The Adventures of John Blake by Philip Pullman. Illustrated by Fred Fordham
D Fickling £14.99, Age 9+
This filmic graphic novel originated as a strip for the comic DFC, and was later reworked for its successor, The Phoenix. It tells the story of the Mary Alice, a time-travelling ghost ship, and its crew from different eras: including an Ancient Roman, a 17th-century English sailor captured by Barbary pirates, and the teenage John Blake, survivor of an investigatory expedition in the company of Einstein.
Into the tale comes a Bond-like action man, Roger Blake (John’s descendant) who is helping the secret service thwart the ambitions of (of course) a billionaire megalomaniac, ably abetted by a smart woman who also has an ancestor in the crew. And joining them is Serena, who falls off a yacht incompetently captained by her father, is rescued by John, and thereafter becomes involved in the international adventure in present and past.
The story reads and looks like an old-fashioned comic strip with scarred villains, smartly dressed heroes and action-packed fights, but with a modern spin: the women are capable and clever, the cast racially and temporally diverse, the villain an exploiter of the power of the internet. Fordham’s realist images tell much of the story with carefully researched detail of place and time.
Read an extract on the Sunday Times website