Philip Pullman, the best selling author of the fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials, will be turning his talents to writing a new comic strip. The new strip, The Adventures of John Blake will appear weekly in a new manga-inspired comic, the DFC. Working together with illustrator John Aggs the strip will be distributed monthly by mail.

Pullman was a big reader of boys comics when he was a child “I was brought up on comics like the Eagle, Wizard and Beano, though not so much Dandy, this is what I want to bring back to today’s youngsters – good storytelling, but with more adventurous and original illustrations.”

Pullman will return to writing novels in 2009 with the children’s story The Book of Dust. He has not discounted a return to the graphic novel after completing the novel, saying "Yes, I might do a graphic novel myself after that".