The general baddies and confusions are set up here. You get to see the Iz, a horde of stubby, eyeless devils with sharp teeth and an ability to blend into the crowds. Mr Gone appears and does wrong. MTV decided that this would be perfect for an animated series so we get a lot of requests for The Maxx. Cliffhanger/DC have promised to reprint the whole lot.

FLCL vol.1 (£6-99) by Gainex ~ Takkun thought he had problems. His town is being smothered by the giant factory, his family are serial perverts and his brother's slightly slow ex is trying to get in his pants. Then the mysterious Vespa girl thwacks Takkun with her guitar. And large robots pop from his forehead like bad spots. His brain disappears and the void left in its wake leads to the belly of a robot cat intent on taking over the universe. No really. Pronounced Fooly Cooly or Furi Kuri and sometimes eF eL see eL. But now we're getting silly.

Unlikely (£10-50) by Jeffrey Brown - "260 pages of young love, sex, drugs, heartbreak & comedy." The alternative title is 'how I lost my virginity' so we're into honest autobiography here. Somehow a better book than Brown's previous CLUMSY, this too matches fragile art and figures with delicate emotions and all the stupid things that we do early on in relationships. I bought a friend one of those Brian Ralph t-shirts that says 'I'm too nice' and you get the feeling that Brown should be bought one too. In a different art style, a heavier hand writing this bare-all confession of sweet love & physical mishaps would either feel to dismal and grimy or forcefully pathetic. Maybe it's the wide eyed depiction of him and his girlfriend that keeps it all on an apparently innocent level. Like CLUMSY, you can feel the ending coming a mile off (well, twenty pages), you know what's going to happen but you sit and you read because you care and empathise

Kramers Ergot #4 (£17-99) - Hard to believe the quantum leap that this anthology has take. I might have only seen the previous issue, and it was almost there, a little push and it would have been great. For some reason they went a little further to make a towering thing, shaped like a phone book and full of exciting stories and experiments. Firstly we've got Mat Brinkman's cover of two scaly beasts heading for collision on a child's rainbow. Now, I don't know if this was intentional but they've used either a type of ink or a process that smells just like wax crayons. And the cover was either done with crayons or something that looks damn close. Neat, huh? The contents read like a best of the recent releases with a few new faces thrown in. Jeffrey Brown gives us a regular comic length story, 'Don't Look Them In The Eye' about the various beggars and bipolars that he could meet in a day venturing across town. Everything that I've said about his fragile figures and gentle disclosure stays true here. Marc SHRIMPY & PAUL Bell is allowed a huge colour section to show us new, similarly deranged characters and, like the goose in his book, a phrase that takes on a mantle of magic due to repetition. Sammy Harkham turns out to be the find of the book. His 'Poor Sailor' managed to freeze my blood during the heatwave. A frontiersman is lured away from his wife by a sea-faring brother. Home life is getting too easy, the house is safe, he needs excitement. Not a breezy story but the clearly delineated figures, robust and full of life sit perfectly in the four panel grid and shine in the two colours.

Three Days In Europe (£10-50) by Antony Johnston & Mike Hawthorne. Page 45 exclusive edition (see below). Bright, romantic comedy in which Jack and Jill both pick their third anniversary to reinvigorate their shakey relationship with surprise presents for each other; presents which required a great deal of skill and ingenuity to organise, not to mention a hefty slab of cash. Jack's gone all-out for Jill with a trip to Paris whose highlight for her will be the invitation-only opening night of a chic new artist's gallery exhibition. Jill's equally thrilled with her own secret success which will see them fly all the way to London for an exclusive gig of Jack's favourite band, Q.E.D.. Slight problem: they're booked for the same three days. Pig-headedness sees their hard-won hopes threaten to tear them apart as they argue en route to the airport, through the check-in desk and all the way to the departure lounge. Who's going to win out? Neither. Jack ends up in Paris, up to his neck in art theft, and Jill ends up in the arms of a rock star! Mike plays the scenes with flair, composing his pages as perfectly as he does each panel, and with a flawless command of blacks, body language and choreography, imbuing the whole with a vitality reminiscent of the very best of animation. And just to make it all a bit more special, the first 25 copies here - and only the first 25 - will include a brand new piece of art by Matt, which they're both going to sign for you, free of charge. Nice one,

