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.