We don’t see enough talking animals around here. Yes, there’s the ambitious ape at the top of the page, but I think it’s about time we saw a few more improbable beasts. Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s graphic novella We3 isn’t exactly heavy on dialogue and its animal protagonists have a rather limited vocabulary, but that’s part of the story’s charm. Actually, charm is perhaps a misleading word, as the book’s eponymous heroes are escaped lab animals. Lab animals equipped with surface-to-air missiles and other military hardware.

A dog, a cat and a rabbit – named 1, 2 and 3 respectively – have been surgically wired into high-tech armour and trained as loyal fighting machines. As we see in the book’s opening scenes, the animals are faster and more vicious than their human counterparts, and of course more disposable. When the project is decommissioned and the animals marked for destruction, We3 escape into a confusing and dangerous world with their creators in pursuit. Much of the story is told from the animals’ perspective, with a mosaic of tiny inset images capturing details of human faces and simultaneous events – a device that highlights the animals’ ability to work as a team and suggests a non-human perception of time. Morrison and Quitely manage to extract a great deal of poignancy from this outlandish tale – and in particular from the animals’ limited awareness of their predicament – along with moments of dark and visceral humour. We3 is arguably the duo’s finest collaboration and manages to be brutal, hilarious and affecting, often on the same page. 

Go on, buy a copy. We won’t tell. More Morrison and Quitely here, complete with in utero wrestling.

It isn’t easy to adequately summarise Fletcher Hanks’ comic book creations, or to convey their demented charm. Fletcher’s combination of weirdness and ineptitude has earned praise from Kurt Vonnegut and Robert Crumb and invited comparisons with the zero-budget film director Ed Wood. His characters – including Tabu, Wizard of the Jungle and a strapping lumberjack named Big Red McLane – spanned just three years of the Golden Age, from 1939 to 1941, and are among the most peculiar things I’ve found in a comic book. Which, all things considered, is saying something.

Imagine, for instance, a hero named Stardust the Super Wizard – a man with a crime-detecting laboratory on his own private star, and whose “vast knowledge of interplanetary science” makes him the “most remarkable man that ever lived.” In addition to these formidable attributes, our hero has other improbable talents. He changes size arbitrarily from one panel to the next; his limbs, head and torso swell and distend for no discernible reason beyond alarming lapses in draughtsmanship. When not racket-busting or camouflaging the Earth with a giant, sculpted cloud of steam, our hero operates his “violently vibrating crime-detectors” and tosses foreign-looking villains down the mouths of active volcanoes. He’s clearly quite a guy.

“A strange, erratic tale of inter-dimensional espionage and (literally) mind-warping underwear, Shade defies adequate summary or satisfactory explanation…”

Steve Ditko is, along with Jack ‘King’ Kirby, one of the most important visual stylists in comic book art. A key architect of Marvel’s Silver Age, Ditko famously co-created Spider-Man and Dr Strange and shaped their formative adventures between 1962 and 1966. His dynamic approach to storytelling combines iconic character design, idiosyncratic body language and surreal ‘cosmic’ scenarios. But while Kirby is widely acclaimed as a major influence on contemporary comic aesthetics, Ditko remains a reclusive and cultish figure, shunning interviews and earning a reputation as “the Thomas Pynchon of comics.” Ditko also warrants attention for being the only comic book artist to be discussed as much for his political philosophy as for his distinctive illustrations.

The artistic troika of Ditko, Kirby and editor Stan Lee marked an unusually fertile period for the comic book; one fuelled largely by the notion of heroes whose personal lives would be as important (and improbable) as their crime-fighting adventures. Spider-Man in particular spent as much time agonising over girlfriends and his Aunt’s innumerable heart attacks as he did grappling with criminal kingpins and homicidal scientists. This soap opera device not only served to contrast the obligatory superhuman stunts, it also connected the characters with the adolescent dramas of their readers. From the landlord-beleaguered Fantastic Four to the civil rights reflections of the X-Men, ‘troubled’ heroes came to define Marvel’s house style.

By the end of Ditko’s relationship with Stan Lee and Marvel in 1966, Dr Strange and Spider-Man had reached a college campus audience and become pop-cultural icons. Indeed, Ditko’s unique aesthetic was so fundamental to the flavour and success of Dr Strange that no subsequent illustrator has been able to match the character’s enormous early appeal. (In October 1965, San Francisco hosted A Tribute to Dr Strange. This unlikely ‘happening’ combined costumed revellers and political activism with the psychedelic rock band Jefferson Airplane.)