Let me go straight in for the kill without any pussyfooting around. So you don't like comic books but for some reason they seem attractive and you want to read one. Maybe it's the movies, the pretty pictures or the geek in your life. Maybe you enjoyed them as a kid but well, you're older now. Whatever the reason, once you're addicted you won't look back.

Wander into a comic book store and gaze at the shelves. It's so tremendously confusing and there must be some special knowledge you need to decipher which issue, character, storyline...and then you walk out again. Now I'm no expert but I'm a convert and here's what got me started.

'Maus' by Art Spiegelman

Blame my teacher of Twentieth Century Jewish Literature at university because it's all his fault. He showed us a page of the second of two graphic novel s that come as the above one volume set in most bookstores. Simply (one of the common features of excellent comic books is that the mixture of words and pictures allows for loads of layers of meaning and feeling to be shoehorned into one page) the author, wearing a mouse mask, sits at his writing desk briefly relating the story of his father who survived Auschwitz and the success of his graphic novel based on this story. As the focus of the pictures slowly slips outwards, we can see that his writing desk is placed on a mound of dead, skinny corpses, humans with mouse heads. Never before or since has an image so powerfully summed up for me the complex issues of guilt and the Holocaust Industry.

The two graphic novels remain the most gripping, gut punching way of getting across the horror of being an ordinary human and living through the Shoah I have ever read. And this in a field that specialises in gripping and gut-punching.

'The Sandman' by Neil Gaiman

Google for Sandman and all kinds of cool pictures come up. Be fooled by the cool pictures because 'The Sandman' is uber-cool. And incredibly profound. And has lots of weird horror and sex in ways that only graphic novels can really handle properly, let's face it. Usually something like this is not on my radar, but volumes of this series (they come with handy numbers on the side, which is good for me) have become some of my favourite books ever. 'Season of Mists' comes out on top so far (I'm still working my way slowly through the series as I don't want to reach the last book and for that to be it), with its story of how the Sandman, Lord of Dreams, goes to Hell to rescue his lover Nada, whom he condemned to remain there in an earlier book. Suffice it to say that by the time you've finished, Neil Gaiman has got to the heart of what it means to be human and to suffer. The pictures are also very pretty.

Last but not least the almighty 'Watchmen' by Alan Moore

This, as many aficionados will tell you, is the graphic novel that's like, a novel. Don't be put off. Alan Moore is a genius (and I never use this word lightly), with the ability to weave stories together in a style that creates depth of meaning in a way I've never encountered before. Chapter 4 haunts me, Chapter 6 left my jaw on the floor. Despite the fact that this pace can't be kept up throughout the whole book don't let that stop you. Borrow or buy a copy and you will not regret it, basically.

Other good ones: 'Persepolis' by Marjane Satrapi, 'From Hell' by Alan Moore. Apart from this I'm still searching. If you come across anything good let me know, huh?

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