When I was younger I was never really into comic books, other than my Transformers weekly comic.  This was about gadget robots, not daft things like naughty children or superhero's from the likes of Marvel and DC.  Batman and Superman never really sparked my imagination.

Step forward to the mid 90's and as a rock fan I was intrigued when Alice Cooper released a set of comics, which for adults are called 'Graphic Novels', to support his latest album.  I picked them up from a small comic shop and went home to read them.  I was opened up to a world which i'd completely missed out on. The care which the artist has taken on creating each panel on the page was amazing.

I discovered that the story wasn't childish in a comic, it could be just as good as any written novel.  What it did do which was different from books is provide some imagery to along with the story.

Being such a good story I was interested to see who wrote it.  To my surprise it was a british author called Neil Gamen.  He'd written such books as 'American Gods' and 'Good Omens' with Terry Pratchett.  I decided to look around for other things which he'd written and stumbled upon probably the best graphic novel ever written.  I'm talking about 'Sandman'

This set of 11 issues is about Morpheus who is the Lord of Dreams, one of the group of entities known as 'The Endless'  Throughout the story we meet various characters who come into contact with him and where their meetings lead them.  They are fantastic.  If you ever want to start reading graphic novels, this is the one to start with.

Just as a bit of entertainment, watch this contestant answer questions about the books on Mastermind.