Fifty-four cooks create a surprisingly satisfying broth in this entertaining graphic novel, which follows a woman called Nel from her birth in 1968 through 70s powercuts, 80s raves and 90s teacher-training courses to the present day. The authors, including Posy Simmonds and contributors to the Beano and Hellboy  each take a year and an episode, creating a lively document of recent history and Nel's arty, troubled life. It is weakest when it crowbars in contemporary references (in one Madchester-drenched moment our heroine moans about "crappy Mondays" at the house of a "bloke called Gerald"), and at its best when the writers engage with Nel's emotions and pluck away at each other's threads, as when Gary Northfield paints a funny, poignant childhood dinner, or Kristyna Baczynski builds an oddball memorial to Nel's grandma. There's great fun to be had flicking through its pages, watching styles and genres twist and turn. The profits are going to Shelter, but this bold work is worth reading for its own merits.

This is a wonderful idea: Rob Davis, the artist and writer whose excellent graphic novel adaptation of Don Quixote came out earlier this year, and Woodrow Phoenix, the man who created the acclaimed Rumble Strip, have got together with the team at Blank Slate Books to produce a beautiful and unexpectedly powerful volume, showcasing no less than 54 of the most talented British comics artists around. Even better, all the profits from the first 4,000 copies of Nelson will go to Shelter, the housing and homelessness charity. If you're interested in discovering new voices (though I should say that Posy Simmonds also performs a cherishable cameo), and want to do a little bit of good in the process, then this is for you.

Nelson is a collaboration, by which I mean that those involved have produced one long novel, rather than a series of short stories. Davis's idea  and it's a good one  was to ask each of those who agreed to take part (they were rounded up via Twitter) to tell the story of a single day in a different year in the life of the character they would create together: a woman named Nelson, after her father's favourite pub, who was, they decided, born in 1968 (there being more artists than years, a couple have done different days in the same year). The result is much more than an elaborate game of consequences. Davis and Phoenix, as editors, obviously kept a close eye on the narrative. Though the vision and style of each artist is different, the baton is respectfully received, the story consistent and knowing. Yes, you will need to concentrate: the physical appearance of Nelson, her friends and family sometimes changes dramatically from year to year. But her essence remains the same. She is a clever, funny, difficult woman and, as she grows up, the reader worries for her. Will she ever be happy? Will she ever allow herself to be loved? Or will the painful legacy of her lost twin and her absent father  who may, she discovers, have ended up on the streets  finally crush her?

I loved this book. I liked the collision of styles and moods, from the Charles Burns-like attitude of Adam Cadwell and Faz Choudhury to the silent-movie simplicity of Jon McNaught and Kristyna Baczynski (though it also seems wrong to pick out names in such a galaxy of stars; the book has no weak links). But more than this, I liked the story. Nelson is only a year older than me, so the nostalgic bits  her Space Hopper, her passion for Duran Duran, her delight at the invention of the fax machine  were direct mailshots. I remember wondering how my family would survive the coming nuclear winter (Nelson's father obtains a "Protect and Survive" manual from the local post office), just as I remember I-Spy books on long journeys, and the Topper nestling alluringly between Twinkle, Mandy and the Beezer at the newsagent. The book has a heartfelt quality  a stark truthfulness  that you would never have predicted, given the circumstances in which it was born. These 54 artists have between them cleverly pinned a life to the page: optimism turning first to disappointment, and then, finally, to a new and rising contentment.

Nelson Week, a series of events to mark Nelson's publication, runs until Friday