Attention Doctor Who fans. Our Mr. Cornell doesn’t have an episode for Hugo consideration this year as far as I know, but if you’d like to get him on the ballot this year you could always consider the Graphic Story category because he has produced one or two. My recommendation would be that you check out Captain Britain and MI13: Secret Invasion. This comprises the first four issues of Paul’s CapB revival, and because it is tied into the Secret Invasion storyline it is now also available as a single graphic novel. All four issues have 2008 cover dates (though comments here suggest that the collection won’t be out in the US until March – boo!).

The overall plot of the skrull invasion of Earth is pretty silly superhero stuff, but Paul does a good job of making something interesting of it. He also gets to launch a brand new British superhero group that includes Black Knight, Pete Wisdom and Spitfire along with the revived Brian Braddock. The storyline also features John from the skrull Beatles, a guest appearance by Gordon Brown, and the introduction of a wonderful new character Faiza Hussein – the comic world’s first Muslim nurse superheroine. Paul apparently has a posse of young Muslim ladies advising him on the character. I just hope he manages to keep control of her, because I’m not sure that I trust Marvel to treat her with the same level of respect she’s getting from Paul.

A quick nod too for Leonard Kirk, who has done a good job with the artwork, save for an odd tendency to always look for excuses to draw Spitfire with her costume in rags. In his introduction to the graphic novel Paul praises Kirk’s ability to get the characters to “act” – because if you can tell from the art what their emotional state is then the writer’s job becomes much easier. Let’s not forget why Graphic Story is an entirely separate Hugo category and not just subsumed under the short fiction categories.

While you are in the comic shop buying this, you might want to check out the second CB-MI13 story, which has just ended with issue #9. Because, you know, every super hero comic ought to feature a battle against a Duke of Hell called Plokta.

At the end of #9 Paul suggests that he might have been reading Kim Newman, because there is a brief appearance by everyone’s favorite Transylvanian count. Issue #10 will apparently be titled “Vampire State”.