"A nightmarish fantasy", it says on the cover, and that's pretty accurate. This is a British graphic novel, originally published in three parts in '2000 AD' between 1996 and 1999. Alan Grant, who I'm used to seeing as a pair with John Wagner on 'Judge Dredd', 'Strontium Dog' and 'Robo-Hunter', was apparently trying to create a hero who would have to be seriously moulded into that role, an ambitious goal but one that I believe he pulls off here, aided to no small degree by the artwork of Arthur Ranson, with whom Grant worked on 'Judge Anderson'.

It's Ranson's art that grabs immediately, illustrating a script that's agreeably surreal but initially sparse. It starts with an execution, Adam Cadman becoming the first man to be hanged in England since 1964. We don't know why at this point, but we already assume murder. He's unrepentant, as he demonstrates by spitting on the priest who attends him. Notably, we don't see his face clearly in the two pages we get before he's enclosed by a hessian hood. There's another page for the job at hand and another for the duration, with a brightly colourful full-page montage to cover his life flashing before his eyes.

It's delightful artwork, because it's both intricate and inherently and deliberately flawed. Instead of simple straight lines, Ranson will draw something that used to be a straight line but, through a combination of time and weather and sheer weight of history, has become more akin to a ragged approximation. That holds for human faces just as much as it does architecture and the latter will erupt onto our awareness in the moment that we assume that Cadman dies.

That's because he wakes up in the Aztec-infused Mazeworld. He's still bound and he's still sporting the hood, prompting the soldiers of Maskul to believe he's the Hooded One. He kills two of them as he tries to get away but he's about to be overwhelmed until he's saved by a mysterious lady in a colourful cape. It's a fascinating shift, because we're thrown into this just as emphatically as he is. One minute, he's being executed. The next, he's escaping through "the Bone Temple sector in the maze of the tyrant Maskul", running before flying frog trackers and lizards flown by skyriders can locate them.

The imagery is fundamentally Aztec, all pyramids and skull statues, but the locals have crossbows and swords. Our first glimpse of this landscape is a double-page spread, full of architecture and a throng of people, Cadman there on the ground starting to attracting attention. As the pages run on, we realise that people are every size, from dwarf to giant, without anyone commenting on it, as if it's completely normal in this world. There are mazes embedded into the design of what may well be everything, extending at points into the panel layouts themselves.

There's an interesting touch when Cadman throws his rescuer at a host of guards as a distraction, only for the hood to tighten on his throat. He can't remove it and neither can anyone else, and it loosens only when he performs a redemptive act, the initial one being to save her. That suggests some sort of design behind this wild shift into fantasy and we wonder whether that's the act of a god or a force of destiny. Certainly the hood has meaning here, the Hooded One being some sort of legend, and the land seems to be in need of a hero.

That's because the mad emperor, fearful of the Maze Lords, has entered the God-Maze in search of enlightenment and the lords who rule this world in his absence are far from beneficent. Lord Maskul is a brutal despot bitterly worried about the potential that the Hooded One has returned. There are rebels, led by Darius and Cadman's rescuer, Riadne, is one of his lieutenants. We know where that name came from, of course. Ariadne helped Theseus escape from the Minotaur in the Labyrinth in Greek mythology.

A rebel giantess telepathically triggers background in Cadman's mind, giving us the rest of what we need to know to proceed. The first maze was a direct link between heaven and earth, with the Terra Infernalis at its centre. The builders were all killed to conceal the design and the emperor, on his hundredth birthday, led his court into the maze, never to return. The world then grew into a maze of mazes, nobody entering the original maze until the mad emperor and his warrior, the Hooded One, "a hero of old".

While it might sound like I've just run through the whole book, all that information is gathered in the first half of the first part of three, 'The Hanged Man'. There's plenty more still to come even in this part, because we get to meet Lord Maskul, as well as the neighbouring Lord Raven and his Dark Man, the latter of whom has a third eye that he uses to rearrange people into mush from a distance. Cadman ends up in Lord Maskul's dungeon, finding that imprisonment is different in the Mazeworld. Survive the prison-maze for the length of your sentence and you're free. Few make it that far, of course, and the city is literally built out of the bones of the dead.

I'll jump forward to the end of 'The Hanged Man', as Cadman gets to return to his own world as a failed hanging. They cut him down after ten minutes, just at the point that he finally realises the dangers of betrayal while wearing this hood. He's starting to think about becoming a hero and he vanishes from Mazeworld entirely, believing that it was a hallucination, the maze inside himself. Except there's the birth-maze pendant that Riadne gave him. Of course, he goes back because the book has two more parts, but he returns in between each.

I found Book Two, 'The Dark Man' enjoyable but less substantial than the first, perhaps inevitably as the middle part of an effective trilogy. There's more story in Cadman's world too, though we're not going to skimp on time in Mazeworld. The third is very much the conclusion of the arc, with an interestingly jarring set of endings. Some of them are happy indeed, ancient wrongs righted and worlds set at peace, but some are sad, especially those dealing with certain primary characters.

This collected edition was published in 2011 by Rebellion, but the individual volumes within it date back to the late nineties. Book One ran over ten issues of '2000 AD' in 1996, Book Two ten more in 1998 and Book Three a final ten in 1999. That fits, because there's more dark psychology here than '2000 AD' featured in the eighties and less of an overlay of humour. There are moments of irony in 'Mazeworld' but it doesn't employ the standard dry wit I remember in '2000 AD' stories from both writer and artist. Even the core conceit, of a redemptive arc that takes a man from murderer on a gallows to the hero of a world, isn't something I think would have worked a decade earlier. Times do change though and I'm happy they changed enough to bring us this. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by Alan Grant click here