For an event as thoroughly chronicled as it is, the Trojan War is still relatively mysterious: There’s no extant ancient document that presents its entire narrative. The war may or may not have actually taken place, in fact; from the judgment of Paris to the Trojan Horse, it’s only known to us through legends stacked atop legends, beginning with Homer’s “Iliad” and continuing through the movie “Troy” and beyond. So the classification on the spine of “Age of Bronze: Betrayal Part 1,” the third and most recent collection of Shanower’s roughly thrice-annual black-and-white comic book, is “Historical Fiction/Mythology.” That’s a clever contradiction: Is it a recounting of something that didn’t happen, or an invention to dramatize something that did?

It’s sort of both. Shanower’s first smart idea was to treat every extant work related to the Trojan War as a potential part of his story — the “Iliad” and other classical Greek literature, of course, but also Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida” and its medieval sources, Mozart’s “Idomeneo,” C.P. Cafavy’s poems about Achilles, even ABBA’s “Cassandra” and the movie “Troy.” The proliferating versions of the war’s history are often incompatible, of course, and sometimes Shanower’s interpretations of key incidents synthesize multiple sources. (Was Philoktetes’ foot injured by an arrow or a snake? As far as “Age of Bronze” is concerned, both.) Piecing together the historical and mythological fragments into a coherent plot could be a dry exercise, but the passions and rages of Shanower’s Greeks and Trojans roar like a charging army of spearmen.

In some sense, “Age of Bronze” is art about art about art, so Shanower’s second masterstroke was to brace it against historical ground. He’s working from the assumption that the Trojan War happened in the late Bronze Age, roughly the 13th century B.C., and he’s exhaustively researched the archaeological record of that era to reconstruct the way buildings, ships, clothing, weapons and everything else looked. (“Age of Bronze” has the longest, most scholarly bibliography you’ll ever see attached to a graphic novel.) His settings and characters look less imagined than carefully observed; this is as close as anyone can come to showing what a war in that time and place would have looked like.

Shanower’s been working on “Age of Bronze” for 12 years now, longer than the war itself, and he claims he’s about a third of the way through it. “Betrayal Part 1″ is the third volume of seven — or, rather, the first part of the third volume. (The earlier volumes, “A Thousand Ships” and “Sacrifice,” are both entirely self-contained; “Betrayal Part 2″ is probably a few years away.) A new reader would be wise to start at the beginning of the series, especially since the new volume doesn’t just begin in medias res, as Horace wrote of Homer, but in the middle of dozens of plot threads. If you only know the story through a high-school reading of the “Iliad,” the business with the wooden horse is still a long way off: “Betrayal Part 1″ ends just as the Achaeans are about to land at Troy after Odysseus and Menelaus’ failed embassy to King Priam. Achilles is itching to lead the attack, Helen is reeling from the revelation of her mother’s suicide, Laodike has just hooked up with Akamas, Pandarus is playing go-between for Troilus and Cressida, and Kassandra is raving in horror at her visions of what’s to come.

There’s much more happening, too, since Shanower’s choreographing an enormous cast. (The two-page genealogical chart at the back of this volume helpfully bolds the names of 42 major characters in its pages.) Still, there’s one very large and deliberate omission from the legends of the Trojan War in “Age of Bronze”: He treats it entirely as a story of individual human interactions, so we never see the Greek gods in action. They may be influencing events or they may not — the wind does indeed shift after Iphigenia is sacrificed, for instance. But what matters is that the characters believe in them and act accordingly, although Shanower always suggests a secular possibility for the way things turn out. Kalchas, the turncoat Trojan priest, is one of the central characters in this volume: nervous, shifty and perpetually clearing his throat, he’s able to manipulate events in enormous and terrible ways, because he claims he’s got no choice but to communicate what the gods want.

For the most part, the language Shanower uses is understated, solemn and poetic. Menelaus’ speech to Priam, for instance, has the cadence of translated Greek drama: “But the man who commits shameful acts, who upsets order and outrages law, though one day he holds wealth and power, the next he plunges into black death.” “Age of Bronze,” though, is most of all a visual story — the earliest iteration of the Trojan War story may be traditionally attributed to a blind poet, but there’s plenty to look at, even beyond the occasional spectacles of warships and sword fights.

Some of the most dramatic sequences in “Betrayal” are carried almost entirely by Shanower’s artwork. The climactic scene, in which Paris, Helen and her abandoned husband Menelaus confront one another in the court of Priam, is presented as a series of close-ups of the three characters’ faces: Menelaus overcome with longing but trying to present his emotional demands as moral imperatives, Paris cocky and openly mocking him, Helen quietly struggling with her feelings and flinching like a 1920s silent-film idol or a ’50s romance-comics heroine. And, after Helen rejects Menelaus, there’s a magnificently staged sequence in which Odysseus steps forward to address the Trojans, pauses for a moment to close his eyes and compose himself, and then explodes in calculated rage — spittle flying from his mouth, shock lines surrounding his head.

