Computer games and film adaptations of graphic novels like Spiderman and Sin City have given a new lease of life to the cartoonist's art. Steve Pratt talks to a woman who prefers to explain things in strip form.

SUZY Varty was brought up to understand that comics were trash and a lesser form of literature. As a professional cartoonist, she's out to disprove that and seems to be making headway.

"I'm now asked to go into schools where boys have difficulty with literacy and do comic workshops," she says. "You can learn how to create a basic character and develop quite quickly. Then you can slip in a story, so it's a big turnaround. In schools, teachers are desperate to get boys to read. Comics are a good way in, but very under-utilised as a medium. The other great misnomer about comics is that they have to be funny. Even British comics are often about issues. I did a comic about contraceptives with young women on the Meadowell Estate."

Varty points to an American Pentagon study in the 1990s to find ways of getting information across to less well-educated servicemen. "They tried a variety of ways to get messages across. They found that with text with pictures, like comics, the information sank in. It was 'how to' stuff, like how to put your rifle together," she says.

These days cartoonists like Varty are more likely to be classified as writers, someone who writes through drawings. This is reflected in the third Orange Young Writers' Festival in the North-East, which enables young people to work with professional writers.

Varty joins professional writers, poets, playwrights, a visual artist, a performance poet and a magazine editor in running workshops across the region this summer, organised by New Writing North. She'll be working with Charles Fernyhough on a workshop called Way Beyond Words. "I did suggest we might do a three-frame strip which is quite a common form of cartoon. Because you have three frames, you still need a story and characters and situation. It's a bit like a three-minute pop song," says Varty, who comes from Gateshead.

The bid for cartoonists to achieve respectability is being helped by the rise in the popularity of graphic novels and film adaptations like Sin City.

"It helps bring comics into literature and it's a really interesting way of working with words and pictures. You have to still have a narrative and character development, but the drawing makes up for the description," she says.

"Bookshops don't know what to do with comics, where to display them, and graphic novels are helping them get a handle on that."

The other difficulty under which cartoonists labour is the perception that comics are a child's thing, specifically aimed at boys. The advent of teenage and women's magazines resulted in girls turning away from comics, but now youngsters have moved on to video games and animation, through TV and film cartoon series.

Varty, though, still finds herself in a male-dominated world. "Women cartoonists had a bit of a golden age in the 1980s really. I have a friend who published underground comics and started a women's comic in London," she says. "There are women in comics now but fewer and fewer. It's a very male world. With the exception of Wonder Woman, there aren't any female characters to relate to."

Workshops with young people, including this summer scheme from New Writing North, are one way of finding the cartoonists of the future. "There are people actively seeking out new talent but this new breed is going to have to be prepared to work abroad," she warns.

The North-East is the home of one of the country's most famous and successful comics, Viz. "They're very much a thing on their own, but there are quite a few cartoonists in the region," says Varty. "We're even allowed into the North-East Association of Illustrators."