Can there be a single middle-aged man in Great Britain who is not familiar with Dennis the Menace and Desperate Dan, or a slick chick of a certain age who doesn't thrill to the mention of Beryl the Peril? A mature matron will go all gooey-eyed over a well-thumbed copy of Bunty, whereas an old film fan such as me is always on the lookout for vintage copies of Film Fun, featuring silent stars from Charlie Chase and Ben Turpin to Laurel and Hardy. And let us not forget Mickey Mouse Weekly, a stalwart from 1936 to 1959.

Although most of the 200 comics that graced our local newsagents shelves over the past century have now been pulped and recycled into the graphic novel, the mouse is still very much with us in the heartfelt masterpiece Maus by the Pulitzer prize-winning genius Art Spiegelman. In the disturbing bestial world of the author, the mice represent Jews, the cats are the Nazis, pigs the Poles and Americans the dogs.

Maus follows a typical German mouse couple (Vladek and Anja) through prewar courtship, marriage and honeymoon, the Nazi invasion of Poland, incarceration in M'Auschwitz, their mutual survival, the birth of their son and flight to America. Close on 300 pages of mice mystery, which would be a moving story even without the simple graphics.

Another stark black-and-white classic from America is Kafka's Metamorphosis, a terror tale about a man who wakes up one morning to find he has turned into a beetle. The effect this has on his family is stamped on every page by the artist Peter Kuper, who moulds Kafka's vivid imagination into a succession of expressionist images that mirror the minimalist horror of Kafka's haunting prose. But I question the grounds for graphic novels based on pre-existing works. Is it just swapping another man's imagination for one's own? My own imagination is always in colour, my personal images even scarier than those imagined by Kuper.

That's enough of monochrome. I'm crying out for colour - in the imagery of WildC.A.T.S. These are a group of evil-fighting adventurers such as Abe Lincoln and a tough 19-year-old cookie called Maxine Manchester. After a unique operation she breaks out of the prison infirmary, ripping the gates off their hinges and escaping - wearing a new $76 million body.

“Hi, Maxine,” croons the beautiful blonde bitch Halo. “Get your butt here pronto and take care of the samurai scumbag atop of the Bela Bartók building, will ya?” Whumf! Wham! Buhwhoom! Faces full of character, glamour, evil, transcendence; striking images of unimaginable cyborgs and horrific happenings, conceived by Alan Moore - the most mind-blowing (and British) comic king of all time, responsible for such hits as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, V for Vendetta and From Hell, all turned into Hollywood blockbusters, and Promethea, a thrilling mystic excursion into a wonderland from which springs “all creativity in the world”.

Comics are censored less than other forms of entertainment and make a creed of free expression. Which medium other than comics could feature such a complex, challenging and literate tragic hero as Neil Gaimon's Morpheus in Sandman, Lord of Dreams. Norman Mailer called the series “a comic book for intellectuals”.

Then there are the classic Lynd Ward woodcut novels of the 1930s - pure art and social history. In Gods' Man, the cruelty of life and the vulnerability of romance is told totally in pantomime, without words; the emotional expressiveness is profound. His Mad Man's Drum tackles the evils of slave-trading.

God Save the Queen by Mike Carey is a good example of the modern shape of comics: its irresistible cover showing a harridan fairy queen, its group of slacker fairies, its fantasy drug “Red Horse”, its realms of the supernatural and Shakespeare updated to a hip, postmodern take on the travails of adolescence - all rendered with mind-blowing colour paintings by John Bolton. Here we have the romantic appeal of the magic and morbid, the alienated but alluring.

All comics seem to wrestle with the philosophic struggle to reconcile one's dubious state in a world more magnificently complex than the dimensions we take for granted. The genre surpasses mere joking to embrace wryness, irony, social commentary and flights of fantasy. Take Ambush Bug, a DC comics antihero currently enjoying a rebirth. He knows that he's stuck in a 2-D comic but can't get sympathy from his artists or editors, who take turns playing tricks on him - such as maliciously popping him into a baby's body and placing him on the front lines in the Second World War. Comics seem to cater to a certain class of berserkers and brainiacs who like to absorb the big issues through gorgeous drawings, seditious characterisation and wild plots.

There are other super-greats: Hergé; the Frenchman Moebius and his space odyssey Airtight Garage, with its soaring visuals of futuristic flight; the cheeky Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Kim Dietch, featuring Waldo the blue cat; and the ultimate, Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland, a comic strip from 1905 to 1927, featuring the most satisfyingly surreal dreamscapes of all time: a little boy turning 90 overnight, becoming a giant, falling, always falling...

Who can remember the satirical overtones and instant appeal of the “shmoo” in Al Capp's subversive cartoon, L'il Abner? First appearing in 1948, the blobby shmoo resembles a friendly penis with feet and two eyes. It's all-giving and self-sacrificing, wanting only to fulfil mankind's needs for food, work and love. If you look at it with hunger, it dies immediately to please you and tastes of chicken or steak, your choice. Its eyes make perfect buttons for braces.

Go to the 2008 London International Comica Festival from November 13 to 26 at the ICA to find films, comics, graphic novels, guest authors and artists, rarities for your collection. You might run into me. I'm peddling my own graphic novel, Boudica Bites Back (based on my forthcoming movie), with drawings by Elise Russell. Pity you can't hear the stirring music while you read it - for that, there's the DVD.

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