Shanower’s greatest gift as a cartoonist is his command of his characters’ facial expressions and body language; he often lets the way his characters look and move around one another say much more than he puts into their dialogue. Achilles’ mother, Thetis, is an imposing presence, but she’s also faintly ridiculous, prone to scenery-chewing gestures. Odysseus is squat and bearded, perpetually on the alert and thinking five steps ahead, and happy to keep to himself until it’s time for him to do something clever. Many of the Trojan War’s legends are about love so intense that it destroys everything around it, and when Shanower draws lovers in each other’s presence, the force of their erotic attraction crackles from the page. Achilles and Patroklus, silhouetted by the sun (as Achilles recalls the prophecy that Apollo would bring about his doom), are a classic pain-and-comfort duo; Paris can’t keep his hands off Helen for two minutes, and Helen knows perfectly well what bad news he is but can’t control her lust for him either.

There’s a slightly static quality to some of Shanower’s figure drawing, which works in its favor here: Many of his characters’ poses are (or might have been) copped from pottery, friezes or half-peeled-away paintings. (Before “Age of Bronze,” his biggest body of work was a series of graphic novels set in L. Frank Baum’s Land of Oz, which similarly built on the archaisms readers expect from those stories.) Other elements of Shanower’s classicism — especially his sense of design and composition — are virtues in modern cartooning as much as they were in the pre-comics era. “Betrayal’s” cover image of a snake coiled around a sandaled foot refers to the story of Philoktetes and more obliquely to the rest of this volume’s plot; it’s pure and simple enough that it might have been seen on an urn made a few thousand years ago.

Shanower doesn’t try to give the Trojan War more contemporary relevance than the archetypal resonance it’s always had, and his visual approach is, perhaps, unfashionably un-radical. At a time when the best-known art-cartoonists are leading with their formal innovations, his most expressive gestures come in the form of distinctly old-school craft: rendering, shading, staging, pacing. But if there’s a story that every art-maker in the Western world is entitled to embellish, it’s this one, and Shanower’s treatment of it is gripping to read and beautiful to look at, a feast of images fit for the gods that he’s carved away from it.

“The Salon” by Nick Bertozzi (St. Martin’s Griffin)

It’s probably best known for being at the center of an infamous legal case, but Bertozzi’s graphic novel is thoroughly charming in its own right — a murder mystery/fantasy set in the Paris of 1907, where Erik Satie, Georges Braque, Gertrude Stein, a dirty-mouthed and clothing-averse Pablo Picasso and their friends discover a secret cache of blue absinthe that lets the artists who drink it travel inside paintings. Beneath the historical fun of the plot, though, Bertozzi has a lot to say about the way the modernists reinvented art’s relationship to representing reality and personal experience.

“Terry and the Pirates, Vol. 1″ by Milton Caniff (IDW)

The first volume in the Library of American Comics, a planned series of deluxe hardcover volumes reprinting classic newspaper strips, includes the first two years of one of the greatest daily adventure serials. Launched in late 1934, “Terry” takes a little while to ramp up: The titular 12-year-old was essentially a sidekick to a generic action hero named Pat Ryan, and the pervasive Asian stereotypes are tough to get past. (The term “dragon lady” comes from the wicked vamp who threatens our heroes for most of this volume.) In early 1936, though, Caniff introduced another femme fatale, a cigarette-smoking Mae West type called Burma, and his gifts clicked into place: vivid characters, high-contrast blasts of light and shadow, and rocket-powered pacing that yanked the plot forward with a little cliffhanger every day.

“Chance in Hell” by Gilbert Hernandez (Fantagraphics Books)

He has been flirting from a distance with the overheated drama of B-movies for years, and now the co-creator of the groundbreaking art-comics series “Love and Rockets” is adopting that mode himself. Both “Chance in Hell” and his current miniseries “Speak of the Devil” are “adaptations” of nonexistent, trashy, sexually charged drive-in flicks (with his actress character from “L&R,” Fritz, playing bit parts). This one, drawn in a looser, broader version of the texture-conscious style he devised for last year’s “Sloth,” concerns a girl named Empress who escapes the gruesome circumstances of her childhood, until they come back to get her. If you haven’t read Gilbert and his brother Jaime’s extraordinary stories from the initial run of “Love and Rockets,” though, start there — they’ve been collected in six paperbacks this year. Gilbert’s volumes are “Heartbreak Soup,” “Human Diastrophism” and “Beyond Palomar”; Jaime’s are “Maggie the Mechanic,” “The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S.” and “Perla La Loca.”

“French Milk” by Lucy Knisley (Epigraph Publishing)

The 22-year-old Knisley’s first full-length book is her drawn diary of a six-week trip to Paris with her mother: a keenly observed letter back home, in effect, with lots of interpolated photographs and sketches of everything in her environment. Its scope is deliberately small, but the pleasure Knisley takes in food and company is infectious, and she’s as conscious of her own perceptions and how she’s communicating them as she is of the world around her.

“I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets!” by Fletcher Hanks (Fantagraphics Books)

Hanks’ career in comics was short — 1939-1941 — but he may have been the most bat-shit insane cartoonist to ever wield a pen. Stardust the Super Wizard, Fantomah the Mystery Woman of the Jungle and the other stars of the short stories collected here (by editor Paul Karasik, whose biographical conclusion is sad but illuminating) are basically just props for Hanks’ obsessions: catastrophes described in compulsive detail, super-scientific rays, poetic justice and images that brand themselves on readers’ retinas. His sense of composition was phenomenal; his grasp of anatomy and linear logic was virtually nonexistent. But almost every panel here feels as if it has been rescued from a majestic nightmare.

