This is the redemption-at-Christmas-storyline popularised by Dickens and told in the unique way Morrison has of telling a story with heart while dressing it up in dirt.

Through Happys insistence on most peoples innate sense of goodness and Nicks cynicism declaring the opposite, we see Nicks story of a once proud and, yes, happy man brought down by the horrors man wreaks upon his fellow man as seen through the unfettered eyes of a homicide cop. The story hangs on Nick and Happys relationship and Morrison gives them some excellent back and forths with Nick becoming meaner the more Happy tries to buck him up giving them some great scenes. In Joe the Barbarian, Joe is a diabetic kid home alone who enters a fantastical realm featuring items from his house - but is it real or is he experiencing an insulin-deprived hallucination that will kill him? Similarly in Happy!, Nick doesnt see Happy the unicorn until hes pumped full of morphine in the ambulance - so, the reader wonders, is Happy real or a vision brought on by drugs? Morrison keeps things deliberately unclear and the reader guessing to the end. But can the upbeat and determined Happy convince the jaded, worn out Nick that not only is he real but so is the danger his friend faces - and can Nick save them in time from psycho Santa? Morrison wrote in his 2011 book Supergods, Things dont have to be real to be true and its a phrase that applies to a lot of what hes written in the last few years. So instead of being visited by three ghosts, a small blue goofy-looking unicorn called Happy shows up, the imaginary friend of one of the kidnapped children that only Nick can see.

Meanwhile down-and-out cop-turned-hitman and all-round human wreck Nick Sax (Saint Nick?) is the unlikely hero who must stop him. After several years of writing Batman and Superman comics for DC, Grant Morrison returns to the grimy, dark side of comics with Happy!, his first swear-filled, gory, and truly unpleasant comic since The Filth - and who better to join him than Darick Robertson, artist extraordinaire of the cheerfully vulgar Transmetropolitan and ultra-violent The Boys? Set at that most corporate of holidays, Christmas, the family-centric festivities are subverted in this comic that portrays Santa as a junkie paedophile whos been kidnapping and murdering children without getting caught.

Happy by grant morrison