I recently interviewed the novelist Michel Faber for The Sunday Herald in his home in Ross and Cromarty. At one point in a wide-ranging interview we talked about his love of comics and their influence on his latest and – he says – last novel, The Book of Strange New Things.

In his acknowledgements at the back of the book he expresses his appreciation for “the team of writers, pencillers and inkers who worked at Marvel Comics during the 1960s and 1970s, giving me such enjoyment as a child and ever since.”

Marvel fans who read the book might find a few of the characters’ names rather familiar.

What follows is the part of our conversation relating to Faber’s love of comics.

At what point in your life did Marvel Comics matter to you and in what way did they matter?

I liked comics in Holland already when I was a kid and one of the few things I can remember about the emigration from Holland to Australia is that my mother bought me a Caspar comic. S*******t comics on earth, Caspar, but anyway.

And then as soon as I discovered serious comics – adventure story comics rather than jokey comics – I got heavily into them, and particularly Marvel comics.

What did you like about them?

I was never that interested in the stories. I was already writing by then anyway. I wrote my first little novel about eight or nine. It was displayed in the library at primary school. And I know by the time I was about 12, 13, I was reading bits of novels out to people in the playgrounds of the school at lunch times so I was already writing novels very early on.

So it was the art that appealed to me and the imaginative world that was opened up by the art and particularly by [Jack] Kirby.

What was special about Kirby?

He was such an inventor of new realities, such a fertile mind. I mean, this little Jewish guy from New York, very old-fashioned, little cigar-smoking guy. But inventing these universes. And I loved his artwork.

I loved the artwork of many other artists and I’ve become pretty much a historian of comics now. I’m very much interested in them as a cultural phenomenon and I have many comics from all over the world and because I can read Dutch and because I can – not fluently but I can get the gist of French and German and Dutch comics as well – I’ve got a lot of French and German comics.

When I was a kid I loved Spider-Man for Steve Ditko’s art and for the soap opera of Peter Parker’s life. What were you responding to?

Spider-Man was among my less favourite Marvel comics and I think that’s partly because what Spider-Man relies on is identification. There’s this nerdy young guy and wouldn’t it be nice to have spider powers, etc? I had none of that identification whatsoever. I’ve never identified with characters in literature ever. I’ve never had this feeling of ‘oh wow, that could be me’. I’ve had a very strange relationship with literature.

So it was the artwork I was focusing on and I liked Ditko. I quite liked [John] Romita who drew Spider-Man after Ditko left and I really liked Gil Kane who drew Spider-Man after Romita left.

Gil Kane was one of my favourites. So it was always focused on the artwork.

What about the stories?

One of the things that Marvel comics delivered was entertainment and thrills and excitement. There was this idea that every month people would be getting their copy of Avengers and Spider-Man and Fantastic Four and whatever and the onus was on the company to deliver something that was incredibly thrilling or the customer would drift away. Because it was a cut-throat business and there was always the competition with DC.

And this idea of the writer having responsibility to thrill and to entertain was something that I really liked and it’s something that I feel when I’m writing.

I don’t have any patience whatsoever with the notion of serious literature or literary fiction, whatever you want to call it, having the right to be boring or heavy-going. That you dutifully work your way through the most well-regarded, garlanded novels of our time, but really when you want a thrill you guiltily put the literary fiction aside and you read a bestseller because you’re in the mood for a bit of excitement.

I don’t get that I think that serious fiction should be exciting, entertaining, a wild ride.

So if you weren’t seeking someone to identify with, what were you after? Was it just excitement?

And wonder. The sense of wonder you get in Under the Skin or Book of Strange New Things, that’s the wonder that radiated off Kirby’s comics for example. This sense of access to a previously unsuspected world. So yeah they definitely gave me that.

But my engagement with the actual narrative, with the soap opera of it if you like, was so tenuous that if, for example, I was following a story line in Avengers and there was one issue where the regular artist whose work I was admiring couldn’t do it because he got sick or was behind in his deadlines, and they got some other artist to do it I wouldn’t read it.

I wouldn’t bother with it. I would have no curiosity as to what happened. That was just not what it was about. I would look at the comic on the newsstand I would register that it was drawn by someone I didn’t like and that was it. I didn’t need it.

The Book of Strange New Things, by Michel Faber, is now out in paperback.