“Two-Fisted Tales, Vol. 2″ by Harvey Kurtzman et al. (Gemstone)

The kids who read Harvey Kurtzman’s war comics in the ’50s grew up to be the conscientious objectors of the ’60s. Originally published by the cult-favorite EC Comics line at another time when America reveled in military rhetoric, and now reprinted in handsome hardcovers (this second volume is where the series really took off), “Two-Fisted Tales” was a collection of short stories set in conflicts from the American Revolution to the then current Korean War. Kurtzman’s comics (drawn by an all-star team including Wally Wood and John Severin) might’ve looked like flag wavers from a distance, but they portrayed war as not only inglorious but hopeless, meaningless and endlessly horrible. More than 50 years later, stories like “Corpse on the Imjin” are still shocking.

“The Amazing Spider-Man Omnibus, Vol. 1″ by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko (Marvel)

The 43 Spider-Man comic books that Ditko drew between 1962 and 1966 have been reprinted countless times before, but this thousand-page-plus volume contains all of them, and it looks and feels like the canon it is. (As a bonus, it includes the original issues’ letter columns — a few of the readers who wrote in, like Donald McGregor and Steve Gerber, went on to write comics themselves.) Ditko drew Spider-Man as a frail teenager in a Manichaean world of grotesque horrors and petty humiliations; Lee reinvented the language of superhero comics as a jazzy, glittering trail of wisecracks and melodrama. It’s primal, brutal, brilliant stuff — the story of a hero propelled by a guilt so overwhelming he’ll never be free of it — and you can practically feel the heat of Lee and Ditko’s ideologies clashing.

“All-Star Superman, Vol. 1″ by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely (DC Comics)

The best superhero series running right now makes the 70-year-old Superman franchise seem bracingly fresh again, and its secret is that it goes back to first principles: the idea that a Superman comic should be pure joy from start to finish. It tosses out the past few decades’ convoluted continuity — if you know who Lois Lane and Clark Kent are, you’re all set. And as smoothly as Morrison’s stories flow, they’re loaded with smart throwaway ideas and juicy subtexts: The premise of each of these six stories is essentially man against himself, or rather the perfect person, Superman, confronting another version of himself. Quitely’s artwork, meanwhile, is splendidly understated, more about body language and facial expressions than grand gestures, although he pulls out the fireworks when they’re called for.

“The Blot” by Tom Neely (I Will Destroy You)

Neely’s self-published debut graphic novel instantly established him as a cartoonist worth watching. Almost (but not quite) wordless, it starts as a hat tip to the jaunty, loose-limbed style of early animated cartoons, and rapidly evolves into a horrifying existentialist meditation about a splatter of ink that takes over a man’s mind and world, the power over life and death that it gives him, and the way it changes his perspective on sex, fear and existence. Is the blot a symbol for the artistic impulse? Maybe — but it seems to go uncomfortably deeper than that.

“Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together” by Bryan Lee O’Malley (Oni Press)

Four volumes in, and O’Malley’s series about a young Canadian slacker coming to grips with his new girlfriend’s romantic history (and figuring out how to grow up a little) keeps getting funnier and more incisive. O’Malley grabs storytelling cues wherever he can find them — kung-fu flicks and Bollywood musicals, manga and especially video games. (This is probably the only non-video-game fiction ever in which characters “level up.”) He’s so gifted at character comedy that some members of his cast don’t have to do much more than show up to get laughs — obsessive teenage romantic Knives Chau is a great invention — but almost all of them end this volume more complex and interesting than they begin it.

“Bookhunter” by Jason Shiga (Sparkplug Comics)

Shiga has been constructing ornate puzzle comics and formalist exercises (like “Fleep,” a 40-page comic set entirely inside a phone booth) for years. This one is his first straightforward narrative, and it’s typically unlike anything else: a gritty police procedural about public-library cops in Oakland, Calif., in 1973 assigned to track down a stolen book. Shiga’s artwork isn’t much more than functional, but it doesn’t need to be; dialogue like “I need a check on purchases of Veratex cloth, sienna, crossed with all zincotype presses sold in the area between Mar ’71 and Jun ’72. ASAP” is intrinsically funny, and kind of fascinating if you’ve got the right mind-set. And the historical setting — the moment when technology was starting to change everything about libraries — gives the story a surprisingly bittersweet mood.

“Apollo’s Song” by Osamu Tezuka (Vertical)

Tezuka was the king of Japanese comics, a natural-born entertainer with broad, ambitious visions and a massive bibliography. Vertical has been publishing new translations of a bunch of Tezuka’s projects (maybe most notably “Black Jack,” coming next fall); this year, it released the psychological thriller “MW” (first published 1976-1978) and “Apollo’s Song,” a marvelously screwed-up paean to the power of love and sex, originally serialized in 1970. Incorporating a nightmarish tale of doomed romance in Nazi Germany, a science fiction story about a war between humans and “Synthians,” marathon-running sequences, and an opening scene involving half a billion anthropomorphic sperm, “Apollo’s Song” is nominally the story of how a man who despises love is punished for his callousness. Mostly, though, it’s a chance for Tezuka to bust out one enormous spectacle after another. The story is as emotionally manipulative as a classic Disney movie, and just about as unstoppable.