Honour Amongst Punks (£14-99) by Gary Reed & Guy Davis. SANDMAN fans please turn your attention here instead, you're in for a visual feast. Set in a post-Victorian world where World War II - and its consequent arms race - never happened, where airships are the height of technology, yet London punk is at its peak, rival, tribal gangs provide some rough encounters for a naive if well-meaning American student, Susan. Fortunately she's made two influential friends in an ex-policewoman turned respected punkstress, Sharon, known on the scene as Harlequin, and her abrasive, tattooed girlfriend, Sam. But Sam's mood swings make her unpredictable, and Sharon may not be as strong as Susan believes. She's caught and torn between her past in a corrupt police force with its aristocratic, establishment control, and the anarchic aspirations of the Baskervilles nightclub regulars with whom Sam finds her escape. She's swapped one addiction for another, and this thirst to be the first to the bottom of any crime may cost her dearly. "Honour Amongst Punks" is what Harlequin would like to believe. Too bad the punks aren't thick as thieves.

As mentioned in the preview, Guy Davis is the only artist I can think of who can give the mighty Eddie Campbell a run for his money when it comes to dark, dank alleyways, pelted by a harsh, wintry rain, and the murderous assaults which will fill them by this journey's end. The staggering boots, splashing in the puddles, the sodden hair, torn leather jackets, and the eerie, form-eroding torchbeam - we're talking complete mastery of light and texture. We're also talking gruesome mutilation, and a class A mystery beneath the surface. Nor is this some Goth-u-like-lite fifth generation cutie crap; the clothes designs are authentic in their rough-and-ready individuality - barbed wire on hand-painted, battered jackets over worn-from-use t-shirts, messed up hair with safety-pin piercings through ugly, broken noses. This is the real deal, not some chain-store Manson-by-numbers, and there are a feast of extra sketches in the back to give you more. However, you're going to have to give them both a couple of issues to get their bearings, for although it's one of the swiftest transitions I've seen in a series, far faster than Sim's extraordinary rise to visual accomplishment, it does nonetheless take both Davis and Reed those two issues to loosen up, lose the overemphasised accents and thin, Austin-esque lines. Having devoured this again for a review I was eagerly anticipating, I was initially worried that it was not all I remembered it to be. Yet sucked in I was, as helplessly as before, and even though I knew what was coming, when the finale erupted in all its horror, its personal power still had me reeling as much as it does poor Harlequin.

Milkkitten #2 (£3-99) by Tanya Meditzky - Another year, another brand of Milkkitten cuteness. Again, painstakingly assembled in a kitchen table by the lovely Tanya, this give's you the full recommended dose of homegrown silliness, stupidity and love. We get another surge for world peace, this time by kicking a rock around the world. Guest pages are by our own James and make very little sense at all. And I wish for nothing less.

