Inspired by his love for Big Brother, the creator of Inspector Rebus enters the DC and Marvel market with Dark Entries.

John Constantine looks like Sting. He is largely human, but with some demon blood. Despite apparently having strangled his twin in the womb, he is basically a good guy. His mission in life is to protect humans from themselves, and from the forces of hell, evil and so on. Outcomes tend to be mixed. “The kind of thing that happens with Constantine,” says Ian Rankin, “is that he always gets involved and comes out smelling of roses, but the people near him end up worse than they were at the beginning.”

Rankin — creator of Inspector Rebus, Scottish literary hero and phenomenally nice bloke — has made Constantine, DC Comics’ occult detective, the star of his first graphic novel, Dark Entries. Illustrated with ruthless, dramatic clarity by Werther Dell’Edera, this is the graphic novel as it should be, a thrilling, beautifully paced pageturner, stricken with noirish angst about the state of the world. Specifically, it’s an attack on reality TV shows. Constantine is sent in to investigate happenings in a very Big Brotherish house, the cause of which turns out to be its unfortunate location — Hell. “I was completely hooked on Big Brother,” Rankin admits, “to the extent of watching it through the night when they were asleep. So I was watching a television screen on which people were sleeping. What does that say about me and all the other people who were watching this?”

The big point here is that Rankin, in literary terms, is a player. His Rebus books are up there with Elmore Leonard. For him to produce a graphic novel is yet another statement that this form is arriving at the literary high table. An even more dramatic statement is Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H Papadimitriou. This is probably the best and certainly the most extraordinary graphic novel I have ever come across. Its subject matter, believe it or not, is the search — in the event, doomed — for mathematical certainty in the first half of the 20th century. Its hero is Bertrand Russell, and his co-stars include fellow thinkers Ludwig Wittgenstein, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing and Gottfried Leibniz.

“The monster infinity creeps into mathematics!” cries an anguished Wittgenstein. “‘Creeps in?’ What rot!” responds the urbane, pipe-smoking Russell. “Infinity is already there from the start, old chap! It’s in the conceptual universe, prior to our poking our puny little brains into it!” “Ach, Russell, I am in such pain!” You don’t get dialogue like that in The Incredible Hulk and Captain America meet the Silver Surfer and Green Lantern.

Subject matter aside, Logicomix is a comic in the great tradition. Its illustrators, Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna, confidently use the full range of expressive devices derived primarily from comics in the DC and Marvel lists — but, amazingly, they are used to dramatise the most abstruse, though immensely important, intellectual crisis of the modern world: what is the basis of mathematics? By the end, you will understand something you might previously have dismissed as hopelessly obscure beard-stroking and head-scratching. Most impressively, you will understand why it’s important.

Meanwhile, Stitches by David Small, published here next month, has topped the New York Times hardback graphic books bestseller list. It’s not a novel, it’s a harrowing memoir. Small is a children’s book illustrator who, at 14, went into hospital to have what he thought was a cyst removed from his throat. It was cancer, and the surgery was horrific. Worst of all, it seemed to have been caused by radiation treatments for a sinus problem given to him by his father, a radiologist. This is a comic, but, again, not as we know it.

The book is, says the Los Angeles Times, “great art”. It is also yet another example of the ever-expanding scope of the graphic book and its persistent demand to be taken more seriously. Stitches, Dark Entries and Logicomix ask a question that makes graphic-novel fans clutch their heads: is this a serious literary/art form? They clutch their heads because the question comes up with depressing regularity. The world of graphic novels goes its own sweet way, then, periodically, people like me come along and start asking the question again.

It is a good question, though, because this is still a live issue. The conservative American Council of Trustees and Alumni, founded by Lynne Cheney, the wife of the former vice-president Dick Cheney, recently published an outline of what should be taught at American colleges and universities. The literary course specifically excluded not only the lyrics of Bob Dylan (are they mad?), but the graphic novel. In response, the venerable literary critic Stanley Fish asked: “Why should trustees and alumni have a say in determining whether the graphic novel — a multimedia art that goes back at least as far as William Blake — deserves to represent literature? (For the record, I think it does.)”

