Mike Mignola's comic book universe based around Hellboy and the BPRD is a fine and amazing thing, but this is an unusually distinctive entry that stands out a bit. 1881, and Sir Edward Grey, England's official Witchfinder, is dispatched to the town of Hallam to investigate the odd death of a Crown official. At first disgruntled at what he perceives to be a mundane murder mystery, he soon finds himself attacked by giant eels, and so starts to feel right at home. Hallam is the source of a popular health tonic, a model industrial town reclaimed from the marshes. naturally there are all sorts of evil goings-on going on, secrets and mysteries and monsters for Grey to explore unravel and fight.

It all has the feel of a wonderfully British period gothic Hammer horror. There's a terrific and loving attention to detail, with glimpses of life in a town dredged from ancient marshes and propelled to a glorious and progressive future by a reforming baron of industry. The cylinders of instructive music played to the workers in the factory, the penny dreadful version of the constable's suspicions, the touches of local dialect, successfully used without mocking or demeaning the speaker and effortlessly touching on tensions between class and education, and eels, lots and lots of eels. It also has a rather bleak sting at the end, a vision of the glorious future everyone's heading towards, and tying in with later evens in the Mignolaverese too, I think.

A splendidly entertaining read that can be enjoyed without much reference to other titles in series, but why deny yourself the pleasure? It's a lot of fun, even if this is a particularly rich and satisfying example.

The concept behind this book seems like a distillation of the prologue to Grant Morrison's Zenith, where an Allied superman and a Nazi superman fight on the streets of Berlin in 1945, cut short by an atomic bomb. In Uber, the Nazis get the supermen before anyone else, but only manage to deploy them on the brink of defeat, precipitating a desperate arms race as the superior human weapons of the Reich devastate the conventional forces of the Allies on both fronts.

This is not a superhero book, though. This is a book about weapons, and escalation and a new type of war. The supermen are basically walking atom bombs of varying degrees of strength and dexterity, and what follows is cruel and brutal and ugly. It's an Avatar book, so the blood and the guts and limbs fly, and in service to almost any other story you might say it's gratuitous and exploitative, but the development of the story is about the prosecution of a war. The narrative voice is detached and cool and objective, like a historian providing commentary for a documentary. The characters are small set against the huge scale of the conflict, and most of them know it.

It's a cruel, brutal and ugly story and it's a cruel, brutal and ugly book, so why the heck am I reading it on Christmas Eve? It's 2016. Aleppo has fallen, homeless Irish people are squatting in Apollo House, Leonard Cohen is gone, Carrie Fisher is in hospital and the US president elect is announcing a new nuclear arms race via Twitter. Somehow Uber, a comic about what would happen if the Nazis got supermen, is entirely of the moment. I wish it wasn't, but it's still a great comic.

I like this a lot - the art is never short of amazing and in some cases is beyond amazing - but it opens on a sour note when, after the escape of a murderous psychopath, our hero turns out to be on a bit of a bender owing to the death of a love interest in the first book. Yes, we have a fridging, a female character killed off to give a male lead character something to emote about. fair enough, this is a kind of anthropomorphic steampunk neo-noir, and noir heroes and anti-heroes are often typically filled with angst over the death of a true love, so it's just about justifiable, only not really, because in this day and age it's lazy and distasteful.

Aside from that, it's an enjoyable romp as Archie LeBrock returns to Grandville in pursuit of Mad Dog, a resistance fighter turned serial killer, and in the course of his hunt turns up a few nasty secrets about the past. The art and the story-telling are brilliant, even if parts of the story, as above, could have done, perhaps, with a little more consideration and subversion.

Beautifully designed and gorgeously illustrated comic about a young girl who lives with her mother, is visited regularly by a slightly intrusive wood man, a man made of wood, and who ties a bell round the nose of a troll. It's a sweet story and it looks fantastic and is full of funny dialogue and turns of phrase. Hilda is an engaging heroine and her pet fox is too cut for words.

An even stranger little adventure for the redoubtable Hilda in this volume - the hidden people want to evict Hilda and her Mum from the valley where they live in apparent isolation. It turns out to be a lot more crowded than they thought. Aside entirely from the invisible folk, there's the mysterious giant who lurks behind the mountain every night. Can Hilda sort things out with the hidden people and solve the mystery of the giant? Beautiful, cute, charming and funny, with a somewhat unexpected ending.

My experience of reading Nausicaa this time round is a bit of a jolt. I collected the old Viz issues assiduously when they came out, and read and reread them, but there were big gaps in my collection and big gaps of time between new issues. When I got these collections over a few years for my son I never got around to sitting down and reading the whole lot until now, and it is really hard to stop once started.