Epoxy (£2-95, £2-20, £8-99) by John Pham - Three stories. 'Elephantine' features Jack, the one armed boxer with heartbreak in his past. Rough, angry lines place him in the murky unlicensed boxing rings driven by an unmentioned desire, able to memorise his opponent's weaknesses. His only friends are his ringside coach and the coach's daughter. 'Shiva' comes on like the big guns of eighties manga. The cities and destruction of Otomo and Shirow boiled down to an angry dragon hunting an android over the night-time rooftops of Hue City. The semi-human Nik fleeing something that was his friend. 'Modesto' is entirely down to earth. Olive's family are having a get together, the adults sitting down inside while the kids run wild outside the house. Olive is a bundle of ideas, to be around her is to be subjected to wild rants, hare-brained schemes. She's a ball of light that draws people closer. So there you have it. The three stories start off in the first issue and rotate, two at a time for each one after that. Different styles, pacing and layouts for each. Then you notice that they're linked. Characters reappear. Maybe they don't share a world but it's like a theatre group with the same players in different stories. Then phrases and objects pop up from one story to the next. Olive's sister buys a duck to fatten up for the upcoming feast and in 'Shiva' someone is accused of stealing a duck with the same name. The third issue is an absolute marvel. The format jumps to magazine size, squarebound with a delicately drawn three-colour cover print combining threads from all the stories. Inside we're given backstory to 'Shiva' with two friends getting ready for a talent show at a local farmer's market. Pham manages to splice together three separate narrative threads (the story proper, the story Binh tells during their performance and the fable an old-timer is spinning by the side of the stage) into one glorious twenty page sequence. If you like STRAY BULLETS, LOVE & ROCKETS, OPTIC NERVE or ACME NOVELTY LIBRARY you should look at this one. You also get 'In Search of Astro Girl' as a back up which ups the Acme content nicely. There were copies of the first two issues lying around upstairs for a year or so. I'd tried to get some more with no luck, almost forgot about it until the Face (off all places) ranked it #1 in their top ten comics. The third (bumper) issue hasn't been been through the distribution system yet so I don't know how many places will actually have it. We've also got the ASTRO GIRL mini comic (£2-99, the A3 silk-screened cover is worth that alone) and the JACK model kit. All can be found on his site www.epoxpress.com which is well worth a look. Ooh, look! Here's an interview

Pulpatoon Pilgrimage (£9-99) byJoel Priddy - Compact, about the size of a winter coat pocket, it feels like a prayer book. '"Pulpatoon" is a medieval word for a savory pie of pressed meat or vegetables. It has nothing to do with comics, or old magazines or even this story. But it sounds neat, doesn't it?' Three travellers (Rowbot, Bull & Delaware Thistle) roam like the scarecrow, the lion and the tin man if Dorothy had never dreamt her way into their lives. Their's is the open, uncharted wilds of Walt Whitman's virgin America just as the legends and stories are about to bloom. Priddy's art is both unfussy and decorative at the same time. His uncluttered layouts, four panels per page maximum perfectly suit the friends as they wander through wide rolling field or huddle around a campfire marvelling at the night sky.

This book won the 2002 Ignatz Award for best new book and has garnered plenty of praise. There's a touch of GOODBYE CHUNKY RICE here not just in the masterful line and the fantasy creatures we follow but in a sense of a complete creation, a book from the heart.You can check out the publishers website here

Jennifer Daydreamer: Oliver (£3-50) by Jennifer Daydreamer - It's not the kitsch aspect that draws you into folk art, it's the honesty of the craftmanship and the impulse to create something even though there's an ability-budget to work within. Henry Darger's rambling works about the Vivian girls, when he wasn't making wild detours into cataloguing clouds, have something that the easy brush of master painters never show - obsession. Obsessions can be good, they can be a reason for getting up in the morning or they can completely drain all your passion into one, entirely unexplainable side of your life. Darger never meant for anyone to see his work, he just did it. Constantly. There were rules to his world. Sometimes creating any object (book, comic, painting, song) is a way of installing order into your world. Everything on the outside may be a wild mess but you can keep some control over what you're doing. Even counting for chance that can mean a lot. Jennifer Daydreamer has created a world called Encephalon (meaning the anatomy of the brain) and we start with her version of the creation myth. A boy in a horned pyjama suit falls from the sky followed by a girl in an angel costume. They fight. And the fight goes on forever. Elsewhere a sleeper's thoughts tumble crawl out from under his bed and chase him through his dreams. The players here are shown as players with what look like homemade costumes. We're not sure if this is the land of one dreamer, or a group reality in the slumber period. Or maybe it's just a land created by one woman, a garden to tend to, a fishtank for ideas.

