I’ve several times received praise from actresses for the female characters I’ve written without being sure why such positive feedback is merited. And then I look at scripts which have made it to the screen and find myself bewildered that the writer has seemingly never met a woman in his life.

One of the primary problems is that many writers continue, even in the 21st century, to define women by their relationships with men. They are wives, lovers, mothers. Which for a start omits some of the more interesting relationships out there, like colleague, employer, sibling or rival.

I suspect part of the issue is the majority of male writers don’t consider the issue of gender with regard to their male characters. ‘Bloke’ is the default setting for so many of the men who appear on screen. So they only stop to consider sex and gender when it applies to those with a different chromosomal arrangement. And particularly when it relates to the fantasy casting of a woman they fancy.

Never mind that writers supposedly have some insight into human character, a claim which is laughable when you consider how many men write women. Insight into character can only come about through a sincere interest in people, and preferably across the contexts they operate in and not merely in their capacity as sex objects.

Fortunately there are exceptions. CCH Pounder’s character in The Shield, Claudette Wyms, is a nuanced portrait of a woman who seeks the captaincy of the police station she’s devoted to so she can clean up its corruption and serve its community. Only, the part was written for a male actor. Pounder loved the character though, and insisted that it wasn’t retooled for her, and the result is a crackling three dimensional performance that reaches parts most actresses don’t get the opportunity to explore.

Soap operas, which have a higher female audience, are notable for some great women characters. But I’m always curious about whether that starts with the writing, or the actress. June Brown’s portrayal of Dot Cotton in Eastenders is a thing of wonder, and some of the show’s best episodes have featured her with just one or two friends, allies, and rivals, such as ones years ago when there were three-handers with Dot, Ethel, and Lou.

But still. I think of the women I know, and struggle to find fictional counterparts as fascinating. My mother, who went through a traumatic divorce to start a new life running a launderette in a rundown part of Birmingham where the most decent people around her were the out-and-out criminals. An ex who has reinvented her career once to do better for herself, and is in the process of doing so again so that how she earns her money is a better reflection of the person she is. An acquaintance who lives in a field that’s literally off the beaten track, in a caravan with her children, raising horses to sell to families who’ll never understand them the way she does.

I’m loathe to subscribe to any particular ideological take on writing, but it seems to me that as long as many male writers continue to perceive women in the role of virgin, mother or whore, that audiences will continue to suffer such stereotypes in every form of popular fiction. Good actresses can rescue bad scripts: imagine what they could do if they were given a good one.

It’s not all bleak of course. Helen Mirren has found some notably excellent writers on Prime Suspect and in The Queen. Meryl Streep dazzles in everything I’ve seen her do, Julie and Julia being a particular recent favourite. And Jodie Foster continues to make shrewd choices, bringing an extra dimension to what could be formulaic roles in thrillers like Panic Room, and developing projects of her own with more personal passions.

It’s amazing what you can do with words and pictures on a page. Comics have such potential, and creators are still finding new ways to work with the way that images and text combine. Sure, there are some tried and tested means of using the form, but what’s exciting is that there is still room for new methods, new effects.

I’d been planning to read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home for a while, having read lots of praise for this autobiographical graphic novel. I’m glad that I picked up my copy in a charity shop for what I typically spend on a latte, as I’ve rarely been so annoyed by a text. It purports to be a graphic novel, and there’s no shortage of blue chip reviewers singing its praises, but I’m sceptical about how many of those who love it so are truly readers of comics.

Bottom line is that Fun Home is not a graphic novel. It’s an illustrated memoir, with the emphasis on the text. There are pictures, sure enough, but they support and amplify details of what’s there in the form of words. Which in my eyes counts as entry level stuff, and in no way merits the kind of plaudits this book has got.

Sure, it’s welll-written. No disputing that. But in no way does Alison Bechdel explore the possibilities of the comic form. No artful or ironic juxtapositions of form and content here. This is an illustrated memoir, no more and no less, which may help explain its popularity with audiences less used to the beautiful possibilities available to graphic novelists. If you really want to see how this kind of stuff should be done, check out Eddie Campbell’s beautiful mixed media adaptations of Alan Moore’s autobiographical writing The Birth Caul and Snakes and Ladders. Compared to those, Fun Home is child’s play, and the work of a bookish and conventional child at that.

