Capital has had its comic capers

Familiar settings brought to life on the page yet skewed by the bizarre nature of the adventures acted out against them.

Later this week, when Deadhead Comics on Candlemaker Row takes delivery of the latest Spider-Man comic, Edinburgh's cityscape will once again provide the dramatic canvas on which the web-slinging hero begins another battle against the forces of evil.

Scripted by local writer Ferg Handley, the story – called Local Hero – features the Castle and the old Edinburgh Royal Infirmary building as Peter Parker's alter-ego finds himself chasing a werewolf. But it's not the first time that Edinburgh has been visited by a superhero – it's not even the first time Spidey has made the journey from his native New York to the Athens of the North.

Indeed, some 21 years before their movie debut, the Capital also provided the X-Men with a setting on which to unleash their incredible powers – ripping up Queen Street and battling the reality-changing Proteus on Salisbury Crags in the process.

Some years later they returned in another adventure in which they cheekily smashed their way into the old Science Fiction Bookshop on Causewayside, before creating havoc at the Waverley Station.

They're not the only ones. Since then The Punisher and Wolverine have all taken city-breaks here, and back in 2000 Gotham City's Caped Crusader too hurtled across Edinburgh's overcast roof-tops as his alter-ego Bruce Wayne came to Scotland to trace his roots in an adventure by local comic book legend Alan Grant, entitled Scottish Connection. In that tale Batman solved the Templar Mysteries of Rosslyn Chapel.

The city has long boasted a thriving community of comic book writers and artists. As well as Grant and Handley – who also pens the cult Commando pocketbooks – Judge Dredd artist Colin MacNeil and Gordon Rennie of Warhammer and 2000AD are also based in Edinburgh, as is Red Dwarf artist Alan Burrows.

Indeed comic books appear to be undergoing a Renaissance. I remember it was Edgar Rice Burroughs' 1911 creation, Tarzan, that tempted me to buy my first comic book back in 1971, when British reprints of Gold Key Comics' Tarzan of the Apes went on sale. Then my Saturday mornings were spent searching local newsagents for the latest issue, while the afternoons were spent catching up on the Lord of the Jungle's latest exploits in between being told that I'd be far better reading a good book than wasting my pocket money on comics.

However, there is little doubt that until recently comics have been looked down on in some circles. Grant's Batman tale being a prime example: When the former Dalkeith High pupil dreamed up the storyline that brought Batman to town he claims the trustees of Rosslyn Chapel actually "tore up the book" because it was filled with conspiracy theories about evil goings-on at the historic site. Yet when Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code did something similar a few years later, the attraction appeared to embrace the publicity it brought. Comic books, or graphic novels as they are now widely referred to, have gained a new respectability over the last couple of years.

At the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2006 crime writer Ian Rankin, a self-confessed comic fan, revealed a desire to enter the world of comic books after DC Comics – publishers of Batman and Superman – announced that it wanted the Rebus creator to write a new series of graphic novels. The first of which, Hellblazer featuring supernatural detective John Constantine, is due out later this year.

Then there was The Comic Book Project at the Collective Gallery in 2007, a unique project produced in association with the Traverse Theatre, the Edinburgh International Film Festival and the Edinburgh Book Festival, which explored the relationship between performance and visual art, which recognised the work of the comic book artist in an exhibition of newly commissioned art works loosely based on the comic strip.

Add to these the graphic novel version of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic Kidnapped – again written by Grant with artwork by Cam Kennedy, best known for his work on Judge Dredd and Batman – which was chosen to spearhead Edinburgh's first ever city reading campaign last year, and it's clear that the comic book is now viewed as an important means of encouraging people to read more.

As if to further this new found acceptance of the genre, Grant has also been invited to give a talk on the way old fiction has become modern reality, as part of the Edinburgh Lectures series. In the lecture, which will take place at the Edinburgh Business School Auditorium, Heriot-Watt University, on January 29, Grant will reflect on his work in the 1980s on a series of Judge Dredd comics and how many of the fictional problems, such as a society fascinated by celebrity and fears about state-controlled police fascism, have since become reality.

Let's hope the latest Spiderman tale doesn't prove to be too prophetic.