Morrison was born in Glasgow in 1960 and as a boy often accompanied his activist father on protests and illicit sorties onto nuclear missile bases while his father sneaked photos for underground newspapers. While at the all-boys Allan Glen’s School in Glasgow, Morrison turned to comic books and relished the way in which their superhero protagonists functioned as surrogates for his own fantasy life. In short order, he began creating his own strips, and by age 17, was getting hired to write his first stories professionally. In the 1980s, Morrison gave up on another early love, playing in a punk band, only to go on to become a charismatic frontman of the comic world with his outré series and his runs writing superhero comics, from Animal Man and Swamp Thing to All-Star Superman and Batman, as well as 1989’s Arkham Asylum. From The Invisibles on, Morrison, along with a revolving gang of illustrators who bring his scenarios to life, has put together as wild and as singular a body of work as any writer in any medium—and produced some singularly dark visions of humanity, of which his two newest series, Nameless (Image) and Annihilator (Legendary), may be the darkest yet. “More nihilism,” he says, laughing, from which he hopes to yield his optimistic “poetry.”

But even if he has created some of the bleakest dystopias in pop culture, Morrison the man is driven by a kind of impish humor and humanism. He half-jokingly believes the dawn of superhumans to be upon us, and he seems to have an insatiable, almost evangelical, need to transmit some of his hard-won hopefulness to the world. This past August, Morrison got on the phone with his friend and fellow comic fiend James Gunn, director of summer’s huge hit Guardians of the Galaxy, to talk about fans, films, and that rooftop in Nepal. —Chris Wallace

JAMES GUNN: Hey, Grant, how you doing, man? Are you in your castle right now?

GRANT MORRISON: Yeah, I’m looking out the window. Scotland is beautiful today. The water is blue. The sky is blue. The sun is shining. It’s unbelievable; it’s like Disney.

GUNN: When I was a small child, I partially learned to read with comics, in particular with Scamp, about the Lady and the Tramp’s male child. That was the prime comic that made me fall in love with comics as a kid. Was there that prime comic for you as a child?

MORRISON: They had this thing, Marvelman, which Alan Moore eventually did a deconstructed version of [later know as Miracleman]. It was just all these weird stories, but with superheroes. That one stays with me forever, from when I could barely read.

GUNN: That’s a lot cooler than Scamp.

MORRISON: It’s cool at least. [laughs]