Philip Pullman tells Nicolette Jones about his new graphic novel set on the high seas – and why he’s leaving his ponytail to the nation

In May 2017, Philip Pullman’s new graphic novel, The Adventures of John Blake: the Mystery of the Ghost Ship, illustrated by Fred Fordham, will be published in one volume by David Fickling Books. But for those who cannot wait, the novel will appear in weekly instalments in The Phoenix comic starting on May 13.

Pullman was a fan of comics as a boy. He loved The Eagle, home of Dan Dare and “Luck of the Legion”, and American comics featuring Superman and Batman, which he encountered when his family lived in Australia in 1956. These were then hard to come by in the UK, where parents and teachers were frightened off by the scaremongering of Fredric Wertham’s 1954 treatise The Seduction of the Innocent, which identified comic strips as a cause of juvenile delinquency.