At the one end of the Vertigo spectrum you had Sandman: brooding, gothic, sensitive, chilling, frightfully clever. At the other end you had this: brash, bawling, loud, surreal, probably deserved to be called a word with -punk added at the end but never was, thank God. Mental illness defines these characters as well as physical disabilities or deformities. Depression, dissociation, multiple personalities, schizophrenia, fugue states, mood swings - hardly the stuff of a heroic superteam, unless you're fighting, or befriending, the bizarre, irrational characters and situations Grant Morrison dreams up for the Doom Patrol. Strange and horrible, but also at times rather wonderful, their ultimate enemy is normality itself as enforced by a rigid beaueaucratic system weirder than anything it wants to destroy. The Brotherhood Of Dada! Danny The Street! The Real Men From NOWHERE! Wonders and terrors abound! (And I wonder if the TV series, which is quite good too, will also come round to the fact that Mr Nobody is actually the Good Guy in all thils.) It's all very silly and weird and melodramatic, and the last issue of the run was very first comic that ever made me cry, and hey, guess what, it did it again.

An astonishing, brilliant, challenging meditation on memory, reality and imagination, the three engines that drive us or through which we drive, cobbling together our visions of ourselves and our families and the world. In the past a girl writes a story about a boy in the future, or is the boy in the future telling a story about a girl in the past? Their strange adventures intertwine like a moebius strip, one of the best technical achievements of such I've seen outside comics. An interview with an elderly engineer about a secret World War 2 project turns out to be the textual element of an art installation, written by a writing teacher and science fiction writer visiting home not long after the death of his mother, wrestling with the next step of putting his father in a nursing home and worrying about his severely autistic sister. Many years later the writer explores his family history dating back to the Civil War and earlier using documents left behind by ancestors on both sides, alluding to a strange nocturnal war with the dead.

So, not a conventional narrative, but a playful one that takes itself seriously and makes few concessions other than being up front about what it is doing and not doing. Books like these are frustrating as hell if you don't just let go of preconceptions and go with it. Park seems to be exploring the way he uses his personal life and his family history in his fiction, and the middle section in particular has some brutal, but also haunting, insights into writing not as a process but as a state of mind, almost. Memory and imagination twist reality in ways subtle and not-so-subtle. What can the reader trust and what can the writer? Not much, but you can certainly enjoy the results, and every now and then you can pick up a weapon and fight back against the armies of the dead from the past that are devouring the future.

Astonishing, achngly beautiful novel about the creation of a now-ancient chalk horse as a young man of a conquered tribe finds a way to save his people. A book to stand with the very best of Ursula Le Guin and Alan Garner.

Ray Spass is a Hollywood scriptwriter who has squandered his earnings on the things Hollywood wunderkind usually squander their earnings on. He is a horrible person and he is trying to write a script about a haunted house in space. He buys a haunted house and holds a squalid black mass to summon the devil, and learns that he is dying. Then the mephistophlean main character from his screenplay turns up and asks him to write his story for him.

Max Nomax is a fugitive from a prison hovering on the event horizon of a massive black hole. The prison is haunted by the results of some dreadful experiment gone horribly wrong. How did Max escape to Earth? Ray has to write the story to find out, and hopefully stop the avenging space angel from recapturing Max and destroying the universe.

Look, yes, just the ploy alone is bonkers, but reading it, every panel is crammed with the bonkers, this s bonkers on a fractal level. It's also hilarious as Ray and Max are too dreadful, narcissistic, self-absorbed personalities playing off each other, and horrifying, as Max's space prison is basically hell. Completely, brilliantly bananas.

Highly readable and entertaining popular history of the border reivers on either side of the Scottish/English border and particularly it's height and decline during and immediatey after the Elizabethan years. The lawman and the lawless, with often little water beteen them, battle it out, chasing each other up and down mountains after cattle and sheep and horses. Raids, kidnappings, blackmail, murders, and the unique and strange and terrible culture that made these things a way of life superbly surveyed and evoked by Fraser with all the character and personality that goes with it.

If the LA Quartet were crime novels, and the Underworld USA trilogy were political thrillers, the second LA Quartet is turning into a supercharged phantasmagoric journey through an inferno of crime and war and politics. Staccato crims, staccato policework, staccato corruption, staccato violence, staccato psychopathic egomaniacal self-aggrandisement and enrichment punch through the pages in Ellroy's unique hard-boiled lyricism, along with an amzing elegaic sense of the astonishing uniquer panorama of passion and opportunity, the temporary suspension of normal rules that exists for the brief period of the war years in LA. Political ideology, warfare, hysterical paranoia, xenophobia, cynical opportunism and crime merge into one as no less than three crimes merge into one layered and intertwined investigations, just as various factions surrounding the investigations are layered and intetwined in competing interests, aims, drives, loyalties and loves. The whole thing seems inhuman, alien, incmprehensible, exhausting, but told with such relentless conviction, energy and unwavering commitment to the milieu that is being created that it's easy to take for granted that the whole thing is a kind of pulp schtick by Ellroy, overfamiliar and verging on self-parody, rather than an amazing literary acheivement. I'm reminded of The Gallows Pole because rather than being historical crime fiction, this is a historical novel about crimes.

