Oh, I really did want to like The Losers. In its comic form, by writer Andy Diggle and artist Jock, it was a lethal cocktail of action and politics, the two threaded together with real expertise as an all-too-plausible story about CIA skulduggery unfolds. And as I recounted recently, the opening pages of the screenplay by Peter Berg and James Vanderbilt were more than promising. So what went wrong?

The opening sequence was a clue. After admiring the tautness of the screenplay version, what’s onscreen adds an unnecessary layer of cutesiness — there were already kids involved, and their presence provided the protagonists with a chance to demonstrate they have a moral compass. That’s all that was needed. Adding aspartame (the nasty sweetener used in many diet products) to that scene underlines that the film comes to us direct from Hollywood, and director Sylvain White, whose CV also includes an installment in the I Have Some Idea What You Got Up To Last Summer sequence, and Stomp The Yard, in which a young dancer’s street moves save the day for…oh, it’s too depressing to contemplate.

Maybe I’m particular conscious of how this stuff works having seen it so expertly played up in Herzog’s superb Bad Lieutenant. In that review I drew attention to ‘maverick’ meaning ‘two days stubble and a preference for classic cars’, and that’s exactly what happens when grizzled team leader Clay gets to drive at some point when they’re after badboy Max, in an old yellow banger that petrolheads get excited by. Hey ho.

Which isn’t to say that The Losers isn’t enjoyable at some levels. In a fairly vacuous way it does deliver kinetic thrills that you’ve more or less seen before, with rapid action against colour saturated backgrounds across the world. And it does that thing which is hard to dislike where you get a group of guys under pressure and they get jokier the more life-threatening things become for them. There’s a level at which that kind of thing is fun — witness the end of The Italian Job, when the coach is perched on a cliff edge, and a laddish chorus of ‘This Is The Self Preservation Society’ kicks in. Mind you, that’s pointing to the limits of such bloky bonding in a gentle fashion. Push the matiness much further and it becomes like those hateful Carling ads, where groups of guys turn down chances for life-transforming experiences because they’re sticking up for the one who’s inappropriately dressed, smelly, or a BNP member.

Would it surprise you if I say all this is delivered to a soundtrack that appropriates some hoary old rock classics and repurposes them, as AC/DC’s back catalogue was utilised for Iron Man 2, and Glee does much more playfully in tv form? That kind of thing is par for the course these days, and that’s an expression that applies more generally to The Losers. It’s not that it’s an especially bad film, just that it brings nothing new to the table, which considering the source material did do — at least by mainstream comics standards (Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz’s Brought To Light is the real mould breaker, from some twenty years ago) — is a real shame.

Does every movie need to be innovative? Well, it’d be nice if more movies at least dabbled with originality. The biggest and saddest problem with The Losers is there seems little to distinguish it from the forthcoming big screen version of The A Team. And all the irony in the world can’t disguise the fact that the adventures of Mr T and his chums were a crock of shit on telly then, and if they’re any better now, it’s only because of the application of the same Hollywood blanderiser that’s taken the cojones from The Losers.

I never saw the first film with the title Bad Lieutenant , and director Abel Ferrera having declared that he wishes death for the team involved in the new one only makes me think that he’s a juvenile prick whose work I have no desire to see. Besides, having caught Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call — New Orleans, I cannot but see Nicolas Cage as synonymous with that job description, and director Werner Herzog as brilliant for having conjured such a magical performance from him. Without their alchemical teaming, the film would have attained nothing more than formulaic edginess, the kind of stuff that used to be called Tarantino-esque.

Would you believe a film about a maverick cop could be original? Terence McDonagh’s descent into crazed evil starts with something as innocuous as a bad back, for which he needs prescription drugs. At a symbolic level, the spine is how a man becomes and stays upright. Pretty soon the lieutenant has one shoulder hunched above the other, and is using whatever illicit drugs he comes across to keep the pain at bay, in the process foggying his perceptions and bringing out a more primal aspect of his character.