Where Alison Bechdel makes the mistake of treating art as a mere adornment of text, Christos Gage pursues another dead end in Area 10, a collaboration with artist Chris Samnee for the Vertigo Crime imprint. Gage has written for tv and film, and Area 10 ultimately comes across as an illustrated screenplay.

Sure, it’s a more interesting choice than the static one made by Bechdel, but it’s a no less limited approach to the exploration of the possibilities of the comics medium. It’s a well paced thriller, and its twists and turns are straight out of a skilfully executed three act structure…but that’s all it is.

To really make the most of what can be done on a page with words and pictures takes more thought than these creators were inclined to apply. Which is fine in terms of not scaring the horses, but fails to really get to grips with a medium that offers so much to the curious creator.

Take a look back to the roots of comics, and the amazing work of George Herriman in the newspaper strip Krazy Kat. Unconstrained by knowledge of the medium because he was too busy inventing it, Herriman’s ability to juxtapose the different elements of a page led to the creation of paper poetry admired by James Joyce and Picasso among others, while still being accessible to a mainstream audience.

Looking at the majority of comics these days, it’s clear that most creators have retreated from risk and stayed with the clearly depicted linear narrative in their pursuit of a means to get by. Which makes some sense, but makes most comics fairly unsatisfying to read. Books and films are wonderful media in their own right, rather than a role model for comics to aspire to. Thankfully, there are creators who have a fascination with what they can achieve with the means at their disposal, and recent years have seen the rise of Chris Ware, whose award winning Jimmy Corrigan is a far deeper and broader example of what can be done in two dimensions than the limited horizons demonstrated by Fun Home and Area 10.

According to Phil Parker, who thanks to his involvement with the UK Film Council on the training side had the inside track on these things, millions of pounds was poured down the drain on developing feature film scripts by tv writers from the mid-nineties and not a single film was made as a result. As well as adding further weight to the argument that maybe losing the UKFC is not such a bad thing, that statistic also points to a significant difference between film and tv.

For the most part, tv isn’t about much beyond providing surface level distraction for people tired after their working days and not wanting to be confronted by anything that might make them think. Popular drama presents characters who could more or less be ourselves dealing with the same sort of issues that we get to tackle on an exciting day. Order is inevitably restored by the end of shows like The Bill and Casualty, and if there is any upset it’s the sort that’s faded by the time the credits roll and the next programme starts.

Only in the hands of a skilled writer like Dennis Potter, Paul Abbott, or the team who put together American shows like Six Feet Under and The Shield does tv tend to have any real emotional and intellectual heft, and all the above are the exception rather than the norm.

Film though, is — or can be — a different matter. Writers have the opportunity to explore a knotty issue that concerns them for ninety minutes or more, and even average box office fodder can reveal layers you’d be amazed to discover in much of what washes up on the small screen.

Take Guy Ritchie’s version of Sherlock Holmes. At first glance it’s a geezerish twist on Baker Street’s most famous resident, with the great detective frequently bare chested and indulging in fisticuffs with a variety of ne’er-do-wells. Scratch the surface and there’s a lot more going on — which is what I’d hope for given that five writers are credited with devising and scripting the screenplay.

A couple of — related — points demonstrate the kind of thinking that went into making Ritchie’s Sherlock the most interesting film of an otherwise overhyped career. First, what’s the essence of Holmes? Well, the detective’s much-vaunted intellect has to be a big part of the answer to that question. So, one thing that makes sense is to pit him against a non-rational opponent. Which is what we get in the form of a seemingly resurrected aristocrat who allegedly traffics with demons.

Think bigger. OK, Holmes is a fin-de-siecle hero, and what characterises the spirit of his age? Well, it’s a time when Darwin and Marx have advanced the cause of intellect, both thinkers challenging the hold of religion and superstition. Too, the Industrial Revoluition has changed the lives of all, whether through uprooting rural dwellers to cities, or changing family structures for all.

So, how about an antagonist that embodies the forces of change sweeping through the country as it edges towards the twentieth century? Sounds good, and that’s exactly what the writers came up with. The necromantic aristo is emblematic of the shift from a spiritual to a scientific worldview, claiming supernatural powers with which he intends to acquire real political clout. And he nearly does too, brewing up a venomous toxin intended to despatch any MPs who are against him, and lying that the forces of darkness are involved.