Actually, it is an art that goes back further than Blake, to at least Hogarth, if not 20,000 years to the palaeolithic cave paintings at Lascaux. Pictures that tell a story are one of the primary ways human beings try to make sense of life. In our time, they were born with the foundation of DC and Marvel comics in America in the 1930s, the success of bandes dessinées (think Tintin) in France and Belgium from the 1920s onwards, and the enormous popularity of manga, a post-war comic form, in Japan. Yet in the Cheney-Fish context, the graphic book is clearly caught in the political crossfire. On one side are the baby-boomer liberals, who see comics, rock music, the whole panorama of mass culture, as legitimate objects of study and appraisal; on the other are the ranks formed by the anti-1960s, anti-boomer backlash that coalesced around the Reagan-Thatcher ascendancy. The latter want a back-to-basics, back-to-classics programme that, in literature, would be centred on a fixed canon of great books.

The anti-boomers are not wrong — solid reading of sturdy books is indeed at a low ebb in both Britain and America — but they may be missing two big points. The first is that, as Clive James put it to me, you have to “follow the creativity”. As long as meaningful critical standards are applied, it is absurd to insist that high art be restricted to certain fixed forms — to do so would have eliminated cinema and The Simpsons from serious study. Following the creativity means no more than letting art lead the way.

The second point is that graphic books are very good. Read not just the ones I’ve mentioned, but also Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home or Art Spiegelman’s Maus if you still doubt me. Rankin is quite clear on this quality issue: “I never had that thing about this being a lesser form. I never had that because, to me, it never was.”

Rankin had an uncle who used to insist that it didn’t matter what his nephew was reading, as long as he was reading. To him, this has become more urgently true now that we have a generation with so many reasons not to read. The way to reach them, he says, is stories. He, like me, acquired an early passion for stories by reading comics such as Hotspur, Victor and Eagle.

“There weren’t many books in our house, but there were lots of cheap comics from the DC Thomson stable in Dundee. There used to be dozens of comics every week for teenage boys. That’s gone, and I think graphic novels are a great way to replace them. My son, when he was 15, got Macbeth in a comic. He said it was great, and could we go and see the play? He would never have gone to Shakespeare without reading the comic first. He’s since read Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita as a comic book, and Franz Kafka’s The Trial.”

For Rankin, the idea of the comics of his youth became entangled with punk. Just as you could form a punk band having learnt no more than three chords, so you could start a fanzine or comic with an old Banda (duplicator) machine. Many of today's graphic novels retain an aura of punk. The young protagonists of Dark Entries are all, in one way or another, punkish. The reason for this persistence may be, as a survey at evil-comic.com showed, that 25- to 54-year-olds account for about three-quarters of the comic market. They are the post-hippie generation, for whom punk was the presiding ideology.

Perhaps the real reason graphic books can so easily slip through the net of serious criticism is a kind of identity crisis. What, after all, are they? I talked to Rankin at some length about how he reads them. Initially, he said, he raced through them for the story; now he lingers to savour the artwork. This visual savouring has become more rewarding because of ever more ambitious production. Logicomix looks gorgeous, as do books such as Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, with its endless array of complex and beautiful images. This development could not have happened but for the Far East. Without cheap printing in China, Jimmy Corrigan would have had to be sold at between £30 and £40, instead of £18. Logicomix comes in at £16.99, thanks to Singaporean printing.

Yet literary critics tend not to do visuals, and art critics don’t do words. Only film and theatre critics really do both, and they, of course, don’t review graphic books. So it seems the form is waiting for its Christopher Hart or its Cosmo Landesman.

It should happen. The striking thing, for me, about the best graphic books is the way I find I read them. Like Rankin as a boy, I tend to race through the story, but, with the best ones, I find myself going back just to look at them. I’ve glanced at Logicomix and Dark Entries almost every day for a couple of weeks. They have come to exist as objects, rather than simply as texts. This, I suppose, is an aspect of the fetishistic appeal of these objects, which makes them the most stolen books in the business. And it is from that strange place between fetish and text that serious criticism will have to start.

Read the article on The Times website here.