So far, so what? Well, it’s all about the execution. Cage is on fire throughout, every time you think he’s reached a new depth plummeting further still with an even more grotesque act, freefalling through badness and madness while still somehow remaining a cop smarter than his colleagues. In a medium where maverick generally indicates two days of stubble and a preference for classic cars, Lieutenant Terence McDonagh is a truly impressive creation.

But hey, is McDonagh born bad, or is he made that way by his environment? Post-Katrina New Orleans is the perfect setting for this litany of decay and corruption, the landscape itself traumatised. It’s notable that the one truly selfless act McDonagh does is to rescue a prisoner in a cell where rising riverwater threatens to kill him, if a poisonous snake doesn’t get him first, launching into the murky water even though he’s wearing $50 Swiss cotton underpants. That act of charity comes back in fascinating form at the film’s cryptic conclusion.

The snake is a good indication of life being out of kilter, and it’s joined by an alligator and an iguana that’s real to the drug-fuelled McDonagh but invisible to his colleagues. The wildlife could be read as a measure of the balance between man’s civilised world and the feral one that co-exists alongside it. In this regard it’s interesting that one of the more touching moments in the story is when McDonagh finds a murdered child’s pet fish, and the poem he wrote about it for class. That and the ‘treasure’ McDonagh found as a child — a tarnished silver spoon he believed to be part of a pirate horde — are where the film’s surprisingly tender heart lie.

But hey, this is Bad Lieutenant, and we want to see crazy stuff. Which we get plenty of, in achingly and darkly funny scenes: McDonagh doing a foulmouthed interrogation of a congressman’s senile mother and her devoted carer, while pulling the oxygen tube away from the former, has to be the most twisted thing I’ve seen in a good while. Believe me, there are plenty of other choices if that one doesn’t tickle your funny bone, and Nicolas Cage isn’t the only larger than life character: he is the most extreme figure in a world where extremes — of violence, of drug abuse, of venality — are the norm.

Anchored by Cage’s performance, this is very much a character-driven film. Sure, there is an interesting story too, about how the cop brings to justice a multiple murderer, and for all the fireworks that plot has farily rigorous attention paid to it throughout: kudos to scriptwriter William M. Finkelstein. But fundamentally this is a film in which an actor and director at the top of their games spur one another on to great things, and that’s always a cause for celebration.

Next Saturday afternoon at the Quad in Derby, Risaria Langley is offering people the chance to participate in a Constellations workshop. It’s a great opportunity for writers and filmmakers to take along the concept for a film and develop it using this powerful method.

Constellations uses non-verbal methods to showcase what’s at the heart of an idea, and give pointers on how to get from where you are to where you want to be. Used widely in Europe, businesses that have embraced Constellations include IKEA and the Dutch railway network.

Read more about Constellations at Risaria’s website. You can have your ideas explored for £50. Be part of the supporting group for £25. Or observe the process for £5. Only the fact that I’ve got a prior engagement in London has prevented me from attending — if you can get along, do so.

I once saw a homeless man take a shit outside Kings Cross railway station, and swear I was the only person who witnessed what was happening. There are bigger and badder examples of social invisibility. Every now and then — it happens often enough to remind you that it’s a depressing feature of human experience — there’s a news story about how people ignore a crime that’s committed in front of them they could have stopped, or leave an injured person to suffer while getting on with their own priorities.

High Plains Drifter is about the hell visited on Lago, a nowhere town whose marshal is killed by a trio of whip-wielding badasses, when they turn to Clint Eastwood for help. There’s an echo here of the Kurosawa samurai films that Leone’s westerns were in part based on, here tangled with a morbid religiosity as befits a nation initially colonised by godbotherers seeking a new home.

