None more black

Rescued from obscurity after 15-plus years out of print, Jon J Muth's masterful 1990 comics adaptation of Fritz Lang's seminal child-killer movie M (1925) can once again be appreciated for what it was: an impressive and inspirational milestone in the then nascent realm of fully-painted comics. Working from staged photographs, Muth would draw photo-realistic copies, applying a mixture of silverpoint, graphite, pastels and ultimately oil paints. The end result generates an overwhelmingly gloomy atmosphere, rife with grief, loss, rage and regret – in other words, perfect. Particularly effective is Muth's vision of the killer. Altogether more boyish-looking than Peter Lorre's memorable turn, he similarly elicits the ever-eerie notion of shocking evil lurking beneath an unremarkable facade.Danny Graydon