It’s all neatly done, and with the smokescreen of a confrontation on an unfinished Tower Bridge, order is restored in the nick of time and a sequel involving Moriarty neatly set up. The alert viewer will note that the depiction of the baddy very much prefigures the rise of fascism in the twentieth century, the sort of effect a writer (or writers) can pull off when given a bigger canvas to work on than those presented by a witless tv soap.

Where film writers can shape their work with theme, tv writers are often limited to a few building blocks which need to be put in different permutations again and again for there to be any sense of novelty for the viewer. Which isn’t intended to be a sleight against those who write for tv, but an observation about the effect of working for a series script editor who is up against all kinds of constraints. And while there is tv that challenges my generalisation there, I’d on the whole much rather write for film because of the scope it presents.

There are some details that cement a film to a particular culture or worldview, even if there was every intent on the part of the filmmakers to create something for everyone. In the delightful Toy Story 3 it’s the fact that, in climbing up to a toilet seat, one of the characters first puts a piece of toilet paper onto it. There’s something very American about that, an exaggerated concern for health and hygiene that comes from a country where advertisers have succeeded in making the public paranoid about even the possibility of germs.

Often, it’s what goes into us rather than what comes out of us that makes for culturally revealing film scenes. Where would Italian American family gatherings be without lavish attention to the food prepared by mama? Meals are part of the fabric that binds families of all sorts together. There’s a warmth and pervasive reinforcement of social roles with Italian American eating in particular — Scorsese’s films are full of that kind of detail. It’s easier to get someone to do a hit when you’ve filled them with home made pasta and a fabulous ragu first.

Food is universal. Seeing how people eat and drink helps to understand even supposedly alien cultures. Tampopo is the glorious story of a Japanese widow who is aided in her quest to run a successful noodle bar by a truck driver and his friends. Food is part of sex play, and part of everyone’s routine — an old lady becomes the bane of a shopkeeper’s life by the simple act of squeezing his vegetables.

When a filmmaker wants to convey the otherness of a non-human species, food is a common first port of call. In Dark Crystal, looming gothic creatures impale small scurrying ones with surgically precise cutlery in a banquet scene. The prawn-like aliens in District 9 have a thing for cat food. And leave it to the Klingons to drink blood wine accompanied by a side of gagh: living worms.

Food is just one signifier that says a lot about a culture. The Market: A Tale Of Trade depicts what happens when a Turkish would-be wheeler dealer tries to get into the mobile phone market in the nineties as the first network reaches his area. There’s a great dichotomy depicted by two simple scenes: an old lady determined not to let phone engineers plant an ariel on her land, and the hero — unconvinced about phones at this point — being swayed by greed as he hears how young people in other parts of Turkey are going crazy for them.

A film about someone cheating on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? could have been made about Major Charles Ingram, and it could have been an interesting tale full of suppressed greed and very British stuff about class. Setting it in Mumbai was a stroke of genius, and Slumdog Millionaire became a much bigger success than a British equivalent could ever have been, for the way it opened up contemporary Indian society to a mainstream audience that had never seen and heard one of the world’s most exciting cities.

Through being able to capture visual nuances of every sort, from patterns on clothes to what’s growing in someone’s garden, facial expressions to the way a child puts her shoes on, film is uniquely capable of depicting how different people live, responding to each other and their environment. In difference there is richness, and from it we see through new eyes and learn more about the world we share.

All of the projects I am working on seek in part to depict worlds that will, to a greater or lesser degree, be new to the majority of viewers. In writing about homelessness, criminal behaviour, the experience of being psychotic, what London is like through the eyes of young people from somewhere else, I’m hoping that audiences will respond with the same fascination that I did when I discovered the differences that captivate me.

So, you’re an alien with a lifespan in millenia, and you’ve used that time to mastermind your own twisted eugenics programme on a backwater planet where your peoples’ battle against an enemy race is still being played out centuries after the resolution of that war back home. All you need to reach the next stage of your plan is for someone to kill you. Which should be simple enough, given the number of enemies you’ve acquired over time, and your skill in manipulating people to your ends.

Only, when it comes to it, things aren’t that simple. You just can’t get the help some days. Even when you’ve choreographed an alleged enemy into being with you while he holds a gun and swears he’s going to blow your head off, he never actually gets round to realising his threat. So, you wind him up even more. And he says he’ll kill you. And the bastard still doesn’t do it.