It’s a wonderful example of how to bring a sense of the fantastic into a film that begins in a heightened but essentially naturalistic mode. One of the problems with cameras is that what you put in front of them seems real. The flights of fancy possible on a theatre stage, where the audience is willing to suspend their disbelief, are less often dabbled with in cinema, which is a pity. High Plains Drifter, directed by Eastwood in 1973, shows how a story can gradually assume mythic proportions in a way that an audience can relate to.

Eastwood plays the drifter, who is all set to move on through Lago when he’s first offered the chance to take care of the bad guys. He changes his mind when he realises that they’re the same bastards that nearly killed him a while ago, and this will be a chance for payback. At which point, things get interesting…

The drifter takes over Lago, quickly establishing his authority over sheriff and mayor and appointing an overlooked dwarf to those roles in their place. It’s a fascinating insight into what happens when one man really does live according to his will — there’s no prevarication about the drifter, who when he sets about the task he’s been hired to do is single minded in achieving his objective. The reaction of Lago’s citizens is interesting: as Eastwood struts and demands what he’s been told is his due, the locals inhabit his aura, impressed but unable to duplicate his machismo for fear of reprisal.

At one level you could easily say this is a story about an alpha male let loose in a rural community which has lost its figurehead. But there’s much more going on than that: in preparing Lago to take on the villains, Eastwood turns the town into hell. When the trio do turn up, Lago is all crimson and flames, presided over the drifter who picks his enemies off one at a time, disposing each of them with the whips that they’ve tormented others.

Make no mistake, Eastwood is a bastard — but the people of Lago had it coming. The drifter is an angel of vengeance sent to punish them, whether by buying rounds of drinks at the bartender’s expense, or rape — he will stop at absolutely nothing in enacting his will. It’s visceral stuff, the rape in particular a shock for modern audiences, and the whole is undeniably powerful.

The picture of hell presented here makes the western’s flexibility clear. Some writers on genre reckon that the western (along with science fiction) is a setting rather than a genre, and that makes sense in this case at least. You could tell the same story, as alluded to, in a Japanese feudal setting, or make it a contemporary tale with gangster trappings. What matters is the heart of darkness beating at the story’s centre, and the commitment of writer (Ernest Tidyman in this case: he also created Shaft in the black detective’s prose incarnation) and director to realising a vision of hell for a secular audience.

I spent a while on the phone with a good friend who is confused and tearful because of a learning process she’s going through. In acquiring the skills she wants to help her develop as a person and succeed in the next chapter of her professional life, she’s increasingly aware of a tension between how she feels, and how she thinks she’s supposed to feel. According, that is, to the stuff she’s learning. To which there’s an answer, of course…the difference between theory and practice is that in theory, theory works. In practice, it doesn’t.

As in life, so in screenplays. Having waded through Syd Field and Robert McKee and Phil Parker and concluding that John Truby offers the most useful frameworks for tackling scriptwriting, I’m increasingly inclined to ignore the guidance of such gurus and set out in pursuit of my own truths.

Of course, I have a sound theoretical basis for such a stance. You may or may not be familiar with Alfred Korzybski. He was a very smart fellow who through studying the slippage between reality and representations of it coined the phrase ‘The map is not the territory’. Meaning, among other things, that words are not which they describe, and that however accurate a map is, it will inevitably miss details that would be pertinent to some observer or other.

As all this relates to screenwriting, Korzybski’s notion could be expressed thus: ‘the script is not the film’. How could it be? A script is a thing of around 100 pages. A film exists in time, and supposedly that time is linked to the number of those pages. I am less convinced of that linkage than I ever was, especially as I write my current script. After the opening sequence, the action moves to a mental hospital. The protagonist is passive, the camera showing us what he sees from a wheelchair as he’s pushed from the back of an ambulance into the lobby, and from there up to his ward. The journey happens in real time, and I know in my head that it takes longer than the pagecount suggests it should. The same applies to other sequences in the script, which are written concisely but I know to have the intended effect would take a longer time on screen.

