THE comics-obsessed Eddie Argos, singer in alt-rock titans Art Brut, once wrote a song about DC Comics specifically in the hope that it would get him an invite to DC Comics.

And it worked, the jammy git.

Fast forward a few years, and the kitchen sink chronicler has made his own contribution to the genre he loves so much.

Written by Argos and illustrated by Steven Horry, Double D (pictured) is a comic about a slightly chubby schoolkid who develops superpowers after being humiliated by his vindictive PE teacher.

In a nice nod to the banality and boredom of a suburban upbringing, our hero’s powers allow him to leap over garden sheds in one mighty bound, or lift a sensible medium-sized car above his head.

But he struggles to find the kind of super exploits to truly test his super powers in his thoroughly less-than-super hometown.

With a visual style reminiscent of Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s Phonogram series, Double D has its moments.

But the narrative is on the ponderous side and the dialogue doesn’t zing in the way you’d expect from a man who has written some of the most wry, bittersweet indie songs of the past decade.

I suppose I was expecting a comic that encapsulated teenage emotions as perfectly as his band’s Emily Kane — “Every girl I’ve seen since looks just like you when I squint” — which might have been asking too much.

This in turn got me thinking of artists with, as Bjork and the Sugarcubes put it, “great crossover potent” but whose move from one cultural form to another didn’t work out quite as intended.

You could include Bjork herself in that, following her disastrous though compelling turn as the blind heroine of Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark.

Part of the blame could be placed at the door of the Danish director, whose treatment of his female stars can verge of cruelty at times. But Bjork, like Bowie, is no actor and she has wisely focused on music in the years since.

And I’m still recovering from Kylie’s appearance in a Doctor Who Christmas Special a few years back.

The vivid vignettes and cruel, twisting narratives of Morrissey’s songs with the Smiths and as a solo artist led many to believe the Mancunian miserabilist’s move to novels would be an inevitable triumph.

Alas no. His first novel, List of the Lost, was met with widespread derision — “verbose, tangential, unfocused” was one of the kinder verdicts — and the book subsequently triumphed in the Bad Sex Awards for allusions to a character’s “bulbous salutation.”

Autobiographies we can accept, because pop stars’ lives are ripe material. But aside from Half Man Half Biscuit’s Nigel Blackwell, master of the song-as-short-story genre, I can’t think of many rock stars I’d like to see embrace the literary life.

Let us instead pay tribute to The Auteurs’ Luke Haines, who this year produced a psychedelic cook book. A heavily offal-dominated cook book.

It was a natural progression for an artist who used to have a Kendo=Nagasaki lookalike hand out liver sausages at his gigs.

In the other direction, Michael Moorcock was rather more successful in channelling his rich and odd world into lyrics for songs by Hawkwind and the Blue Oyster Cult.

Comics legend Alan Moore had a local band in Northampton called Emperors of Ice Cream who, he admits, ripped off the Velvet Underground.

It was perhaps expecting too much to hope a genius in one form could easily make the leap to a very different discipline.

So Eddie, I love you.

But I should probably just listen to your comic’s soundtrack album instead.

By James Walsh