Philip Pullman, author of the children’s trilogy, His Dark Materials, has put the writing of books on hold to concentrate on a new comic strip.

The Adventures of John Blake will appear weekly from the end of May in a new comic, the DFC, with action drawings inspired by Japanese manga strips.

Pullman has swapped the fantasy land of his books for another, in which John Blake, a modern-day sailor, crisscrosses the Pacific encountering extraordinary beasts and events from a mythical past.

The DFC will be distributed by mail order at £9.99 a month.

“Normally I write a book, give it to the illustrator and he gets on with the pictures,” said Pullman. “With this project, it is as if I’m doing a film script with me specifying what I want drawn.”

Pullman, who last month brought out a short prequel to His Dark Materials called Once Upon a Time in the North, is working closely with the comic illustrator John Aggs on the Blake story.

Aggs said of his Japanese-influenced pictures: “I use lots of tricks, like splitting a picture or making it like a spider’s web or broken glass.” Ships, for example, are shown in a storm with jagged edges and depicted as if they are moving very fast by showing them in a string of images.

Pullman has some knowledge of art himself after attending weekly life classes for several years. “I can do the body,” he said.

Pullman, a former school teacher, was an avid reader of boys’ comics when he was a child in the 1950s and has continued to read illustrated books such as Hergé’s Tintin and Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, a memoir of the author’s relationship with his father, a Holocaust survivor.

Pullman also reads contemporary graphic novels such as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, which has been made into a film.

“I was brought up on comics like the Eagle, Wizard and Beano, though not so much Dandy,” said Pullman, born in 1946. “This is what I want to bring back to today’s youngsters – good storytelling, but with more adventurous and original illustrations.”

Although Pullman intends to return to novel writing next year with a children’s story called The Book of Dust, he is likely to retain his interest in the illustrated comic form. “Yes, I might do a graphic novel myself after that,” he said.

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