From the dayglo blocks of colour exploding in front of your eyes to David Bowie’s thrusting stance, bursting out of the page, Reinhard Kleist’s graphic novel, Starman: Bowie’s Stardust Years, exploring one of the most important developments in popular music and performance art, is truly stunning. Not only does it look fantastic and read brilliantly, but is also inventively plotted with two timelines interweaving wonderfully throughout.

Bowie’s backstory is rendered in washed-out browns and blues and charts his journey from jazz-loving younger brother in a repressed family to meeting his twin influences of art and music in Andy Warhol and Lou Reed. But rather than presenting a book of two halves, Kleist jumps back and fore, juxtaposing a sepia suburban past with the technicolour triumph of Bowie’s original alter ego.

The impact of Ziggy Stardust on the minds and bodies of the British youth of 1972 is captured so well, with teams of people worshipping at the rock alien’s feet, unsure of what they are seeing, of where Bowie begins and Ziggy ends. And Kleist, of course, takes us all the way through from Space Oddity to that performance on Top Of The Pops to the moment Bowie does indeed end Ziggy Stardust and prepares for the next stage in his continual evolution. This book will help you know and see Bowie better than you could imagine, its art skilfully capturing the creativity and charisma of its mercurial subject.