Paris is a new four-issue miniseries from Andi Watson, but this time round he's enlisted another artist, Simon Gane, to provide the illustrations.

It's a 1950s love story set in - well, Paris, obviously.  New York art student Juliet is slogging her way through the rather rigid course and doing a bit of portrait painting on the side.  She crosses paths with Deborah, an English debutante who'd rather like to explore Paris properly, but instead is stuck on the social calendar prescribed by her overbearing family.  Sparks duly fly.

The key with these stories is to bring the characters to life, and that's where Andi Watson excels as a writer.  He has an eye for detail that makes every throwaway item go towards building his characters.  It's played as light comedy, but at the same time Watson keeps his characters thoroughly believable.

Gane is an interesting choice of collaborator.  Watson's own art tends to be extremely minimal, with sparse backgrounds, and rendering his characters with as few lines as possible.  It's sketchy but highly expressive.  Gane is a very different artist - while not exactly a photorealist, there's much more detail in his figures, and his art gives us a much more three-dimensional world. 

At several points, Gane is allowed to do full-page establishing shots, something that would be a waste of time with many artists.  Instead Gane packs the pages with detail, almost overloading the reader by throwing them into the scene.  It's fabulous stuff, and more than justifies the decision to give him the space. 

Andi Watson can always be relied on to deliver a good story, but the quality of the art here is a pleasant surprise as well.

Rating: A-

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