That’s just one example of the disconnect between what’s on the page and what I hope to see on a screen one day. It’s also impossible to get across just how I want the sound design of the film to work. When the protagonist is in hospital, the building is having work done on it, and he interprets the sound of the construction as his psyche being drilled into and restored. I can point to that, but I know my description is only a very binary version of what I want to see and hear — if the effect is achieved as I’d like it to be, it will be a synaesthetic link between what the character perceives and what it means to him.

Structure is another area that’s mutable, never mind what McKee and the others say. Oh, there has to be a structure, there’s no doubting it. But it should flow from the natural shape of the story, rather than being a cookie cutter to pour a story into. Some stories are cookie shaped, and that’s fine. Not all of them are. And remember how arbitrary some of this stuff is — structure for tv writers is determined in large part by whether there are ad breaks in the show you’re writing. A straightforward commercial consideration dictates how you exercise your craft. Simple as.

Really, all structure is about is ensuring that the turning points in your story work effectively and build up to a satisfactory resolution. There may be three acts. But why not five? Or instead shape your story into ten minute sequences. There’s a way that will work for your story. Mine too. And my increasing suspicion is that the longer writers dwell on the formalities of all this, the less creating they get round to.

I’m reminded of an acquaintance, a talented musician who somehow never gets round to creating any actual music. First it was because he needed a bass guitar. Then because he needed a five string one. Then because he lacked home recording equipment. Finally, he has a studio of his own, with more kit than The Beatles had. And hasn’t produced a sound.

I’ve never warmed to Martin Amis. I’m not sure many people have. Oh, he’s without doubt a very clever man, but the few times I’ve tried reading his work I’ve bounced off the surface and been repelled by what I’ve sensed lurking deeper. But maybe that’s my fault for reading Dead Babies, which even a lot of his fans don’t like.

There’s also the business of his massively overinflated self-perception. He considers himself one of the few Men of Letters still standing, and the deal he has with his publishers reflects that preening arrogance: there is no way that publishers will recoup the money invested in him. He is a status purchase; the literary equivalent of a statue in the garden — probably one of those crass ones of a boy pissing in the pond, since Amis fancies himself as a bit of a webel.

All of which explains my ambivalence about Money, a two-part adaptation of which started last night on BBC2. And which was highly enjoyable — almost enough to make me pick up a copy of the book. Second hand, at any rate, preferably from a charity shop. Money is Amis’s take on what Thatcher did to Britain, and it has to be said it does so very well. Mind you, I was working in advertising in London when all this was happening, cutting my teeth as a copywriter, so there’s a lot for me to wince at as protagonist commercials director John Self implodes when his crass film project is picked up by an avaricious producer and his life falls apart on both sides of the Atlantic.

Self is a grotesque boor, beautifully played by Nick Frost, the only actor that writers Tom Butterworth and Chris Hurford had in mind for their adaptation of the book. He manages to make the loathesome porn addict, drug hoover and misogynist enjoyable to spend time with, and funny for good measure. Not that he humanises Self in the mawkish/Morkish way that Robin Williams can, but you could say he holds up a mirror to the audience, which serves a similar function without seeking to ingratiate.

With a name like Jeremy Lovering, the director was born to call the shots on a twisted satire of unpleasant appetites running riot, and he does so in style. Period details heighten the retro aspect with a touch of teethclenching for good measure. The visual design is strong, matched by an excellent note perfect period score from Daniel Pemberton that has echoes of the decade’s finest and trashiest tunes…it’s symptomatic of the time that many of them occupied both roles simultaneously.

Altogether then, I’m very pleased with Money. You could say it’s a bit glib, self-satisfied, but given both the source material and the author, maybe that’s to be expected. For all that, it sheds light on a decade that we can look at with new eyes in the wake of banking scandals and a new era of Conservatism, albeit hopefully toned down by Liberal Democrat influence. We shall see…and it would be good to see someone chart this new government and its Big Society with the same relish that Amis brought to Thatcherism.

