[In the following review, Sabin examines a selection of graphic novels—including Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Mark Kalesniko's Mail Order Bride, and Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima's Lone Wolf and Cub—asserting that such works should “appeal to readers beyond comics fans.”]

The forthcoming release of two major movies based on graphic novels—Ghost World, derived from Dan Clowes's tale of teen angst, and From Hell, based on Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's Jack the Ripper story—represents something of an opportunity for the graphic novels industry. If only it can capitalise on the ensuing publicity, then its much cherished ‘outreach programme’ (industry code) to appeal to readers beyond comics fans can be more fully realised. It's fortunate, then, that the latest crop of novels is so accessible to the general public (all the bookshops need to do now is stop shelving such material next to X-Men compilations).

Alan Moore returns to the late nineteenth century with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, illustrated by Kevin O'Neill, which pictures an alternative Britain where characters from Victorian fiction have a life of their own. The ‘league’ is led by Mina Murray from Bram Stoker's Dracula, and consists of H. Rider Haggard's Allan Quartermain, Jules Verne's Captain Nemo, R. L. Stevenson's Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde and H. G. Wells's Invisible Man, all brought together to combat an evil criminal mastermind from the East and his band of ‘sly Chinee’. Thus begins a penny-dreadful adventure that mimics modern superhero team-ups—Moore's own Watchmen comes to mind—while retaining an all-important sense of humour.

This is very postmodern humour, you understand—Quartermain is discovered in an opium den and the Invisible Man is caught hiding in a girls' school. Yet it never threatens to overwhelm what is essentially a ripping yarn of a rather quaint kind: you feel that Moore and O'Neill really yearn for a bit of old-fashioned romance.

The House on Borderland is a period piece of a different kind: an adaptation by Richard Corben and Simon Revelstroke of William Hope Hodgson's cult weird fantasy novel of 1908. The story revolves around a hermit's battle with monsters from his id—‘foul horrors from my veriest dreams!’—who appear in the form of horrendous) ‘swine things’ that besiege his house, While we're never sure that the character is on the borderland of sanity, his first-person narrative draws us from one action set piece to another, as he blasts his porcine foe with muskets.

Purists will argue that Hodgson's book has been turned into a cheap shoot-'em-up—and to some extent this is true. It is also the case that the novel's celebrated psychedelic, ‘end of the cosmos’ climax is done scant justice. What we have instead is a Hammer horror confection that is never scary, but which still manages to be vastly entertaining on an ‘'E's behind yer!’ level. Perhaps the complex, mad original could never be translated into a different medium: but as a homage, this will do nicely.

There are no such problems with subtlety in Mail Order Bride, Mark Kalesniko's atmospheric study of what happens when a 39-year-old Canadian virgin buys an Oriental partner via a brochure. As the shy Korean begins to assert her personality, reminding her husband ever more forcefully that she's not a fantasy (and not Chinese), so the resentment grows. ‘I don't fit the stereotype any more!’ she scalds him, before packing her bags.

This deceptively simple premise is given real emotional weight by the deft handling of dialogue and the delicately rendered black-and-white penman ship. The art is in the apparent artlessness, and the book announces Kalesniko as an exciting talent on the graphic novel scene.

Lone Wolf and Cub by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima is a Japanese epic from the 1970s, here republished for the first time in the original pocket-size format (we're up to volume 11 in a huge 28-volume series). A samurai yarn about an assassin's trek across country with his young son (the cub) in tow, the scale of the comic allows for scenes to unfold ‘in the moment’, with bloody swordfights lasting many pages and choreographed in kinetic detail. The art style is more reminiscent of traditional Japanese scroll paintings than the ‘big eyes and speed lines’ aesthetic associated with contemporary manga, and the series deserves its reputation as a classic.

Locas in Love is a collection of interlinked short stories by one of the great names in alternative comics, Jaime Hernandez, and features characters created by him for the long-running series Love and Rockets.

Revolving around the love affairs of a group of Hispanic-American women, the tone is upbeat and lively, and the final 1960s-set tale, a childhood flashback, is a triumph of economical cartooning. Hernandez has been eclipsed by a new wave of alternative cartoonists since the 1980s (with Ghost World, Dan Clowes is definitely flavour of the month), but his confident style and understanding of layout still hold him in the front rank.