Electrocigar.

It has arrived.

This thing has a main body the size of a half corona, not counting the mouthpiece. Overall, six inches long and half an inch thick. It looks like a cigar from a distance but close up, it looks like a piece of oak dowel. Doesn't matter, the antis only see what they want to see. In fact, if you went around with a piece of oak dowel in your mouth with the end painted red, I'll bet you'll get told not to smoke.

In fact... if you had a little bit of wood dowel painted to look like a cigarette and had it in your mouth in the pub... but that's the germ of an idea for a whole new game.

Smoking? It has the same cigar fluid as the one used by the Titan but it has a super-size cartridge and a heater you could use to melt Michael Jackson's nose. The taste is the same as the Titan in the cigar mode - cigarish, but not as good as the real thing. Still, all ahead fun factor five, Mr. Scott, because dropping a cigar this size into your shirt pocket might even get them reaching for the fire extinguishers. It feels like a cigar, which puts it a bit above the Titan in cigar mode because that gives the rather odd impression of smoking a cigar the size of a cigarette.

Plus point? The size of the thing. It looks like something you'd see hanging out of Winston Churchill's face before the ASH airbrush crew got to work. Nobody is going to mistake this for a biro.

Minus point? The size of the thing. You have to suck like a convicted MP in the showers to get it properly under way. Still, it's good lung exercise, something the antis never get. Regular smokers of large cigars might find this easier than we puffers of Satan's little rolled-up contracts. Occasional cigar smokers like me might find it an effort. Not enough to hurt, but a different approach to smoking.

Smoke rings - yes. But all the Electrofags can do smoke rings. The huge cartridge does produce a good belt of 'smoke' so the smoke rings are (purely subjectively) better.

Will it forever replace real cigars? Not for me. However, decent sized cigars are really only smokeable at home. They do produce vast amounts of smoke and even the most tolerant non-smoker would struggle to keep their smile if you lit a half-corona in their house. Like all Electrofags, the cigar version leaves no residual smell.

I smoke cigars mainly at Christmas and on National No Smoking day. A pack of five Henri Winterman's half-coronas will last several months. Cigars require time to smoke, they aren't a quick job like a cigarette, you need time to relax and enjoy them properly.

Verdict - an interesting and potentially very fun addition to my electrosmoking and mind-game arsenal. There used to be an electropipe too but that seems to have faded away. It still won't stop me smoking the real thing, especially as little green shoots of future doom have sprouted and will soon be big enough to move to the greenhouse and also because my cigar intake was less than ten a year anyway. But any new means of meddling with the minds of the mindless is always welcome.

Oh, and I also bought the little bits of gadgetry that fit on the end of Titan Electrofag batteries and turn them into a mini-light or a laser pointer. Multi-purpose smoking devices. Even Batman didn't have that.

Marvel needs a new hero. Electrosmokeman's day must surely be near.