1871, Texas, and just-orphaned Ben and Bo Curtis are forced off their land and join a cattle-drive north to Abilene. Narrated by Ben, it's a rough, tough tale of surviving and growing up in the dying days of the Old West that probably owes a debt to Lonesome Dove, being all demythologising and anti-romantic, though packed with the sights and sounds and characters and adventures of the time. Ben's a likeable young hero, but, it turns out, like his brother and almost everyone else he meets, a product of his time and place, and, amongst other things, racist as hell. Ben has a lot to learn, and though he will learn a lot, he's not going to have a Damascene conversion into a 21st cetury liberal.

After driving cattle, he works at a store, and is gripped with a feverish need to make money, and sees the opportunities all around him, skipping over the poor farmers more or less tricked to come out and too poor to buy anything. His budding business venture takes him out to Dodge, little more than a bunch of shacks and tents, but eventually he ends up out on the plain, skinning buffalos as they are sytematically and heedlessly slaughtered in a great bloody orgy of excess and consumption and greed.

Every adventure Ben has is driven by greed. Even the traditional western trope of revenge pales in comparison. Worry about whether to order a bunch of hats, then whether the hats will arrive, then whether the hats will sell consume him in Abilene, while his brother's grave lies untended and his brother's killer wanders free. Not but that his reluctance to go looking for a fight with the guy seems sensible enough, and when the fight does come it's entirely through coincidence and idle boasting, but it does cut against the traditional motivating drive of a western. The conflicts in Carter's west aren't titanic tragedies of family or honour or revenge - they're over resources and riches, getting in first before the law catches up.

He's not the only one driven by the desire for money, almost everyone is out to make a killing in one way or another, from the riders on the cattle drive to the poor sodbusters to the merchant businessmen and the railroad tycoons. Ben's got the same fever as the rest of them, driven by his own poverty, but also the sense that everyone and everything around him is there to be exploited, and the prosperity gospel preached in the churches further tells him that God approves, too. Ben is not without empathy, though. He's puzzled to find himself grudgingly recognising the worth of a black man, realises that the indians aren't quite the savages they're made out to be, that the farmers are being given a raw deal, and that there is something appalling about the slaughter of the buffalo. Along the way we are given hints that these are the seeds of the man he may yet grow up to be.

Anyway, an excellent, novel, a true bildungsroman, a sweeping saga of a wilderness being conquered and consumed and a frontier yielding to first vestiges of a rapacious civilisation.

Ellis's updating of the Wildstorm universe distils it all down to two powerful competing factions held in check by treaty and mutually assured destruction, one smaller faction with a public corporate face and a hidden secret ops alien-conspiracy face, and some rogue players sensing the outline of the threat. IO and Skywatch shadow box while the Wild CAT throw spanners in various works, and Jenny Sparks meets The Doctor. Told with ruthless precision, it's a widescreen cutting-edge epic of hi-tech, low morals, aliens among us, super powers, genetic experiments on the loose and flying saucers versus hidden science cities.

Strange and wonderful and unsettling and subtle and odd stories that don;t so much get under your skin as sit down next to you on a train or a bus and start speaking themselves to you, whispering, perhaps, some of them more to themselves than to you but you can't stop listening and you care very much how they turn out but you're a bit scared of it too.

With a panel on Flann O'Brien's masterpiece, The Third Policeman, reeling drunkenly towards me, I decided that the time had come to finally properly acquaint myself with the life and times with that gentleman scribbler. The definitive Dubliner, hailing as he did from Strabane, his most endearing acheivement, in the eyes of his compatriots, was, apparently, that he squandered the talent of his youth and pretty much killed himself with drink. What I didn;t a[reciate was, that even though the rejection of The Third Policeman discouraged him from further novels for far too long, his work ethic was pretty extraordinary, but any sort of breakthrough popular international success eluded him, though At Swim-Two-Birds was just beginning to receive the sort of acclaim and sales that might have lead to a different career had it come sooner. Cronin is an affectionate and merciful biographer, not hiding his many faults but treating them with gentleness and sympathy. It's a brilliant evocation of Ireland in first two-thrids of the twentieth century, the same milieu that produced exiles Joyce and Beckett, but it was Miles who stayed, diligently providing daily entertainments in his newspaper column for the people of Dublin in much the same way he provided support for his large family when his father died, a wholly different sort of artistic life and outlook.

A superb book about a fascinating character.