All that said, there’s another take on Money that captures much of what Amis and this adaptation shoot for in just two and a half minutes. Seriously. The Flying Lizards version of the song of that name, known primarily for its Beatles version but originally by Motown mainman Berry Gordy, crystallises what those times were like in a brutal 151 seconds. Don’t believe me? Check out the video here, and see what you think…

City of God was an exhilarating and eye-opening immersion in the life of Rio de Janeiro’s underclass. I’d call it a landmark in Latin American cinema, only that sounds kind of pompous, and I don’t have anything like the grounding in Latin American film to make such a claim.

After some controversy among the team who created the film, its writer Jose Padhila went on to write and direct Elite Squad, which revisits the same territory — but this time through the eyes of Rio’s police. The film was a Golden Bear Winner at the Berlin Film Festival in 2008, but my response to it was muted compared to its vibrant predecessor.

That reaction is only partly due to the sense of familiarity that Elite Squad conjures. More, it’s to do with a question about what Padhila intends for the film, how that affects his choices as a writer and filmmaker, and how they in turn shape my feelings.

The symptom of the problem, as I perceive it, is a voiceover. It’s delivered by the captain of an elite police squad, who reflects on the careers of two young recruits to his team. Problem being that the voiceover tends to distance you from what’s happening on screen, and at times is frankly redundant. You can see what’s going on without having that information reinforced by dialogue, and for me at least it becomes more irritating still since the voiceover is intended to shape my emotional response, one that I was perfectly happy about and don’t want manipulated.

The other issue is more fundamental, and is why I call the voiceover a symptom rather than the problem itself. Padilha has chosen to make his film what amounts to a drama-documentary, one that stresses the facts of life within the police force. It’s a choice that sacrifices story and emotional impact for spoonfeeding the audience with admittedly fascinating information.

For instance, seeing the mechanics working on the police cars cannibalising a new vehicle to put parts into two others, tells you a lot. Finding out that the captain of the squad is on the take, and having the cheek to swipe the protection money that’s going his way to patch up the squad’s vehicles, is fascinating — but it doesn’t lead to any larger payoff. It’s the picture being built up that Padilha is interested in, making sure we get a sense of what this facet of reality is like.

And that’s fine, if you’re intent on using film as a polemical device. I have no problems with that. The history of cinema is littered with examples — Russian filmmaking is intricately tied up with propaganda, from the films themselves to the way they were shown on special cinema trains to audiences dotted about the vast Soviet Union. Then there’s the films made about the Royal Mail that are so celebrated for their visual style and John Betjeman scripts. And what is advertising if not a form of polemic? The industry has given us directors from Ridley Scott to Duncan Jones, and more are coming through all the time.

I’m not averse to Padilha’s stance with Elite Squad – it’s just that I find it a less powerful film than City of God since its function seems more to inform than to engage. And that seems to me to indicate a willingness to sacrifice the full potential of what film can do in favour of doing something more didactic and narrower in conception. Which is just one reason why directors are remembered for their feature films and not their party political broadcasts, however sincerely motivated the latter may be.

Earlier this year, I met a man who was interested in talking to me about a possible joint venture. He was forthright and ambitious, and we swapped contact details as you do.

A few weeks back, we talked, and it transpired he’s had quite an amazing and appalling life. He’d been through a hell of an ordeal abroad that had hit the news, and had political ramifications. And he wanted to capitalise on that experience, use it to catapult him into being a motivational speaker talking about what he’d been through, and have an accompanying book and so forth.

I was interested, but pretty soon alarm bells started to sound. He told me he’d been in America talking to someone who reckoned they could get him a book deal, and filmed a half hour video about his ordeal to get across to people in the book and film worlds what he’d been through. But he also said that he wanted to work with me. And that didn’t add up: if he’s got this American thing on the go already, what could I add to the party?

