HERE’S A LINE WE’VE heard before: “Comic books aren’t just for children.” No kidding.

In recent years the form has given us an essential Holocaust novel (Art Spiegelman’s Maus, in which Nazis are drawn as cats and Jews mice), an eyewitness account of the first intifada (Joe Sacco’s Palestine) and an intimate memoir of growing up during the Islamic revolution in Iran (Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis).

Nobody would argue against the “adult” status of these books. But we still feel more comfortable praising cartoonists when they take on weighty, international, personal-political subjects, almost as if their achievements are despite, rather than because of, their chosen form. There are exceptions: the grotesque world of Robert Crumb and the complex art of Chris Ware are celebrated in their own right. But there’s a lingering suspicion that a comic book, however it’s pitched or branded, is unlikely to contain much of real substance.

Daniel Clowes is a cartoonist who entered the spotlight briefly in 2000 when Ghost World, his acute and moving story of adolescent crisis, was adapted into a film starring Scarlett Johansson and Thora Birch. Although Clowes steers clear of global issues, focusing instead on the weirdness and banality of middle-American lives, his graphic novels posses an emotional range, intellectual depth and visual potency that should — but sadly don’t — claim as wide a readership as Spiegelman or Sacco. By anybody’s standards, his are important books.

But, thankfully, they are also delightfully witty and self-aware. His latest, Ice Haven, is a collection of strips, each told from the perspective of one of the eponymous town’s inhabitants — the title-page tells us that this is not a comic book or graphic novel but a “narraglyphic picto-assemblage”. What’s more, there is a one-man chorus in the form of Harry Naybors, a comic book critic. In the opening strip, Harry makes a case for the medium ’s superiority to prose and cinema, as it embraces “both the interiority of the written word and the physicality of image”, thus more closely replicating “the true nature of human consciousness”. It’s a convincing argument — or would be, if Clowes hadn’t drawn him wandering around in white Y-fronts and socks.

The “picto-assemblage” centres on the kidnapping of a reclusive child called David Goldberg. In solving the mystery of his disappearance we meet Random Wilder, an amateur poet with delusions of greatness; Charles, a silent pre-teen given to tortured philosophical outbursts; Vida and Violet, two new arrivals at Ice Haven, both dreaming of future happiness; and Mr Ames, a private dick more interested in the fidelity of his wife than in finding David. Clowes records the soliloquies and interactions of his idiosyncratic cast with a humorous touch — especially effective when Wilder is venting his frustration at the “puckish God” that denies him his laureateship.

But this is not a sitcom, and Ice Haven is more reminiscent of the strange, dark layers of Twin Peaks or the fractured human moments of Short Cuts than the banter of Friends or Frasier. Even the author’s jokey employment of classic cartoons is unsettling: his Peanuts-derived schoolyard scene is terse and unresolved, and his re-telling of the prehistory of the town — presented as a blackly comic Flintstones satire — is an abrupt shock of rape and violence. Like Clowes’s brilliant noir dream-book David Boring, Ice Haven charts a disarmingly precarious course between realism and fantasy.

Throughout, word and image are matched with ingenuity and economy, making full use of the genre’s capacity for tonal shifts and postmodern tricks. But as Harry reappears at the story’s ending, pretentiously asking us to ponder the import of the “obtrusive neighbour” motif, the author seems to be warning us not to take his book too seriously. And why would we, Mr Clowes? It’s just a comic, after all.

ICE HAVEN by Daniel Clowes
Jonathan Cape, £10; 89pp
£9 (free p&p) 0870 1608080
www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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