mission of their own - to steal ships to rescue her besieged Third Army. Yupa and company travel through the forest and meet with the crew of the gunship. A massive migration of insects has begun, drawn south by the artificial spores created by the Dorok scientists, possibly triggering a catastrophic extension of the miasmic forest called the daikasho.

Once again the story unfolds around a breath-taking action set-piece. From the appearance of a single flying insect to the vision of vast swarms filling the sky, Kushana's daring raid on her brother's camp under cover of the insect migration is a terrifying, exhilarating spectacle, but it's the slowly mounting dread of the Dorok mold as it grows and spreads, poisonous to humans and insects alike, apparently unstoppable and intelligent that heralds the coming apocalypse. If I read much past this point I can't remember it - I've no idea how it all works out. Under the dazzling visuals and extraordinary storytelling, it's all getting rather sombre and grim. What hope for humanity's survival?

I still have the two issues that bookended Vertigo's Children's Crusade crossover, a terribly over-ambitious idea full of brilliant ideas that never fully meshed. Nonetheless, the first bookend, written by Gaiman and drawn by Bachalo remains one of the most potent, mysterious, atmospheric, sad and thrilling comics ever produced. The second issue wrapped things up quite well, I always thought, even though though the two together never felt like a whole story. Even if you read the other relevant issues in the crossover, they were a bit all over the place and uneven. The art in the Doom Patrol issue was dire, if I recall correctly. Anyway, Gaiman has talked about it before, and about the difficulty of getting the Vertigo writers to mesh, and he reiterates it here in the introduction.

So this collection finally gives the curious the chance to see what it was all about, and it's certainly worth getting for that opening. Toby Litt, who had an excellent run recently on Dead Boy Detectives, and Peter Gross do their level best to patch something all together in the middle with results that are readable, at any rate, but the sheer number of moving parts and plot points barely touched on in the originals makes it a bit rushed and crowded. Some of it doesn't fit very well, making it seem awkward, and a far cry from the eerie, sinister atmosphere of the opening. I also can't help but wonder if the Black Tower stuff was best left undeveloped - it was wonderfully enigmatic and mysterious as it was. The story makes more sense, believe it or not, but it unavoidably ends up being laborious about it, sacrificing pace and atmosphere - squishing three or four issues' worth of story into a few pages is never going to make for a properly seamless result.

So the missing children of Flaxdown and the the Dead Boy Detectives and the children of Vertigo set out on their Crusade once more. Fitting that after an rousing opening it all dissolves into a bit of a mess, really, don't you think?

The new boy at Griswald's Grammar seems a bit lonely and sad, and the gang feel a bit sorry for him, but his strange behaviour and diet of onions are a bit off-putting. That doesn't stop people suddenly becoming friends with him, behaving oddly and subsisting on a diet of onions. Only Shauna seems immune to Lem's charms, but can she find out what's going on and rescue her friends from onion influence?

Another clever, funny, strange and charming adventure from the ever-lovable Bad Machinery gang. I do love how they start off seemingly normal, going gradually off the wall until the end is just gleefully unhinged.

Grant Morrison's legendary epic run on Batman begins with a bang -Batman shooting the Joker in the head? Except it's not Batman, it's an ex-cop dressed as Batman. With the Joker incapacitated, and Gotham peaceful after an anti-crime blitz, Bruce Wayne can take some time of doing playboy millionaire things uch as attending charity auctions in London. Ninja man-bats invade, bred by Talia al Ghul, daughter of the Demon, and she has a special surprise - Batman's son, Damian, a spoiled, vicious, dangerous boy. Meanwhile the fake Batman proves to be the first of three fake Batmen, and a sinister entity called the Black Glove is orchestrating murder and mayhem and Batman is about to be pushed to some very strange limits.

I can just about take Batman seriously as something other than a rich man who dresses up to beat down on the underpriveleged for kicks when he's up against the strange, the bizarre and the completely crazy. Ninja man-bats, strange alternate Batmen, hidden forces organising murder mystery weekends on luxury islands with a group of international Batman-types are the very stuff of fun Batman stories and Morrison knows it well. This is a big collection, and it's thoroughly addictive. The only thing that doesn't work is the Joker illustrated prose story, which is just a comic with nasty horror prose inserted between the story and the dialogue. Not awful, but a bit meh, though I think the new iteration of the Joker it depicts is relevant to the next part of the run.

Ed Brubaker and Bryan Talbot, two creators I respect loads, had a fist at a Dead Boy Detective miniseries, and it didn't really work. It's pretty hard to replicate the charm Neil Gaiman brought to Edwin and Charles in their introduction in one of the best issues of his Sandman run, an interlude in the middle of Season Of Mists when the souls released by Lucifer have all returned to Earth and Death is running around trying to round them up. Getting their voices right is probably impossible if you're not Neil Gaiman. Toby Litt doesn't quite manage it - the prelude adventure here is a bit weak and not very promising. The series proper kicks off, however, with the introduction of Crystal Palace, a cutting-edge contemporary personality, privileged daughter of self-obsessed performance-artist Mum and ex-rock star Dad who is welded to her phone and computer as well as engaged in a big online game and the subject of media scrutiny - an enfant terrible in the making. With Edwin haling from 1916 and Charles from 1990, the addition of a child of the new century is entirely appropriate and she works as a foil to their terrible innocence.

After a performance art stunt goes wrong, Edwin and Charles rescue Crystal, but her glimpse of the supernatural sends her to enroll in their old school where very evil doings are afoot, and old school bullies and new stalk the dorms. By this time, Litt has stamped his own mark on the series and made it his own, you stop comparing the boys' voices in this series to their voices as written by Gaiman, and with typically lovely Mark Buckingham art it turns into a wonderful modern supernatural adventure.

The interesting thing about Gaiman and Buckingham's run on Miracleman is what it doesn't do. Following on from on the most conceptually amazing and ambitious superhero comics ever made, from its early days in the pages of Warrior through to its troubled publication history with Eclipse, Alan Moore pushed the bounds of the superhero genre, taking it first to hell and then to heaven, with the creation of a utopian vision of a world remade into something like perfection.

To continue a superhero comic that has reached a utopian crescendo is usually to ignore it, or to insert a worm into paradise and bring it all tumbling down. In The Golden Age, Gaiman and Buckingham sit down instead and look at the world, really look at it, and try to tell us what it's like. So we get a series of short stories - a pilgrimage, an affair with a goddess, a bed-time story, an artist undergound, and others. Each story is finely wrought, with an emotional core and a sense of the wonder of this world of miracles set against the tiny hopes and dreams and failures of ordinary life. It all ends with Carnival, a comic of incredible emotional heft, deeply moving, somehow universalising the concerns of, of all things, a superhero comic, and transmuting them into a vision of hope, of grief and loss that can never be forgotten but which ca be lessened over time. After all, there aren't many superhero comics that spend so much time time with people mourning the casualties of the latest big superhero fight. But that's what makes this seem real, this joyful, hopeful, painfully bright fantasy. There's a snob in me that finds it a bit tawdry that Miracleman has ended up between the covers of a Marvel collection, but to see it all in one place like this, one complete piece of work, is pretty miraculous.