Blood Song (£14-99) by Eric Drooker.

Do you ever have moments of clarity, out of the blue, when you become acutely aware of how far we've come as a race? How much we have achieved? And how much we've fucked up this poor planet?

How... unnatural almost every aspect of our lives are now?

I was queueing at the local Morrisons check out, paying for my plastic-packaged, pre-made pizzas, my industrially fermented, corked and bottled wine, and a couple of tuna steaks carved and gutted by some person I've never met from the carcass of an animal which someone else had sailed out and killed for me... and I was waiting to exchange these goods for a swipe of a small strip of electronically coded plastic... and I looked out through the vast panes of glass which form the northern wall of the supermarket, across the out-of-town retail park - one great big scab of bitumen, metal and concrete - and I thought: "Jesus, what is so abhorrent about our natural landscape, that we want to do this to it?"

Two days later and I'm doing the Sunday zombie zone-out, watching David Attenborough's THE LIFE OF MAMMALS. The camera is following the epic, relentless hunt of a... I don't know - bigger than a gazelle - by a single member of the Sand People of Africa (I hope I've got that right at least). First three of them track the beast following the smallest scuff of the ground and, through the thickets, by pure instinct. Then, when they're close enough, one gives chase. For hours and hours and hours, until both human and animal are so exhausted that one can no longer stand. Then the man looks the creature in the eye, and - more for ceremony than anything else, it's pretty redundant at this point - he spears it. More impressive still than any of this, is what happens next: the man venerates his prey, treating it with great dignity, and gives thanks for the life which will now sustain his family. He knows that to feed his wife and children it was absolutely necessary, yet he acknowledges what he has done, what he has taken away. And we rarely give it a second's thought.

Which brings us (at long last, I know) to BLOOD SONG, a silent graphic novel of extraordinary power and awesome, truly awesome beauty. The story is told in a series of double-page spreads comprised of two panels (the single horizontal image is divided into two separate, black- mounted frames), and the basic palette is a lunar blue, with occasional, startling dash of vibrant colour. It begins as a view of the Milky Way, quickly focussing in on our own sphere, before hovering over a mist-enshrouded, mountainous forest somewhere like Southeast Asia. We can see that the villagers there have harnessed the land for crops, but the picture painted is overwhelmingly of a natural, blissful existence, of a tranquil equilibrium amongst the lush flora and exotic fauna of the region, where an old man fishes for his family's supper, and, the next day, his young daughter, joyfully accompanied by her dog, calmly fetches water from a distant stream. But her childhood is about to end, swiftly, as she feels blood between her legs. She washes it from her dress, before returning home. Now civilisation intrudes, and it is anything but civilised. Shockingly, this idyll is suddenly shattered, pierced through the heart by a bayonet, and incinerated with a flame thrower. The girl and the dog, flee, desperately, through thorns and trees, their stamina, born of a healthy existence and natural ability, outstripping that of the soldiers, and once more they find themselves in the womb of nature, with its sequestered beauty and colour and diversity... until they come to what should not be the edge of the jungle. But is.

That represents my best ability to convey the first half of the book. The second half takes them to a modern city, and if you've already read Drooker's FLOOD, you'll pretty much know what to expect, only this is so, so much better. So much more moving, so much more devastating. What I cannot do is show you the pictures. I think my favourites are when the panels are broken by the dog and gulls, out in the ocean, but there are so many sequences to which Drooker has given a great deal of thought, or perhaps relied on an unfailingly impressive instinct, to create some superb effects, narratively and visually. We have, finally, secured a few more for the shelves, so please take a look next time you're in. This was my book of the year. By a very wide margin.