The premise of the first two “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” books (the first of which was made into an atrocious movie) was that, in 1898, England assembled a spy team from the era’s pulp-literature characters: Mr. Hyde, Captain Nemo, the Invisible Man, Allan Quatermain and Mina Murray, better known as Mina Harker from “Dracula.” In “Black Dossier,” we jump ahead to 1958, when the team’s two survivors, Murray and Quatermain, are still out adventuring together — and particularly well-preserved, thanks to a 1901 encounter with a “pool of life.” The book’s plot is minimal: The two of them steal the titular dossier (a piecemeal account of the League’s history from their 17th-century founding as Prospero’s Men to a later group headed by Lemuel Gulliver and an early-1900s adventure involving the wicked Doctors Caligari and Rotwang), and escape with it in a rocket that will be familiar to fans of early-’60s children’s television.

All the story is meant to be, though, is fruitcake batter, holding together one candied nugget after another. In the course of the book, we encounter, among other things, a brief prose piece in the merged styles of P.G. Wodehouse and H.P. Lovecraft (“What Ho, Gods of the Abyss”), a pornographic “Tijuana bible” aimed at citizens of Airstrip One from George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” picture postcards from the fictional locales of Fantippo, Toyland and Coradine, and a biography of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (painted by O’Neill in the style of British “boys’ comics”), who turns out to have also been Roland, the Mona Lisa, and Orlando the Marmalade Cat from Kathleen Hale’s children’s books. In places, it’s as if Moore is pinning you down and demanding you admit how clever he is. (He is! He is! Uncle!)

The world of the League is pieced together from fragments of every kind of fiction. An essay on the supernatural foundations of England’s history is credited not to Aleister Crowley, but to Oliver Haddo, his stand-in from W. Somerset Maugham’s 1908 novel “The Magician”; the aerial bombardment of London was instigated not by Adolf Hitler but by Adenoid Hynkel, Charlie Chaplin’s character from “The Great Dictator.” This sort of concatenation of fictional sources isn’t a new idea — Philip José Farmer did something very similar in the early ’70s with his “Wold Newton family” books — but Moore’s command of every piece of cheap entertainment ever committed to paper or film means that there’s scarcely a panel of “Black Dossier” without some Googleable detail.

He’s also a sure-handed parodist of literary style, whether he’s approximating the tone of John Cleland’s “Fanny Hill” (“In exquisitely suggestive ornamental gardens spread about the tunnel-mouth that let into this perfumed underworld itself, I paid my coachman, not in coin, though to my way of thinking very generously…”) or Orwell’s Newspeak (“Make report. If fail make report, is INFOCRIME. Make report. If report made on failing to make report, this paradox. Paradox is LOGICRIME. Do not do anything. Do not fail to do anything. This warn you”). And different sections of the “Dossier” are not just written but illustrated and designed and printed in widely divergent styles; sadly, the 45 RPM record rumored to be included doesn’t show up in this edition.

The patchwork nature of the book also means that Kevin O’Neill gets to work overtime. O’Neill, who made his name drawing berserk, grotesque fantasies like “Marshal Law” and “Nemesis the Warlock,” is the only artist ever to have his actual drawing style declared unsuitable for children by the Comics Code Authority (on the strength of a 1986 “Green Lantern Corps” story written by Moore); his line work gives everything he draws the crinkly mass of a crumpled piece of paper. “Black Dossier” calls on him to go beyond his usual lively sense of design and choreography, approximating the look and feel of 18th-century political caricature, Art Deco erotica, a tourist map, vintage magazine cartoons and a ’50s pulp paperback cover (for a book by Sal Paradyse, whose name may ring a bell to anyone who’s read “On the Road”).

In short, “Black Dossier” is a thoroughly postmodern book, in the sense that it’s entirely built out of allusions and associations — preexisting bits of meaning. That raises the question of what meaning it has on its own, or whether its light is entirely reflected. As David Foster Wallace (riffing on a John Barth line about postmodern fiction) put it: “For whom, the proles grouse/ Is the funhouse a house?/ Who lives there, when push comes to shove?”

Moore does have something of an answer. The key line of the first “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” book, reprised here, is “The British Empire has always encountered difficulty in distinguishing between its heroes and its monsters.” (Somewhat surprisingly, that’s Moore’s own aperçu, not a quotation from somebody else.) The premise of the whole series is that pulp fiction and popular entertainment are the ways the deepest anxieties of culture bubble up into narrative: Nemo and Mr. Hyde and the invading Martians of “The War of the Worlds” exemplified Victorian England’s fears about science, empire and “foreigners.”