That wonderfully twisted scenario comes in one of the chunks of writer Joe Casey’s contributions to the mythology of Wildcats. Dark, and delightfully realised by artist Sean Phillips, it beats to a different drum than most comics I’ve seen, and gave me a real appreciation for Joe’s writing talents.

I’d read a lot about Joe Casey without actually reading any of his comics. He’s an interesting interview subject, talking passionately and with disarming frankness about the medium he loves and has never quite fitted in with. Sure, in the course of his career he’s written for iconic series like X-Men and Adventures of Superman, but he’s just as focused on a wide range of less well-known, but frequently applauded, titles such as Godland, Automatic Kafka, and Milkman Murders.

So, he’s written all that stuff, and somehow I didn’t pick up an actual Joe Casey book until I came across a second hand copy of Vicious Circles, the second collection of his run on Wildcats. I’d previously enjoyed Alan Moore’s take on the aliens and superheroes series, and had heard good things about Joe’s take on the title — all of which added up to justification for finally parting with money to check out some of Casey’s work.

There’s a delicious dark humour running through that scene with the alien overlord failing to get an enemy to murder him. Similar delights run through the collection. An android character is beautifully depicted — while his more stylish colleagues sport dark suits and smoke enigmatically, the android dresses like a stereotypical American tourist, in shorts and a colourful shirt. His speech patterns are similarly naive.

Clearly, whatever else might be going on, Joe Casey likes to enjoy himself while he’s writing. That makes a real difference to the finished comics. For all their powers, Casey’s characters have very credible motivations. And Casey is clearly a bit bored by the repetitive nature of the superhero comic. This second volume lays the seeds for what a lot of people reckon is his best work, which shifts Wildcats from being about people hitting one another and instead explores another means of using power to change the world: corporate enterprise.

All that’s to come, and I know now that I’ll go out of my way to find Casey’s other work on Wildcats. And, who knows, maybe I’ll check out more of his work too. Casey’s in an enviable position, as one of the Man of Action collective of writers, of being able to pick and choose what comics work he does, thanks to the financial stability that the team have achieved through developing Ben 10 and other hit animation shows for kids. All of which suggests that Casey’s interest in corporate affairs is not merely academic: getting Ben 10 off the ground is a major achievement, involving interacting with networks and merchandising manufacturers. It’s an impressive feat, and one I’d like to emulate.

Interesting the way a detail can work in different films. In Die Hard, Bruce Willis is a ridiculously tough hero, able to stand in rooms with a bunch of bad guys blasting bullets at him and leave them unscathed. The signifier for his essential humanity is the way his feet get cut by broken glass — the only time in the film he suffers injury.

Contrarily, we have Jodie Foster in Panic Room. Moved into a new place with her daughter, she’s very much vulnerable when the film kicks off. But as the story develops, and her daughter is threatened, she walks barefoot through a room with broken glass and, in full heroic mode at this point, is not troubled by pointy bits.

Some people are sniffy about Panic Room. Director David Fincher’s previous film was Fight Club, and its nebulous political satire suggested to some that Fincher was a man with something to say. Well, maybe, but that’s quite the burden to be shouldered with, and taking your own publicity seriously can lead to creative missteps — see what happened with David O. Russell and the dismal self-consciously meaningful I Heart Huckabees after the wonder that was Three Kings.

Panic Room is unashamedly a thriller, and a reminder of why Alfred Hitchcock spent his career at perfecting the form. The technical and storytelling chops needed to pull off an effective thriller mark out a director as being able to master any yarn they have an urge to tell.

There’s something of a sneer in the term ‘thriller’. The implication is that being thrilled is a baseline emotion, not as sophisticated as the delights of reflection, insight, or ennui, that other less physically active films seek to evoke. But really, thrillers go back to the roots of cinema, when audiences paid to be startled by fight scenes, daredevil tricks, and ladies strapped down in front of oncoming trains. Why not go further back still, to cave paintings, when bison would be depicted in an attempt to conjure them, and people would get excited and scared by the prospect of hunting for meat to feed the tribe.

