What would you do if you found this book?

My middle daughter has got me into Manga - and I'm loving it.

It started for her when we watched a TV series called Naruto together and went on from there to the wonderful anime stories produced by Studio Gibli. I have just finished reading a massive series that is wildly popular among Manga readers, called Deathnote - and it blew away all my preconceptions about how this medium works, and the kinds of ideas that it can communicate.

Originally, I had thought that Manga - a style of comic book that originated in Japan, but has been picked up and copied around the world - was filled with stock characters and lame stories. How wrong could I be. Turns out there are several different kinds of Manga - shojo is aimed at girls, shonen at boys, which tends to have darker themes and more violent plotlines. Deathnote is definitely the latter.

A bright teenage boy called Light finds a notebook that has been dropped by an angel of death (a Shinigami in Japanese mythology). Turns out that when you write someone's name in the book, they die soon after from a heart attack. Light decides he wants to create a new world where wicked and evil people are brought to judgement - and he starts to write names in the book. He creates a crusading persona for himself - Kira - and believes he is doing the world a favour by getting rid of "the bad guys".

But as Kira is investigated by the police, US agents, and a super sleuth called L, he uses the notebook to kill them all and protect himself. It's a complex and rich story built around this central dilemma of the morality of using such a powerful weapon. And it portrays the way an idealistic teenager is turned into a scheming manipulative monster by the corrupting effect of being given absolute power. The story involves the reactions of politicians, criminals, Light's close family, the media and the general public - all of them interesting and nuanced. Especially of interest is how public opinion slowly turns from fearing Kira to supporting him, and even forming a religion around him.

It's also been enjoyable to discover a new way of reading a book. With a "normal" print book, I either skim through it quickly to hoover up the information it contains, only slowing down to reflect on ideas that have struck me as important or interesting. Or else I read it carefully to enjoy the language and the storyline.

With graphic novels, you can hoover up the information or plot advancement on a spread in less than 10 seconds. But the joy of consuming this kind of book is to take your time and think about the illustration choices, allowing the words and the images to work together - enjoying the effect of the page design in the same way as you might enjoy reading and repeating a tasty phrase in a words-only book.

The massive popularity of this kind of book means that we shouldn't be dismissive of this category of literature, as though word-only books are intrinsically superior. They are not superior, they are just different. And the appetite for Manga shows that there are many visual learners out there who will read a graphic novel, but may never touch something without illustrations.

Which is why we are working on something new and exciting for Easter next year... Watch this space for more words (and pictures) about it in the next few months...