From Brighton The Graphic Novel editor Tim Pilcher’s point of view, the amazing thing was no one in the city had thought to do something like it before.

“There was a strip in The Argus in the 1960s, which was a black-and-white short based around facts and figures, but there was no real narrative,” he says, following the launch of QueenSpark Books’s anthology, which covers almost 300 years in the city’s history.

“We have loads of comic creators in Brighton but nobody ever got round to it.”

Part of what makes Brighton The Graphic Novel so special is that most of the contributors to the 14 stories have never worked in the comic book format before.

“Only about five had done comics previously,” he says. “We reached out to a whole new group of people. Some had written for television or theatre, others were illustrators or animators.”

Perhaps that’s partly why Brighton The Graphic Novel has such a fresh feel.

Comic lovers might recognise the styles of one or two artists such as the amazingly talented Nye Wright, BN1 creator Paul Stapleton or Dundee Comics Prize runner-up Jaime Huxtable.

But Brighton The Graphic Novel benefits from a range of styles and storytelling methods, which reveal some of the city’s lesser-known history.

The inspiration for the book came from Bryan Talbot’s comic classic Alice In Sunderland, which told the story of his home city in a revolutionary way, weaving in the Sunderland Empire Theatre and Lewis Carroll’s most famous creation. Talbot returned the favour by penning an introduction to the book.

“Alice In Sunderland was one person’s vision of a whole city. We thought it would be impossible to ask one person to do it for Brighton,” says Pilcher, who adds that more inspiration came from the recent anthology Nelson, which saw a team of 54 artists telling one character’s life story year by year.

An open call went out to find contributors in January 2012, with Pilcher mentoring the writers, and fellow graphic novelist Paul Collicutt looking after the artists.

Pilcher says the team deliberately avoided the obvious Brighton history. There’s nothing about the creation of The Royal Pavilion, for example, but there is a tale about another, lesser-known 19th-century folly, The Anthaeum in Hove.

And the only Brighton bomb-ing involves the Odeon cinema during the Second World War.

Stories are penned about real Brighton characters, such as the late lamented old-school barber Mr Cooper, visionary inventor Magnus Volk and “Brighton’s angels” Dave Lynn, Lola Lasagne and Maisie Trolette rather than city celebrities Jordan or Fatboy Slim.

There is also lashings of Brighton’s darker side – sidestepping cliched gangster tales for creepy stories about Aleister Crowley and the mysterious Hand Of Glory used to lull the unwary to a drugged sleep.

The Argus even gets a look-in, with a sly dig at the newspaper’s reporting of the death of the world’s wickedest man, and an investigation into what happened to the West Pier.

The tales are bookended with stories of the sea, from the city’s origins as a base for fishing, to a modern day fantasy based around swimming.

All have background notes explaining the real history behind the stories.

“It’s a book for Brighton but also for people living outside Brighton,” says Pilcher, who has just released his own memoir, Comic Book Babylon, about working with Vertigo Comics in the 1980s and 1990s.

“The original idea was to have eight stories but we had so many great submissions it bounced up to 14. We could easily do two or three more volumes.

“Even if you think you know the history of Brighton, you are still going to discover something new.”

  • Brighton The Graphic Novel is published by QueenSpark Books, priced £15.99