‘Straight outta my brain box!’

(which currently sits with Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography among Amazon’s top 10 bestselling books), it must be asked, because the book is a graphic novel derived from a computer game.

Its author is the 24-year-old “DanTDM” (real name Dan Middleton), who made his fortune creating The Diamond Minecart, an online video channel inspired by the Minecraft computer games, which receives 400million viewers a month. According to his publishers, this makes Middleton “the world’s biggest YouTube star”. And now he’s expanding into the bookshops. “So here goes, this is my world of imagination on a page,” Middleton explains in the novel’s foreword. “You can now sit down with a story straight outta my brain box!” At first glance, it appears like something outta cyber hell, with lots of goggle-eyed, robotic-looking characters communicating in desperate speech-bubbles. “AARRGHHHH! Uh-oh!” is how the book begins – which summed up my initial reader response. But persevere and there are some surprisingly rich pickings. Middleton says that his challenges included “plotting the story and evolving my characters”. This is not a remarkable insight into the art of novel writing, but his efforts pay off. The story begins when a mysterious-looking crystal plummets to Earth ( WOOOOSH… KRA-KOOM), and shatters into magic shards. When a vengeful scientist attempts to appropriate the crystal’s powers towards his evil ends (“YOU ARE WITNESSING MY PLAN TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD – THE WORLD THAT IS RIGHTFULLY MINE!”), it falls to the young hero Dan and his friend Dr Trayaurus to save the planet from ruination. This is all a far cry from CS Lewis. But Middleton uses fantasy’s trusted conventions – an averageseeming hero, a quest, the acquisition of knowledge – to fashion his exhausting images into a well-paced story, with a clear narrative frame. There is also some deft characterisation. The benevolent Dr Trayaurus was born with a condition of “extreme clumsiness”, which causes him repeatedly to balls up his scientific experiments; Denton appears to be a fearless villain (“THIS WORLD IS MINE FOR THE TAKING – MWAHAHAHA!”), but ends up intimidated by his own clones.

It is argued that good fantasy offers us not just escapism, but rather a means of understanding reality. I’m not sure that such a claim can be made of this book. But as a means of enticing your child off the computer, then there is much to be said for it.

Emily Bearn is won over by a lively graphic novel from one of the world’s biggest YouTube stars