In a Scotland where kitchen-sink realism reigns supreme, it’s difficult to escape the feeling that Grant Morrison’s specialism in superheroes, fantastical fiction and the counter-culture has left them under-appreciated in their home country. And as our wide-ranging discussion darted from The Jesus And Mary Chain to Robert Louis Stevenson, Glasgow’s Art Deco heritage to the feminine power of witchcraft, it’s easy to see why; the vein of Scottishness that fascinates Morrison has always been deeply suspicious of society’s straitjacketing norms.

‘The mainstream of Scotland has never been particularly friendly or welcoming,’ the Glasgow-born writer says. ‘There’s always been a sense that Scottish culture represents one kind of working-class life: it’s either the shipyard canteen in the 1930s or else it’s crime fiction. But we have this really strong tradition of the weird, from as far back as “Tam o’ Shanter” to James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs And Confessions Of A Justified Sinner, right through to Irvine Welsh and his embrace of the more grotesque aspects of human experience. There’s a stream of the Scottish imagination which is very bizarre and surrealistic, and it comes from a working-class way of thinking that’s rooted in witchcraft and magic.’

Where these works dovetail with Morrison’s is, in part, through their willingness to bend the strictures of reality away from hard-nosed dialogues on modern living towards stories imbued with magical-realist sensibilities; this theme has existed from the very beginning of the comic-book mainstay’s career. ‘I got my start in two places in Scotland. One was Near Myths, which was an alternative magazine based in Edinburgh that let us aim stories at adults. At the same time, I got work at DC Thomson writing for their Starblazer series, which were science-fiction versions of the Commando books. I was getting the alternative on one side and being taught the basics of how to compose a story for a commercial publisher on the other.’

Merging a populous sensibility with Morrison’s unique blend of non-linear storytelling and philosophical preoccupations has made them a radical proposition in comics, placing them in the same bracket as Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore as writers who pushed the medium in bold new directions throughout the 1980s and 90s. Much like their peers, Morrison has straddled the mainstream of DC and Marvel while creating their own works, penning major scripts for Hollywood, games and television, and in 2011 publishing Supergods, an influential non-fiction meditation on superheroes.

Given the longtail of their career, it’s surprising that it took until 2022 for this doyen of comic books to move into novels with Luda, the story of a drag queen in the fictitious Scottish city of Gasglow. ‘Honestly, as much as novels are wonderful, in a lot of ways you might as well just phone around your friends and tell them the plot. It’s certainly not the sort of thing you can make a living out of.’ 

Describing Gasglow as ‘the dream city’, there are hints of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark in its pursuit of a psychogeography that encompasses alternative elements of Scotland and what Morrison calls the country’s ‘feminine side, its witchy side, its weird side. It’s a shifting Glasgow that I wandered when I was young. The city is a huge build-up of everyone’s experience. In the book, there’s a place called the Rendezvous Café which is based on a couple of locations in Glasgow where generations of people have met to form bands or fall in love. I’m interested in those systems and ideas that formed then disappeared, but somehow left traces all over the culture. I wanted Gasglow to be a way of preserving all of that.’

Much like Gasglow (which may feature in the writer’s future work), autobiographical elements of Luda weave through the narrative in search of universal truths. Case in point: Morrison was an avid participant in the 90s drag scene before feeling too old to participate. ‘The book had to be about an older drag queen no longer able to express that side of their personality in the same way and with the same effectiveness. It made me think of Merlin and his assistant who imprisoned him, the idea of a stupid old man giving up his power because he’s been flattered by beauty.’

For Morrison, drag became about the different selves that people present to each other, and as a metaphor for our social-media existence. ‘I think drag can be a metaphor for the magical seizing of control in a world where no one knows what’s real anymore. We can choose what to wear and how to tackle a life that has completely changed from 20 years ago.’ This is a radical repositioning of modern culture’s hyper-curated lifestyle from a writer who has spent their career injecting the popular with an intellectually charged punk spirit.

Grant Morrison (with Jane Flett) appears at Edinburgh Futures Institute, 10 August, 7.30pm; main picture: Allan Amato.