Tall tale for the space-age

The Philip Pullman buzz at the moment may be all about his forthcoming prequel to His Dark Materials, but creeping up in parallel comes this graphic novel, originally produced for the children’s comic The Phoenix –a periodical that is, incidentally, an infallible mega-hit among the under-12s on whom I’ve tried it. Written by Pullman and crisply illustrated by the young illustrator Fred Fordham, it’s a knickerbocker glory of genre influences, with a plot that rockets along as though in direct rebuke to the fusty and unprepossessing title.

Fordham’s attractively clean-cut style echoes old newspaper comic strips such as Jeff Hawke and Modesty Blaise, but this isn’t entirely an old-fashioned tale. The contorted plot zooms about between the 21st century, where everyone totes “apparators” – essentially iPhones 2.0, glowing lozenges that project holograms, play music, spy on you everywhere and never run out of battery – and several points in time and space aboard the Mary Alice, an oceangoing schooner that was caught in a timebending experiment in the Twenties and ripped out of the fabric of reality.

Now the Mary Alice sails, Tardis-like, between eras, crewed by the various souls it has rescued; these include a Qing-dynasty sailor, a Roman engineer, a Napoleonic deckhand and John Blake, an intrepid teenager whose glowing pocketwatch acts as the ship’s mysterious engine. When they’re joined by a girl-overboard from present-day Australia, the Mary Alice’s crew find themselves pursued by the inventor of the apparator, a Silicon Valley titan who is not only the richest man in the world but also (naturally) a Blofeld-style, yacht-owning, missile-fondling, scenery-chewing supervillain.

There’s also a contemporary plot in which a black-clad Admiralty secret agent and an oceanographer on the trail of the Mary Alice do lots of conspiratorial haring about and punching people. If this all sounds like the kind of storyline that may require the use of graph paper and flow charts at some stage, don’t worry; it all comes together in a hectic sequence on the Thames at the end. This is

Pullman has a great time building a Jenga tower of action scenes