Nausicaa and Asbel escape from the forest only to be captured by a lurking Dorok ship which is part of a trap being sprung on Kushana's southern maneuver. The flotilla is crossing the forest, stopping at a clearing of acid lakes, where it encounters a Dorok force who are torturing a baby Ohmu to draw a mass of the adult insects down on the encampment. Nausicaa is appalled at the reckless cruelty of the trap and escapes, as much to stop the torture as to save the flotilla.

The orchestration of events surrounding the descent of the swarm of Ohmu on Kushana's troops is one of the wonders of all sequential narrative. Complex, tricky, with multiple moving parts, it unfolds with clarity and suspense and a sense of rushing, impending doom and destruction. It's a mesmerising, riveting sequence, all the more so as it shows aspects of Nausicaa's, Kushana's and Kurosowa's characters that make them all desperately compelling. Master Yupa has his own adventures, discovering an even darker side to the trap with even darker implications.

I think this is the one where I really fell in love with comics. I mean madly, passionately in love, because I was already pretty smitten but I don't think I had ever seen or read anything like the sortie from the besieged garrison. Rereading it now years later I think I can still safely say it is the best depiction of battle that I have ever read or seen in any medium. It is the greatest piece of action narrative I know of, at any rate.

Travelling through Dorok territory with Kushana, Nausicaa discovers horrible signs that the miasma of the Sea of Corruption is being used as a weapon. Kushana is determined to rescue what is left of her beloved Third Army, being thrown away in useless rearguard actions by her horrible brothers. Nausicaa just wants to end the violence and reduce bloodshed. In a bargain to secure the release of civilian prisoners she agrees to ride beside Kushana in a daring sortie to destroy Dorok artillery.

It's incredible. The build-up, the careful depiction of the battleground, the precision of the tactics, the action itself, filled with acts of brutality heroism on both sides, the horror of it, the epic sweep of it, the astonishing momentum. That it's all in service to a dreadfully wasteful conflict is all rather the point, but this heightens the suspense and the stakes rather than reduces them. The incompatible aims of Kushana and Nausicaa are as much in conflict on the field of battle as the opposing armies,. and this is very much Kushana's ground. Can Nausicaa get through the fight without turning herself into yet another blood-spattered killer?

The daikasho is in full flow, the mutant slime molds are converging, the Dorok empire has ousted his younger brother, who held the real power because of his supernatural powers. The Dorok lands are over-run with dying insects sprouting the seeds of a new fungal forest poisonous to humans. The people flee and famine, pestilence a long, bloody, futile conflict over the remaining patches of clear land seems inevitable. The forest may be a natural process to clear toxic pollution from the ground, but will any of humanity survive to see it? Should they?

Close utter despair, Nausicaa travels to the heart of the new forest, but even as she discovers the truth about the Sea Of Corruption, she is surrendering to a desire to take of her mask and become part of the forest.

It's the big question, isn't it? The planet will keep on turning no matter what we do with it - will we keep turning with it or will we be spinning in our graves? It's not even a question of deserving it or being worthy - it's a simple matter of practicality, about being smart enough not to turn your home into a toxic dump full of acid and carcinogens. As the story moves towards its penultimate volume, the artist is visible wrestling with this huge but simple question - where to find hope in a world we're turning into a toxic dump and then fighting over the last chair.

I started reading this series with the assumption that I might read one a week, interspersed with other graphic novels, and it would be a pleasure to revisit a comic which has been a big influence on me and finally read it from beginning to end. I actually half-expected to not find it as mind-opening as I did the first time I read it, or the bits of it I was able to collect, in fact I assumed it wouldn't be - there's been a lot of ink under the bridge since the days of Ummagumma Comics in the printer's shop on Father Matthew Street in Cork. But here I am, rushing through it. Well, not even rushing, savouring it, admiring the craft and the imagery and more-pertinent-than-ever themes of ecological devastation and the survival of humanity, but definitely suspending all other activities to keep reading it through to the end.

Nausicaa is lost inside herself, under attack from the dark spirit of the Emperor's brother while the Emperor himself has captured Kushana and extorted a marriage agreement from her, while he prepares to deploy the recovered God Warrior, one of the things responsible for the Seven Days Of Fire that destroyed civilisation hundreds of years before. The Sea Of Corruption might be part of the great flow of life, but it is Nausicaa and her love for those that are alive now that can keep humanity from annihilation.

But the biggest, deepest, most terrible tragedy of all is that it turns out I don't have Volume 7 and must wait a day or even two before i can get it from the library. Weep, oh humanity, weep!

A lively, down-to-earth, sensible and occasionally acerbic practical guide to how to think about writing for children. Inevitably a bit dated, given how much the world has moved on and society and publishing have all been changed since 1982, but it's a very handy framework to build on, and some things don't really change. In some ways it's very basic, as if for absolute beginners, but given the author's extensive experience in the field, I think most children' authors would find it of interest.