Notes From A Defeatist (£13-99) by Joe Sacco - It's "earlier, funnier stuff" time again, this time the spotlight is on the genius that is Joe Matt. The warping perspectives and odd angles are in place, as are the drifting panels but through this collection of stories you get to see an artist flexing his (inky) muscles and fitting form to story. On the road with an (unnamed) rock band, crossing Europe, the layouts jump around from page to page. The title snakes around the panel top until we realise that it's heading straight into a word balloon. Other pronouncements are given in different styles as a parade of hangers-on and starfuckers congregate backstage and on the tour bus. As the times get wilder and more out of control so does the art.

White Flower Day (£10-50) by Steven Weissman - "If the quality of this work is any indication, one won't be surprised if Weissman's name is soon mentioned as being of the same caliber of a Schultz of Watterson" - CINESCAPE "...filled with the kind of mysteries that actively involve readers in the creative proces. Weissman respects and exalts the intelligence and imagination of children." - LOCUS "WHITE FLOWER DAY, like CHAMPS and DON'T CALL ME STUPID manages to put a warped, Universal Monsters twist on childhood without denying it's carefree attraction. I like" - PAGE 45

Orbiter h/c (£18-99) by Warren Ellis & Colleen Doran. If you think you know Colleen Doran's artwork, think again. Having immersed herself for over a decade in her own science fiction series, A DIFFERENT SOIL, she'd be a pretty good choice for this sci-fi psychological mystery anyway, but Colleen appears to have been so inspired by the script that she's produced the work of her career by an extraordinary margin. The cover is an astounding blend of detail and wash, the palette all her own, incorporation a space shuttle launch, an ancient zodiac, solar cartography and/or formulae and a male portrait, aspiring to the heavens. Inside the solidity of form far surpasses what I've come to expect from Colleen's - for me - slightly fey figure work, with said shuttle, The Venture, pulverising the Cape runway, and all in its fiery wake. But it's an Ellis work, and you want a hint of the plot: "There's a sonic crack, 50 miles out. Something trailing fire, swooping down from the upper reaches of the sky... It's coming down like a dirty comet." After 10 years missing, presumed lost, The Venture has returned, its crew missing save for one catatonic pilot. But it's engines and instrumentation are all new, and it appears to be covered in something akin to a skin. It has Martian sand in its undercarriage. Three specialists, cheated of their own dreams of spaceflight, must find out where the shuttle's been, and what happened to the crew - not to mention the mind of its pilot. [Publication in still going ahead in the wake of last week's disaster, but there'll be a new forward by Warren Ellis, putting the book into context]

The Wipeout (£13-99) by Francesca Ghermandi - Very in love with this book. Sized large to replicate the bigger-than-your-head feeling of storybooks you got as a kid it's a sweet confection brimming over with soft, marshmallow shapes and inventive design. Ghermandi has alloyed 'The Man In The White Suit' and 'Double Indemnity' and retold them with a cast of Thorntons mis-shapes. The scientist's wife never has enough money for her much needed hair transplant. All she has to get her by is a shop bought thing, just a piece of wool looped through her head a few times. Her constant servings of turkey make him feel ill and distact him from the task in hand, perfecting the detergent that will clean anything, whiter than white. But if you mix it with milk it becomes deadly.

Fleep (£3-99) by Jason Shiga - I think that this started off as a dare to himself. Write a premise that couldn't possibly be strung out for forty to fifty pages and then string it out to forty to fifty pages. And then make it gripping. Well, it worked. A guy wakes up on the floor of a phone booth that is surrounded by concrete. There's a phone book in a foreign language, three coins for making calls, he's got slight amnesia and there's no way out. Gripping, funny and audacious all at the same time with an ending that I did not see coming. From the creator of the still excellent DOUBLE HAPPINESS.

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (£10-50) by Wang Du Lu / Andy Seto ~ About time, I've been waiting for this for eons and it's one of the only adaptations I have really given a toss about (the other being BATTLE ROYALE which Old Blighty, not to mention the rest of Europe, will be missing out on). Take the back story and indepth characterisation from Wang Du Lu's 1930s' novels and the recent film's back-breaking stunts and cinematography, put it through the mill and you get this luscious li