In 1958, the heroes of what remained of the British empire were spies, and on the first page of “Black Dossier” we meet a brutal, depraved secret agent identified only as “Jimmy,” who asks for his vodka martini to be stirred: “otherwise it bruises the alcohol.” (When he picks up Mina Murray at a bar, she tells him that her name is Odette “Oodles” O’Quim.) His boss, who goes by some initial or other near the middle of the alphabet, is Harry Lime from “The Third Man,” and they’re up to no good. There was something innately monstrous, Moore suggests, about 007 (with his limitless license for violence and sexual exploitation), and about the covert operatives and private eyes that fascinated mid-20th-century Britain: The book’s other villains are Herman Cyril McNeile’s jingoistic, two-fisted detective Bulldog Drummond (who appeared in a series of novels beginning in 1920) and a never-quite-named stand-in for “The Avengers”‘ Emma Peel.

Playing with other people’s inventions in this way, of course, skirts the edges of copyright when you get past a certain date, and “Black Dossier” — originally scheduled to be published a year ago — is rumored to have been delayed by some legal glitches. But the biggest single source of allusions in this book is well out of copyright: William Shakespeare, by whom we get to read an excerpt of an “unknown” play, “Faerie’s Fortunes Founded.” “Black Dossier” proceeds, in part, from the premise that Shakespeare’s queen and patron was Queen Gloriana, as in Edmund Spenser’s “The Faerie Queen” — so, by extension, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “The Tempest” were actually among Shakespeare’s history plays.

In the concluding section of “Black Dossier,” Prospero himself — drawn to look very much like Moore — turns to address his audience in blank verse. (This isn’t the first Moore comic to be concluded by a stand-in for the author — he first did it in his final “Swamp Thing” story, 20 years ago.) Tradition has it that Prospero’s renunciation of his magic at the end of “The Tempest” represents Shakespeare bidding farewell to his art. So Moore, who’s been making noises for a while about retiring from comics, is effectively snapping his wand, drowning his books and knocking a mountain over on top of the whole site.

As with Moore and J.H. Williams III’s “Promethea” — one of relatively few major Moore comics projects not directly inspired by someone else’s work — the farewell in “Black Dossier” is a paean to the power of the imagination. This one, though, is a bit more final. It begins “Duty necessitates I here abide, attending to such stragglers that remain, ignore their hosts’ exaggerated yawns and, fearing party’s end, scuff now their feet ‘midst fallen streamers and spill’d goblet-dregs.” In other words: We’re done! Scram! Funnily enough, this isn’t actually Moore and O’Neill’s ultimate League story — they’ve promised another volume, Century, to be serialized in three parts beginning next year. (This is, however, almost certainly the final book to be published by the Moore-created America’s Best Comics imprint: The credit page, modeled on the London Underground map, includes the note “ABC: Closed for the duration.”)

After that throat-clearing, Moore-as-Prospero gets to his point: Popular fiction doesn’t just mirror its readers’ reality, it inspires and creates it — which makes it somehow more real than reality. “If we mere insubstantial fancies be,” he asks, “how more so thee, who from us substance stole?” Blurring the line between the page and the reader’s world further, the book’s final section is printed in 3-D (to represent the characters’ transition from the third dimension, where time is unidirectional, to a temporally boundless fourth dimension); in a last gesture of over-the-top cleverness, the enclosed 3-D glasses have a third eye. This isn’t just Moore’s kiss-off, it’s his bid for immortality — a realm that, one last time, he’s trying to enter through other people’s creations.

The setup is that a death god (or “Shinigami”) by the name of Ryuk accidentally-on-purpose drops his notebook into the human world. Write anyone’s name in the book, and that person will suffer a fatal heart attack 40 seconds later — unless you accompany the name with an indication of exactly how and when the person will die. Ryuk’s notebook is found by Light Yagami, a brilliant, aimless college-bound son of a cop, who decides he’s going to use the power of life and death to make a better world. Wackiness ensues.

At first, Light kills horrendous criminals who’ve escaped justice. Then he starts killing criminals who haven’t escaped the justice system — and the media starts referring to the mysterious bad-guy assassin as “Kira” (phonetic Japanese for the English “killer”). Then he starts killing people who might be able to expose him as Kira, including an American FBI team that comes after him. Eventually, the Japanese police form a task force — including Light’s father — to take down Kira, led by the aforementioned world’s greatest detective, a mysterious figure known only as “L.” (Actually, he’s the world’s three greatest detectives … and that’s just for starters. L proved popular enough that there’s a separate movie about him currently being made in Japan.)

L realizes that Light might well be Kira, and that even if he’s not, he’s smart enough to help with the investigation — so Light ends up joining the team that’s trying to track him down. That begins the frantic, gnarled cat-and-mouse game between L and Kira that occupies the rest of the series in one form or another. The story hints at some kind of erotic tension between the two of them (this is where the handcuffs come in), but they’re mostly interested in seducing each other into a trap; they’re the adversaries each has been waiting all his life for.

There’s an awful lot of “if he knows that I know that he knows that I know, then that’s exactly what he’s expecting me to do” stuff. And then … well, it’s tough to get too specific about “Death Note” without spoiling its fun — especially since it’s built on a series of massive plot twists, each of which sends it careening off in a new direction until a final philosophical whammy slams the final volume closed. Suffice it to say that Ryuk the apple-eating death god is Kira’s companion, but never really his ally. As Gloucester puts it in “King Lear”: “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods;/ They kill us for their sport.”

