And sometimes you just want to say, "look, this is really great. It made me laugh. You should try it." But I'm guessing that's not enough context here.

So. Jillian Tamaki. She's a Canadian cartoonist. With her cousin Mariko she created the rather lovely graphic novel Skim and the award-winning This One Summer (which, shamefully, I've yet to read). She does illustrations for newspapers and magazines and book covers for publishers (look out for her design for Penguin Canada's Obasan which is particularly gorgeous). And now she's gathered together strips from her webcomic Supermutant Magic Academy into a book. And it's very good.

I guess you could call it a YA book. It's a school story. The school is a little bit Hogwartish, a little bit Xavier School for young mutants. The kids learn spells. They have superpowers (some of them good, some of them a bit naff).

But really it's not a book about their difference, it's about their sameness. It's a book about teenage-ness, about finding your place in the world, about fancying boys and/or girls and wondering what you are going to do with your life and whether any of it is worth the effort.

"Would any of you like to share your career aspirations with the class?" one of the academy's teacher asks at one point."Jim?"

"I dunno," Jim replies, "to be honest, I was just hoping to be able to keep the demons away …"

I said it was funny, didn't I? I want to say the obvious. The obvious is: "imagine the young Woody Allen had been hired to write New Mutants." It's in that ballpark. And so characters worry about sex and existentialism, about who they are and how they should present themselves. They know life - even superlife - is essentially absurd, but, you know, hormones are hormones.

As Sean T Collins noted in his review in The Comic Journal, Tamaki "addresses sex mainly by depicting kids experimentally trying to establish sexiness". There is a lot of adolescent role-playing going on here. And it's full of teenage superiority and uncertainty. That all feels right (although I am a very old man and it's been a long time since I was a teenager).

There are a number of recurring characters. Wendy, a cutesy fox girl, her friend Marsha who holds a torch for Wendy but can't bring herself to say anything. The Everlasting Boy (who is immortal basically)and Frances who's going to turn into Bikini Kill's Kathleen Hanna or YBA Sarah Lucas when she grows up. Others are more throwaway. Good for a gag or simple visual poetry, like the boy who is an old man by the time he gets to the bottom of the slide.

Supermutant Academy, I'm guessing, is very much a left-hand activity for Tamaki. The art is choppier and rougher than anything in Skim. The strips are episodic, often one-pagers designed to get to the punch line. Some of the strips are less finished than others as if Tamaki decided 'that'll do, that's fine. That gets the idea across."

And yet the whole thing gathers a momentum and depth without ever losing the humour. It even climaxes with traditional fantasy tropes. An apocalyptic prophecy. A monster cat thing. Mortal danger.

But Tamaki doesn't take that stuff seriously. She recognises that for a teenager fitting in and standing out are far bigger challenges.

So where does that leave us? Saying, look, this is really great. I laughed a lot. You should try it.

Supermutant Magic Academy, by Jillian Tamaki is published by Drawn & Quarterly on April 28.