The ethics of the situation troubled me — I didn’t want to be working on something for him in Britain while he’d meanwhile got people working on his behalf in America. It seemed like he was prepared to work on projects with different partners, all developed from his personal history, and go with whatever worked, which wasn’t a situation I liked the sound of: who exactly had the rights to what, and how would they benefit from it? And that made me reassess the whole situation. It struck me that here I was dealing with an opportunist, and I didn’t want to be.

A few days after that scenario, I met up with a couple of women from a small but credible theatre company about the possibility of working together. We talked about one way to do so, and I made them aware that there were other ways forward too, which excited all of us. I set about developing four ideas for them in the next 48 hours — one of which was based on my experience with the chap I mentioned above, since the whole notion of turning your trauma into a career interested me, and his approach to it was fascinating.

As it turns out, the theatre people moved the goalposts about what they wanted, and didn’t go with any of the ideas I submitted. Hey ho. But I’m still fascinated by the guy I’d met, and at this point I’ve got a two page story outline and five pages of dialogue inspired by him. And I like what I’ve written, as does a filmmaker I’ve shown it to, and I’d love to do something with it.

At which point I remember that there’s a Channel 4 scheme running, looking for original 30 half hour dramas. It’s a project I’ve applied for unsuccessfully in the past, and ignored for a few years. This time round though, I reckon I’ve got something topical, with a dark satirical edge, that I’d love to develop. The requirement of the organisers is that the script can be shot in four days, and the piece would use only three actors…yeah, I’m going to give it a go. Plenty of time between now and the early June deadline to polish up a proposal.

All of which serves as a reminder that — like the title of this piece suggests — nothing is wasted. I could have dismissed the meeting with the tormented guy as a run-in with just another joker, albeit one who’d been through hell. Instead, I used it to inform an idea for a play. And now that’s been knocked back by the people who were potentially interested, I’ll remix it and submit it as a tv idea. If that doesn’t work, I can see it existing as a radio play or low budget feature even. No sense letting a good idea go to waste, and in this particular case I know the concept is worth sticking with until it finds its opportunity for expression.

Every project needs its own vocabulary, its own rhythm. By ‘vocabulary’ here I don’t mean the lexicon of words you use, though that can be part of what I’m getting at. Instead it’s to do with working out what goes into your story. Some of that will be clear if you’re working in a particular genre. Staccato sentences work well with thrillers, for instance. A touch of humour in a comedy helps remind you and readers that this is meant to be funny. And so on.

But what about when you’re not writing something that’s clearly one genre or another? Some people will raise their arms in horror at this point. But stories that cross over genres are increasingly popular, and for all the effort of people like Phil Parker in defining how genre splicing works, that kind of thinking tends to be based on perceiving the pattern in what someone else has already done. What if you’re doing something new?

You could argue that The Full Monty is just another personal drama with comic touches. And sure enough, there’ve been plenty of attempts to capture the lightning that went into that particular bottle. How many British films have been made in its wake that tread a similar path? From Billy Elliot to Kinky Boots, Calendar Girls and Brassed Off there’s been no shortage of films that attempt to pluck heartstrings with peculiarly British tales of ordinary people with a commitment to a very personal path in life.

Thing is, it’s uniqueness that matters, distinctiveness that truly makes an impact on audiences. If that wasn’t the case, then sequels would put as many bums on seats as their forebears. If people really valued consistency to that extent, they’d stay home and find it on the telly. If you coax an audience into venturing out to spend money on a cinema ticket, the least you can do for them is give them some kind of surprise.

Which isn’t to say that anything goes. This isn’t a plea to abandon narrative and play William Burroughs cut-up games with text. Though, that said…

I went to an extraordinary concert the other night. A Dutch lute player called Jozef Van Wissem, playing to just twenty or so people. He deserved an arena. There was nothing obscure about what he was doing except that he was doing it on an instrument that time has forgotten, though if you do think of the lute it’s probably because Sting recently got into them and did an album of tunes with one.