There’s a rumor that “Death Note” was originally supposed to be only about half as long as it turned out to be, but when the original Japanese serialization proved to be wildly popular, Obata and Ohba were persuaded to extend it. That makes sense, since about halfway through the series, there’s a point that seems like a natural ending. It’s a fake-out, but it does signal a change (which some readers hate) in the tone of the series into a parable about mortality, immortality and the difference between physical existence and identity. Near the end, there’s a series of exceptionally creepy scenes in which one character is seen playing with little wooden toys that represent the rest of the cast — and then wearing a cardboard mask of another character’s face. For the first half of “Death Note,” Kira and L appear to be characters like any other, but in the second half, Ohba repeatedly makes it clear that they’re roles that his characters can assume or abandon.

That’s a lot of weight to carry, but very little of the heavy stuff comes through on a first reading. “Death Note” is an unbelievably suspenseful story — one of the very few comics I’ve read in years in which I could barely slow down enough to pay attention to its formal craft because I was so caught up in wondering, “Omigod, what’s Kira gonna do next?” Ohba and Obata’s style, in fact, tries to call attention to itself as little as possible. Every image and every bit of dialogue puts all its energy into pushing the story forward. There’s nothing to linger over because “Death Note” does nothing but move. Even its talkiest scenes are fraught with terror; each interaction between characters, no matter how casual, is secretly an interrogation, a 20-moves-ahead push toward a checkmate. A couple of car chases and shootouts almost seem like a distraction from the story’s real business of high-caliber psyche-outs.

The core of the creeping fear in “Death Note,” actually, is its moral uncertainty: Most of its characters perpetually struggle with doubts over whether they’re doing right or wrong. Light is an unrepentant serial killer, a butcher on an enormous scale, but he isn’t a Freddy Krueger, a monster who represents pure evil, or a Patrick Bateman, a demonic symbol of his age. As coldly manipulative and egomaniacal as he is, he genuinely believes he has the moral high ground, and he sort of has a point — Ohba suggests that Light’s totalitarian world, ruled by a propagandistic TV channel and an arbitrary secret executioner, is in some ways a better, happier world than ours. And over the course of the series, we see glimpses of how the Death Note could be far worse in someone else’s hands; in the books’ only really weak sequence, a corporation acquires a Death Note of its own and uses it to prop up its business interests (by committee, no less).

What makes “Death Note” tick, though, is how neatly wrought its characters are — Obata underscores their psychological interactions with telling little tics of body language. An actress named Misa Amane is drawn (and written) in Japanese comics’ tradition of cute, tiny, airhead girls with big eyes, but she’s a lot cannier than she pretends to be, and you can watch her measuring how much quasi-innocent charm to pour on in every situation. The Shinigami’s zombified midair postures and caricatures of decay make for some crisp, dark comedy. And L is a magnificent piece of character design: chunky spikes of black hair, deer-in-headlights expression, always sitting with his knees in front of his face and snacking on candy. For all his breathtaking leaps of detective logic, he’s an emotional innocent.

He’s also an element in a little metatextual game: A group of major characters over the course of the series have initials in an alphabetical cluster, and the O who’s never mentioned in the story itself could be Ohba himself, or an empty circle. (Ohba’s name is apparently a pseudonym; his real identity is as closely guarded a secret as L’s.) “Death Note” is one of those projects — like “Harry Potter” and “Buffy” and “X-Men” — that inspire their fans to read deeply into the story, and to imagine it extending in all directions. There are already thousands of “Death Note” fan-fiction stories on the Web, as well as mountains of fan-made art (and more than a few fan-made porn comics). Ohba and Obata drop dozens of hints about their characters’ motivations and history that they never fully explain; their readers have been more than happy to pick up the clues and run with them.

Part of the fun of “Death Note” for American readers is also the way that Japanese culture frames and directs the plot. Given the enormous success of the movie version in Japan, and the fact that the story isn’t tied terribly closely to the comics medium, I’ve wondered if a filmed remake set in America could work. I don’t think so. For one thing, the peculiar logic of “Death Note” depends on unbreakable social rules that aren’t nearly as stringent in the United States. Ohba’s characters — including the ones who are happy to murder with a stroke of a pen — repeatedly refuse to take obvious courses of action that would violate their socialization and moral codes.

Even the fatal notebook itself is regulated by a series of arcane mystical laws: the precise amounts of time its death sentences can take, the consequences of giving up possession of it, its relationship to the Shinigami. At worst, an American version of Kira, whacking the bad guys left and right without blinking, would just be John Rambo. Ohba and Obata’s story is just the opposite: It’s built around the ever-tightening knots of moral ambiguity that come with the power of judgment, and the creeping fear that free will may actually mean nothing and personal identity may be no more than a hollow mask.

That’s part of the problem. Over the last half century, comics culture has developed as an insular, self-feeding, self-loathing, self-defeating fly-trap. A lot of the people who hit their local comics store every Wednesday think of comics readers as some kind of secret, embattled fellowship. (That’s why most comics stores are deeply unfriendly places: everything about them says, “You mean you don’t know?” In some of them, even new pamphlets and books are sealed in plastic before they go out on the shelves; if you don’t walk into the store knowing what you want, you’re not going to find out.) It’s a poisonous mind-set for any number of reasons, the biggest one being that to enjoy a comic book, you either have to be a Comics Person or be able to explain why you’re not really a Comics Person.