That tribal sense is very much there in Panic Room. A mother and daughter are menaced by intruders, and rely on a safe room in the house to see them through. Only, mum is claustrophobic — and the daughter has diabetes, meaning sooner or later mum is going to have to leave the safety of the panic room to get her daughter’s insulin from elsewhere in the house.

Sure, the film thrives on technical excellence — bravura tracking shots through the house, sublime editing to get across what happens when mum leaves the room and the invaders try to get there ahead of her return, inventive ways to use the basic rules of the panic room itself. But none of that would mean a thing without the primal connection of mother and child. Bad people are trying to take Jodie Foster’s baby away from her, and nothing but nothing will get between them.

That bottom line is important to bear in mind. It’s easy to get lost in convoluted plotting and subtle motivations. But for real involving narrative, nothing beats tapping into fundamental emotions. For all his whizzbang tricks, David Fincher really gets that point, and everything in the film stems from that realisation.

Panic Room is a reminder of the visceral power of a straight line narrative where the stakes get higher and situations are reversed. I have yet to accomplish that feat in any of my writing, and seeing as I aspire to write quality thrillers, watching Panic Room again was a salutary reminder of how that job can be done with real flair and finesse.

I got into a lovely conversation with someone earlier, a woman who spotted my Page 45 bag as I went up to buy a smoothie at the till she was working behind, and recognised me as a fellow comics geek. We were still talking an hour later, joined by a couple of other people too, in a freewheeling chat about how race and class and sexuality are depicted in stories. Which all sounds very po-faced, but the conversation was anything but: views and examples and counterexamples were exchanged in a very friendly fashion, without the animosity and entrenchment that such discussions can often lead to online, where there’s no visible connection between the views people express and the manner in which they articulate them in person.

Brought up in the eighties in the Caribbean, my new acquaintance loved comics and only had access to those published by Marvel and DC — there was no market for indies, or at any rate no one speculated on the possibility of one. She became a big fan of the X-Men as written by Chris Claremont, at a time when I too was engrossed in their adventures. But J had a whole different take on the characters thanks to her sex and race. This was at a time when Claremont was arguably one of the more progressive writers in the medium, making a point of creating powerful female characters in his stories, which also featured considerable ethnic diversity.

For all the kudos Claremont received for the wider spectrum of characters he wrote about, there was a distressing undercurrent to what happened to the female ones. More than once, one of his heroines would begin to explore her sexuality — usually signified by a change to a stereotypically ’sexy’ outfit — and discover that her powers were boosted as a result. Only, such explorations inevitably ended up with them turning evil not long afterwards. It happens once, and it’s a story. More than once, it kind of creates a pattern. One which says something about its creator — and has a particular resonance for a young woman of colour reading what happens when one heroine after another discovers lingerie and genocide in quick succession.

These things matter. They might not be noticed so much by the white males who constitute a large part of the mainstream comics readership, but to J they sent out a consistent and negative message about what women are like. No great surprise that she stopped reading comics for quite a while, though as much as anything that had to do with the ascendancy of Rob Liefeld in the nineties and the industry reshaping itself in his misshapen and crosshatched image.

J came back to comics, saying it was Marvel’s Civil War event that drew her back in, and Mark Millar’s Ultimates that persuaded her to stay. She was and is more persuaded by the relative diversity of the Marvel Universe compared to DC’s fictional sandbox, where attempts to introduce a wider ethnic mix are short term, as the company concentrates on what it supposes its core (white, male) audience is, and once again offers them (straight, white, male) icons. I’d like to think that good will yet come of the integration of black writer Dwayne McDuffie’s creations from his imprint, but right now the jury is out.

Is it any better over there in the world of indie comics? Hmm. J at least is not convinced. Exactly how many of Alison Bechdel’s Dykes To Watch Out For aren’t either at college or are graduates or even professors? I’ve joked before that the reason I’m not bi is partly because of all the workshops you have to go to, but is it really true that you need a degree to be a lesbian?

It can sound pompous to suggest that writers have duties of any sort. But I believe it’s important to create in whatever fictions you write characters who are truly representative of people in society at large. Fiction is a mirror in which people should be able to see themselves, and if we’re not considering what we do we’re at risk of perpetuating a world in which non-white children try and bleach their colour away, homosexuals struggle to find counterparts for themselves in books and on screen, and women wonder whether they’ll ever be defined by anything beyond their relationship status.