Anyway, Jozef is a very contemporary kind of lute player, who in looking for new repertoire to play uses the cut-up methods that Burroughs was known for to create new pieces based on the elements of old ones. Which all sounds very academic and mechanistic — except the effect is anything but. His playing is elegant, delicate, touching. Methods that seem calculated turn out to shed new light on old material. And that’s just as true with some of what Burroughs did, by the way — ‘experimental’ conjures up whitecoated scientists, whereas these experiments are all about connecting with creativity in new ways.

That attitude of experimentation is important. Yes, there are doubtless times that three act structure is the best way to express your story — it certainly is for some of mine. But on other occasions you have to reach for something that truly suits your concept, rather than trying to bang it into a readymade template simply because that’s what seems to be available. It’s not. As stories differ, so do structures. For every similarity there is between your tale and one out there already, there’ll be a difference that’s worth thinking about just as much. Oasis might have got the hang of some of what The Beatles did, but there is no possible way that Liam and Noel could have come up with what Lennon and McCartney created at their height.

You could say that Sweet Tooth starts where The Road ends. The latter story follows a father and son travelling through a post-apocalyptic landscape and finishes when the father dies and the son carries on with a new guardian he hopes he can trust. Sweet Tooth starts with a similar situation, the young boy in the charge of a mysterious man who promises a haven beyond the forest where he’s always dwelt, away from whatever apocalypse has visited the world.

Only, The Road and Sweet Tooth, for all their similarities, are worlds apart too. Cormac McCarthy’s book-cum-film is an established modern classic by an author at the top of his game. Jeff Lemire has made a small but perfectly formed impact in the world of comics with previous work for what amounts to a boutique publisher, and Sweet Tooth is his first ongoing series with Vertigo, part of Warner Brothers — he’s still in the early days of his career.

McCarthy’s tale dodges the label science fiction in the same curious way that 1984 does — it’s a fable for our times. But one clear choice by Jeff Lemire puts his work in the realm of the fantastic for most readers — he gives his young protagonist antlers. And — like Wolverine’s claws, or Dracula’s teeth — those accoutrements define him as being part of genre fiction as far as a general audience is concerned.

In practice, there’s clear tonal consistency between Lemire’s work here and his earlier more overtly naturalistic stories. The story is in large part concerned with childhood and family secrets, and the artwork and writing both border on the archetypal…or naive, depending how you want to look at it. At any rate, the young hero’s antlers in practice make this no more science fictional or fantastic than the stories of Ray Bradbury, another creator whose relationship with genre is interesting.

Though it’s set in the future, the story has the feel more of a fable than science fiction. And the pace and style further support that conclusion. You could sum up the story thus: ‘a mysterious stranger takes a young misfit from the forest where he lived with his father to a place described as a haven for those of his kind’. And that’s what happens, and takes fives issues of a comic to unfold.

Clearly, we’re involved in a different kind of storytelling than the model used by many comics creators. Titles like X-Men rely on information-heavy narratives with plenty of opportunity for drama and melodrama. They thrive on conflict and exposition, with the plot swinging this way and that following breathless revelation after breathless revelation. Which is fine when you’re in the mood for that kind of thing, just as Big Beat (remember that?) is fun to listen to when you’re wanting something kinetic and splashy.

Just as Frank Sinatra rewards a closer listening than Pendulum, so do some stories benefit from a gentler kind of attention. Sweet Tooth is the antithesis of the crossover event-driven comics mainstream, a small still pool to their raging New York intersections, and Out of the Deep Woods, the recently released first collection, is something to be relished when you’re in a mood for something subtle and atmospheric.

Oh, the story has its share of incident — and even gunfire if you’re concerned about missing that food group in your entertainment diet — but fundamentally it’s a very different kind of comic than the sort Mark Millar concocts mostly with the aim of getting another film deal. And that’s to be encouraged, at a time when so many people seem to be thinking of comics essentially as illustrated pitch documents that will secure them the attention of Hollywood.