That incestuous relationship between audience and medium has been encouraged by the big comics publishers. Mainstream comics pamphlets that are incomprehensible to anyone not already immersed in their culture aren’t just the standard now; they’re the point. If you pick up a story crammed full of inside references, and you’re enough of an insider to catch them all, you’re going to feel like it was made just for you, and it will intensify the sense of difference between you and “normal people.” (I know from experience; some of the comics I enjoy most are stories I can’t explain to a lot of my friends without using phrases like “pre-Crisis continuity” and “the 616 universe,” sounding severely schizophrenic, or both.)

Then there’s the name-and-class problem — not just the way the wretched term “graphic novel” has come to be a euphemism for “comics,” but the reasons it caught on. The origins of “graphic novel” are slightly murky — it seems to have been first used in the ’60s as a name for a potential “higher” form of comics, and it was popularized by Will Eisner’s 1978 book “A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories.” (As its title suggests, Eisner’s volume is not so much a novel as a collection of four not-all-that-long stories linked by their setting.)

But the “novel” part of “graphic novel” blots out the idea of short fiction and nonfiction — it’s odd to call, say, books of reportage in cartoon form by Joe Sacco and Ted Rall “novels,” or to suggest that memoirs by Alison Bechdel and Harvey Pekar are fictional, or that a collection of short pieces by Ellen Forney or C. Tyler is actually an extended, unified story. Given how long it takes to draw comics, the idea that the “novel” is the default form for the ones with high aspirations is also pernicious, because it suggests that shorter stories can’t be serious. (Working on short fiction or poetry carries about the same prestige as working on a novel, but if you’re drawing comics, that’s not the same thing as working on a graphic novel — which is why too many young cartoonists start in on novel-length pieces before they’ve developed storytelling skills.) “Graphic narrative” sounds like a euphemism twice removed from its source, and still has the unfortunate resonance of “graphic” with the way it tends to be paired with “sexuality” or “violence.” And “sequential art” sounds utterly arid.

The class implications of “graphic novel” almost instantly led to the term’s thorough debasement. As a ten-dollar phrase, it implies that the graphic novel is serious in a way that the lowly comic book isn’t. That, of course, leaves it open to being co-opted by anybody who wants to dress up their inept little drawings in a jacket and tie, which is why shitty forty-eight-page superhero stories started to be sold as “graphic novels” within a few years of the appearance of “A Contract with God” — 1983′s “Super Boxers” could have killed off the prestige of any term attached to the form.

Even so, to this day, people talk about “graphic novels” instead of comics when they’re trying to be deferential or trying to imply that they’re being serious. There’s always a bit of a wince and stammer about the term; it plays into comics culture’s slightly miserable striving for “acknowledgment” and “respect.” It’s hard to imagine what kind of cultural capital the American comics industry (and its readership) is convinced that it’s due and doesn’t already have. Perhaps the comics world has spent so long hating itself that it can’t imagine it’s not still an underdog. But demanding (or wishing for) a place at the table of high culture is an admission that you don’t have one; the way you get a place at the table of high culture is to pull up a chair and say something interesting.

So what do people who are committed to feeling like embattled outsiders do? Fetishize the object that symbolizes their difference from everybody else, naturally. The first wave of comics collectors were trying to preserve the past of their culture — to rescue the ephemeral pamphlets that made up comics’ fragile history from the quick and sure destruction they were intended for. They wanted to hold on to the pleasure their favorite comics gave them, and perhaps to understand how years’ worth of stories about particular characters might fit together into a grander narrative than even those stories’ creators imagined. There’s something honorable about that.

The preservation impulse turned into a collector’s impulse — what was once called “the nostalgia market.” Uncommon issues, naturally, were worth a bit more, then a lot more, then became the object of speculation. Publishers started to play on the idea of collectibility (in 1965, Marvel launched a series reprinting comics that had been published less than four years earlier, “Marvel Collectors’ Item Classics”). And people started to hoard new comics with an eye to their future financial value, not the future pleasure to be had from owning them.

There was once a kind of nerdy charm to the collectors who sought out old comics in “pristine mint” condition — cover still glossy, no dings or dents on the spine — and valued them according to their historical importance as well as their condition. First appearances of favorite characters were in high demand, and so were issues with well-loved artists, and a few more specialized kinks. “The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide,” updated annually, singled out horror comics involving the “injury-to-eye motif,” for instance.

Sometime in the ’80s, though, there started to be collectors who cared only about the investment potential of their comics and didn’t have any particular interest in reading them. I worked in a comic book store in the mid-’80s, and I loathed the customers who came up to the counter with their own plastic bags and acid-free cardboard backing boards to begin the process of preserving their investments right away. It was easy to spot the kids who would become those collectors, too: they’d look quizzically at the first issue of some new series, and ask, “What’s this going to be worth?” (I always told them that if I knew what things were going to be worth, I probably wouldn’t be working behind a counter.)

