This is an unusual graphic novel in a number of ways. For one, the traditional delineation between writer, penciller, inker and letterer is non-existent because Mark Wheatley and Marc Hempel are both all of those things. From the additional material at the end of this collected volume, it seems like there's more Wheatley here than Hempel but both wrote, pencilled, inked and lettered. That isn't just atypical, I'm struggling to think of another example of it.

And for another, it's a book out of time. The copy I borrowed from Edward is a 2005 graphic novel from IDW that brings together the twelve-issue run of 'Mars' that was published by First Comics in 1984 and 1985. It's set in the far future, ten-thousand years after an origin story chapter set in the near future. And yet it all feels like something written in the pulp era of the thirties but reworked in the acid drenched sixties and finally brought to vibrant colourful life in the indie eighties. When else would a comic book gain a theme tune?

The origin story that occupied the first issue of the comic book is fast-paced sci-fi action, setting up not only the lead character of Morgana Trace but the human characters who populate the rest of the book. She's the daughter and pre-teen assistant of Dr. Nathan Trace, who's just implanted an organic computer chip into Tommy Reid's brain, only for him to go through chaotic regression, not a good thing, surely, whatever it is. Anyway, Tommy's father is royally pissed and he brings a laser lawnmower to Trace's press conference, which leaves the doctor dead and Morgana paraplegic.

I adored this opening chapter. However, following the tradition of old school pulp sci-fi adventure—this collected volume is dedicated to Andre Norton with reason—it's outrageously fast-paced. It takes four pages for Morgana Trace to be crippled. It takes three more for her to earn her PhD at thirteen, by continuing her father's research, and one more to walk again, having linked her mind to a computer that bypasses her severed nerves. As a side-effect, knowledge is now transferrable immediately. Damn, this isn't just PhD worthy, it's Nobel Prize worthy.

And that's not all. Off she goes to the Moon to rebuild her atrophied muscles with Cal Drifkin and his robots, to whom she can now link to do great feats. And, because of that, they're both chosen for the 11th Mars mission. Suddenly there are six humans on the Goddard/Lovell space station, in orbit around Mars, using Cal's robots and Morgan's link to terraform the planet. They're building canals and other structures, planting seeds and turning a dead world into a living one. This is old school optimism at its finest.

Except, as you might imagine, there's a catch. The governments of Earth have restricted the link that provides instant knowledge to certain people, the Studied Crowd, thus keeping it away from the masses, and the Common Man wants it. While reporter Ray Madura is on Goddard/Lovell for his job, reporting on Morgana and the mission, calamity strikes Earth. We're not quite sure what happens—there are condensed reports suggesting sunspot activity, radio clouds and knowledge transfers for the Common Man—but suddenly Earth and Luna are no longer reachable. Assuming the worst—and we're never given information otherwise—perhaps the last seven people alive go into suspended animation for ten thousand years.

All that is in the first issue of the comic book! We have eleven more to go, even if the authors had intended for there to be two more again. The last couple are rather condensed to cram the whole story in, once the run was decreased from fourteen issues to twelve, and that's unfortunate, but I can't say that it mattered. I understood the final two chapters far better than some of those that preceded them. Like I said, this is acid-drenched pulp sci-fi action. It's Edmond Hamilton by way of Mick Farren.

The end of that first issue is Morgana coming out of suspended animation ten thousand and one years into the future to find everyone else gone. The space station is empty, of people, food and anything else. All she has is Teezy, the AI who runs the place, who she transfers into a robot, and a shuttle that will take her down to the surface of the planet. Once there, we're firmly in motion so it's time for issue two. What follows is highly episodic, each issue telling its own story as she seeks and eventually finds her colleagues, with the reasons behind the wild imagination brought slowly into focus so that they can wrap up in those frantic last couple of chapters.

For a while, it's nothing but female empowerment, with three characters at the fore. The lead is Morgana Trace, of course, who's a walking paraplegic genius. As Teezy is fundamentally her, she's a female program in a robot body, and, if we question whether gender can be applied in this case, let me add that Morgana isn't interested in sex either because she can't feel anything below her waist. She's certainly not interested in providing someone else with pleasure that she can't share, which seems like a feminist angle to me. And then there's Fawn, some sort of thieving Martian cat girl who shows up early and hangs around after Morgana saves her from giant snails armed with laser lawncutters.

Trust me, it gets weirder. There's a confessional tree. There are vegetarian dinosaurs. There's an entirely naked commune of famous artists who are all dead but interact with their environment through pure mental energy. There's a religious war fought mostly with illusion. There are native creatures who constitute threats in bizarre ways, like the weirdies and boogens, snakes that swim in the air and turn human beings drunk on nectar into animals. I couldn't tell you what Winston's chapter means, but it's outrageously surreal, with G. Willikers, Aldo the Worm Man and whatever else seemed like a great idea while Wheatley and Henkel were presumably high on nectar.

My favourite character, other than Morgana Trace, who dominates the book, is easily Moot the Caretaker, whose role I won't explain but who looks rather like the creature on the original cover of 'Appetite for Destruction' as reimagined by Hayao Miyazaki. And that's not a bad way to think about the artwork, which is simple in execution and vibrant in colour. It often feels rather like an immersive and delightfully lush cartoon strip, everything fundamentally organic—even robots or cities—but always with an sense of danger. It's as wildly imaginative as the story and it's so active that we can't stop turning pages. I devoured this in a sitting.

Does it all hold together? Not remotely and there are certainly sections I didn't fully grasp, but it feels like a fond leap back to the past to ride frantically into the future. I'm on board with that. ~~ Hal C F Astell