Unless you are both blind and deaf, or possibly just exceptionally stupid, you can't have failed to notice Harry Potter. Irritating and overused as the expression may be, in young Harry Potter JK Rowling has created a cultural phenomenon. Jacket blurbs credit her with introducing a whole new generation of kids to reading, with crafting tales that appeal to children and adults alike, and with generally being pretty much the best thing to happen to the publishing industry in the last couple of years.

Of course, like all cultural phenomena these days, there's merchandise everywhere and a movie in production. Harry Potter is being milked like the bespectacled cash cow he is. So, because I like to feel like I'm up to date on the latest trends, I thought I'd take a look at this children's fantasy series, only a couple of years (or thereabouts) behind the rest of the population. I plead unreasonable bias. I read a lot of awful fantasy novels as a teenager, so I try and avoid anything that smacks of fantasy these days.

'Comics could learn a lot from Harry Potter.' But I've spent the last couple of days devouring the books. Make no mistake, devouring is the word for it. I really enjoyed them. Oh, they weren't challenging or improving or worthy, but they were fun. Lots of fun. If you've not read them, I commend them to you. The first three won't take you more than an hour or two each, and the last maybe twice that. You can afford the time. Give 'em away to a kid afterward if you find you're embarrassed to have them on your shelf, but give 'em a look.

Comics could learn a lot from Harry Potter. We've got more in common with him that you probably realise. The first thing that stuck was that this is serial fiction. Anyone who has read the books could tell you this, but I certainly hadn't seen any mention that these books were building to tell a greater story. Each of these books is just one issue in a greater Harry Potter saga.

Maybe Rowling planned it that way from the outset, maybe she didn't. It doesn't really matter. Each book builds on what has gone before, expanding elements mentioned only in passing in the previous novel, bringing back characters for earlier novels, slowly revealing the mysteries they hide, changing what we had previously understood about others. And they do it with an easy grace.

Of course it's easier for Rowling to do this than it might be for a comics writer. She has thousands of words every time, and can afford to use a couple of hundred recapping salient points for a new reader, as opposed to only having 22 pages a month. Even so, her books, in large part, stand alone, the serial aspect only coming about as you read more of them. I read these books out of sequence, and honestly didn't notice. What was the last on-going comic you read that you could do that with?

But then, comics are a lot more frequent. They've got (in some cases) decades of story to re-cap. Someone remind me why this is a good thing again?

'If only most superhero comics were as inventive.' But we have more than this in common with Harry. Perhaps the next most obvious thing is what some people refer to as the "sense of wonder". The spectacle. The stuff that makes us say "Wow!" under our breath. Rowling is at once formulaic in that we know exactly what to expect from one her novels - secrets, spells, flying and fantastic creatures - and yet endlessly inventive in what she supplies us with, never using the same trick twice, or always using a new twist.

If only most superhero comics were as inventive, rather than being content to trot the same old tricks out - partly, I think, because the root of the "wonder" in a lot of superhero comics is in the violence, and most superhero books either can't or don't show enough of it to allow for something new or amazing. Whether or not you think it appropriate or not is an argument for another time. The fact remains that most of the time, the moments that we're meant to look at Superman in wide-eyed wonder are when he's pounding the stuffing out of his villain du jour.

Another trick Rowling has also pulled off that most comics can't, is that she's actually managed to live up to that "all ages" label. How she's done it is a bit more problematic. At least part of it is, I suspect, simply a case of being in the right place at the right time. Enough dumb luck to get noticed by the right people. Another part of it, though, is that she doesn't pander to kids. She's not afraid of throwing in something a little frightening or adult, especially as the books have moved on. Maybe it's not mature-themed stuff. We're not likely to see Potter's friends losing their grip on reality and turning to drugs, but at the same time, death is real in Potter's world, and it comes to the least deserving. The innocents are often made to suffer horrors through no fault of their own. Bad people go unpunished.

How often do we see that sort of thing in the black-and-white morality of the superhero? Hell, comics don't even have the balls to use the word "death" in a comic aimed at kids. In Jill Thompson's LITTLE ENDLESS STORYBOOK they refused to allow her to openly name Death of the Endless, and wouldn't even publish it without a "For Mature Readers" warning, although they took a big, brave risk and added "of all ages" to the end of it.

'Our heroes need to grow and mature.' But here's the best lesson that Harry Potter can teach us: he changes. His relationships with the other characters develop and move on. Time passes. This is far and away Rowling's best trick. She knows that the people reading her books (who perhaps started out having the first one read to them rather than reading it themselves) will be getting older, and as they do so, the hero that they're meant to identify with has to change as well.

From being frightened of his strange new environment and worrying about making friends or being thought of as stupid in the first novel, in the fourth book Harry is much more confident, facing more complex dilemmas, where the emphasis has shifted from what he must to do to save the day to the question of what is the right thing to do. Most astonishingly of all, by the fourth book it looks like Harry might be on the verge of discovering girls. Harry is growing up. And as he does so, his world is becoming more serious and a little darker. I don't want to spoil the series for you, but suffice it to say that I didn't see all of the ending of the most recent novel coming.

I've been saying for years that comics need to do this. Our heroes should not exist trapped in an artificial never-changing present, they need to grow and mature if they're going to remain socially relevant.

Marvel may be taking the right kind of steps with their "Ultimate" line. They're making their flagship characters relevant to youth again, by retelling their origins in a modern world. That's a start. But I fear they'll fall into the same trap they did last time. The Peter Parker of ULTIMATE SPIDER MAN will be more or less the same in two years time as he is now. (Given the slow pace at which Bendis is telling the story, he probably won't have had time to age more than a week or two.) This is too slow. They need to age at the same rate as the people who are reading them if they're going to keep the readers interested.

Alasdair Watson is the author of the Eagle Award-nominated RUST.

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