No one ever really made their fortune as a comics investor, but the legions of clueless speculators brought on a few boom-and-bust cycles in the industry. The comics speculation game got a slightly disgusting twist in 2001, with the launch of Comic Guaranty LLC and “slabbing.” CGC, as it’s better known, grades collectible comics for condition on a ten-point scale, then seals them between hard plastic slabs, so that they can never risk being damaged — or read-again: perfect financial fetish objects, entirely severed from their original aesthetic purpose.

That’s the sort of protective response that’s arguably appropriate for a singular object whose meaning as art can be experienced through clear plastic — something with what Walter Benjamin called “aura.” There’s something almost parodically wrong about seeing a piece of mass-produced entertainment framed like an irreproducible original. Naturally, the art-comics world mostly thinks of CGC and comics investment as beneath contempt — one piece of industry slang is “FYOV,” the “forty-year-old virgins” who fuel the collector market. (It was around long before the movie.)

At the same time, even within art comics, there’s a longing for the medium to get more of something that’s usually called “legitimacy.” There’s an element of comics culture, sometimes called (a little derisively) “Team Comics,” that gets excited whenever anything that looks like that acknowledgment or respect I mentioned above turns up in the outside world — a college class on the graphic novel, a Hollywood movie based on a graphic novel, a newspaper or magazine article about a cartoonist, somebody reading a comic book on a TV show. Different segments of Team Comics take notice if a TV character is reading a new issue of “Aquaman” or Lynda Barry’s “One!Hundred!Demons!,” but the principle is the same.

Both the “Team Comics” culture vultures and the alternate-cover-hoarding mavens are driven by the desire to turn their hobby into some kind of success or validation, whether through affluence or cultural power, and that impulse is directly connected to the class aspirations that afflict the entire medium. A lot of comics readers are unhealthily attached to the idea that everyone else thinks what they do is kind of trashy and disreputable, and that they have to prove their favorite leisure activity worthy of respect — to show the world that they were right all along.

It’s probably time to let go of that strain of earnest defensiveness. The snobbery of the rest of American culture toward comics is, if not entirely gone, dissipating quickly. In late 2006, Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel “American Born Chinese” was nominated for a National Book Award (in the Young People’s Literature category); when one commentator — Tony Long, a blogger at Wired News — opined that it shouldn’t have been nominated because it wasn’t prose, the comics world jumped down his throat. But it’s not as if literary culture revolted as one: Long appears to have been the only voice of dissent, and as clueless as part of his argument was (he noted that, well, he hadn’t actually read “American Born Chinese”), his point that Yang’s book was the wrong medium for its award was at least debatable.

What’s actually happening in culture at large is more like everyone trying to jump on the comics bandwagon — as a 2004 New Yorker cartoon’s caption put it, “Now I have to pretend to like graphic novels, too?” The medium’s new enemies are internal: the much less casual snobbery of the commercial mainstream and the art-comics world toward each other, and cartoonists’ nostalgic yearning for the badness of the bad old days. Reading only auteurist art comics is like being a filmgoer who watches only auteurist art cinema, but more than a few art-comics enthusiasts wouldn’t dream of picking up a mainstream comic book, even as entertainment. Likewise, plenty of superhero buffs can’t imagine being interested in some actionless black-and-white independent comic.

The most frustrating effect of the art/pop divide in comics, though, is nostalgie de la boue. A lot of the best cartoonists of the moment have picked up their visual vocabulary from the crap and hackwork of the past, and they’re fondly and unhealthily attached to it in a sentimental, self-loathing way, as a curdled by-product of the attachment they felt to it as children. You can find this fascination with the feeble, uninspired comics of the artists’ youth in Chris Ware’s “Rusty Brown,” in Dan Clowes’s “Ice Haven” and “Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron,” in Ivan Brunetti’s “Misery Loves Comedy,” and in a lot of other art comics, and it’s an utter drag. Robert Crumb is a particular offender: most of his early work riffed on the toothless pop culture of his youth, and his drawing and sense of humor still haven’t entirely let go of fifty-year-old issues of “MAD.”

In mainstream comics, nostalgie de la boue manifests itself as stories whose main point is to trigger nostalgic responses in their older readers — forgotten Golden Age characters being trotted out again and integrated into the tapestry of continuity; “retcons,” or “retroactive continuity,” meant to explain apparent contradictions in old comics or draw connections where there hadn’t been any intended in the first place. The inbred children of that approach are stories nostalgic for old retcons, attempts to recapture the past of attempting to recapture the past, even if it wasn’t that good the first time and was even worse the second.

Nostalgia, especially nostalgia for childhood, is a heavy burden for a medium to bear, and comics have been carrying it since the culture around them began to coalesce. The comics collecting market was called the “nostalgia market” at first; The Comics Journal was renamed from The Nostalgia Journal. The earliest books of essays about comic books were collections like “All in Color for a Dime” — reminiscences of early childhood experiences with funnybooks. As far as thinking about what makes comics interesting, though, nostalgia is poison — not just because it makes people overvalue the stories that fueled their childhood fantasies but because it makes them misunderstand the reasons why the good stuff or even the resonant crap affected them so strongly, and what exactly might have been messed up about it, or the way it made them feel the first time around.