Getting a handlebar on the detective story ... The Cross Bronx

Autopsies. Interrogations. Gangsters plotting a hit in the back room of a bar. Such are the central ingredients of a good crime story. These are all, however, static, wordy situations in plain rooms, and while that's OK for books and films, it's not much good for comics, which need visual excitement on every page. (Ninjas or robots if possible, but almost anything will do.) The defining challenge for most crime comics, therefore, is whether they can reconcile the demands of the genre with the demands of the medium. Even the best writers stumble.

Take Sam and Twitch: the Brian Michael Bendis Collection Volume Two. Bendis is now best known for hectic superhero comics like Ultimate Spiderman and New Avengers, but he got his start writing noir stories like Goldfish and Jinx. His magnificent five-year run on Daredevil with artist Alex Maleev - now collected in nine paperbacks, starting with Daredevil: Underboss - was theoretically a superhero comic, but far closer in tone to the Godfather trilogy or HBO's The Wire. In between, he also worked on Sam and Twitch, a disappointing spin-off from Todd McFarlane's long-running Spawn. Sam and Twitch are two police detectives who live in a New York that is mostly grey, brown, or greyish brown. They sit and chat a lot. They don't get into many fights. It might as well be a radio play. This is the fate that all crime comics should fear.

For Michael Avon Oeming and Ivan Brandon, the solution is supernatural. In their atmospheric The Cross Bronx, Rafael Aponte, another New York cop, questions both his vocation and his faith after a confrontation with a voodoo spirit of vengeance. And, thanks to her, Aponte's fruitless investigation is interspersed with vivid, bone-crunching set pieces.

For Warren Ellis, meanwhile, the answer is pacing. A case for Detective Richard Fell, star of Fell: Feral City, is always wrapped up within 16 pages, so the plots are packed in so tight they breathe an audible sigh of relief when you open the covers. But there's still room for all the imagination and black humour that fans have come to expect from the writer of Transmetropolitan and Planetary, plus a demonic nun who deserves her own TV chat show.

Life is easier on the other side of the law. Even a crack platoon of geography teachers couldn't make a boring story out of a heist gone wrong, so as long as you keep the action coming, you're a made guy. Ed Brubaker's Criminal: Coward and Darwyn Cooke's Selina's Big Score (collected in the hardback Batman: Ego and Other Tails) are both entertaining, but while the latter is so full of vintage neon glamour that it could be the definition of the word "caper", Coward is a great deal grittier. In both cases, it's the rich supporting cast of hoodlums that really makes the story - and they don't have time for much conversation.

Best new graphic novel: Ellis, like Bendis, is now best known for his Marvel superhero work. His Ultimate Galactus Trilogy, recently collected for the first time in an unwieldy 368-page hardback, is a work of such pure, relentless thrills that (as with Mary-Louise Parker, or the phrase "heist gone wrong") my heart flutters at the very mention of its name.