The 10 best graphic novels
- 1/10
V for Vendetta (1982) Alan Moore's antihero 'V' wears a Guy Fawkes mask - a symbol since adopted by Anonymous and anticapitalist protesters worldwide. This thinly veiled attack on Margaret Thatcher's Britain owes a lot to George Orwell's 1984, but its chilling vision of a totalitarian future still rings true - it was made into a Hollywood film in 2005.
- 2/10
Wanted(2004) The film of Wanted, starring Morgan Freeman, is a lesson in how badly Hollywood can ruin comics - but the original is a sparklingly clever take on the dark side of geek fantasies, as a normal, downtrodden man discovers he is the heir to a supervillain - The Killer - and is slowly sucked into a brotherhood of villains.
- 3/10
Batman: Year One (1987) The back-to-basics approach of the recent Batman trilogy of films was beaten to the punch by this masterpiece by Frank Miller, which took away Batman's gadgetry, camp foes and even Robin to create a distilled-down meditation on madness, evil and what it means to be a superhero.
- 4/10
The Invisibles (2000) This series of six graphic novels showed off the confrontational side of comics - pitting a time-travelling group of magicians against a conspiracy of the English upper classes and trans-dimensional aliens who want to enslave the human race. Its Scottish author, Grant Morrison, claims that the script was 'dictated' to him during an alien abduction in Kathmandu.
- 5/10
From Hell (2000) Alan Moore's gigantic Jack the Ripper tale - it tips the scales at 578 pages - captures the horror of the Ripper's crimes with a perfect pace, and pours over a judicious measure of conspiracy theory. It was made into a film starring Johnny Depp.
- 6/10
Kick-Ass (2008) Mark Millar's violent tale of a 'real' superhero shocks and amuses in equal measure as a school weakling lives out his geeky fantasies as the costumed 'Kick-Ass' with bloody and highly surreal results.
- 7/10
Leviathan (2006) This whodunnit-cum-horror is set on a huge ship - clearly modelled on the Titanic - in the Twenties, 'marooned' in the ocean by a demonic pact made by its owner. The black-and-white artwork paints a fictional world as unforgettable as any literary fantasy.
- 8/10
Watchmen (1987) One of Time magazines 100 greatest novels of all time, this deconstructed the idea of superheroes, with masked heroes portrayed as mad vigilantes and narcissistic freaks as a nuclear war looms. It was made into a film in 2009.
- 9/10
Superman: Red Son What would have happened if Superman had landed in Soviet Russia, not America? Mark Millar's intelligent political comic pits a Superman devoted to 'expanding the Warsaw pact' against a devilish United States, where the CIA recruits Lex Luthor to undo the hero from Krypton. The time-warping ending is superb.
- 10/10
Maus (1991) Art Spiegelman's Holocaust memoir was the first graphic novel to win the Pulitzer prize. Its deceptively simple drawings of Jews as mice and Nazis as cats tell a first-person tale built from tape-recordings of his father, an Auschwitz survivor. It's as hard-hitting as other Holocaust memoirs such as Primo Levi's If This is a Man.
Cambridge don Robert Macfarlane, chief of next year's Booker Prize judges has said that he would be 'open' to the idea of graphic novels competing. "I wouldn't see it as a problem," says Macfarlane, "Charles Dickens ran his chapters heavily illustrated when they were published." But can comics really compete with the written word? Here are 10 that try.