There’s nothing cool anymore about acknowledging the coolness of comic books. Popular culture is so far beyond that moment when comic characters — specifically those gifted, costumed adventurers known as superheroes — shed their reputation as fetish objects for children and marginalized adults and entered the mainstream. We’re now well into an era when every summer weekend brings the opening of an “X-Men” or “Green Lantern” movie. Colorful crime fighters’ vivid uniforms and rippling physiques are used to sell everything from pro football apparel to Broadway musicals, while the characters themselves, untethered from their decades-long narrative traditions, are reduced to mere commodities. Forget about rescuing Lois Lane or Aunt May — now it is the superhero himself who needs saving.

If anyone should be up to the task of rediscovering the magical essence that has inspired nearly 75 years’ worth of superhero storytelling, it is Grant Morrison, a Scottish comics writer and author of “Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God From Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human.”

Alongside genre-redefining talents like Frank Miller (the writer and illustrator of “Batman: The Dark Knight Returns”) and Alan Moore (the writer of “Watchmen”), Mr. Morrison, 51, is one of several revered comics figures who, beginning in the late 1980s, dragged the medium into the modern day.