Brian Truitt

USA TODAY

Grant Morrison and Chris Burnam are working together on %27Nameless%27

The creators completed a run on %27Batman Incorporated%27 last year

%27Nameless%27 explores horror that Western culture is obsessed with

Grant Morrison has been giving himself the heebie-jeebies lately, and soon he's passing those scares off to the rest of us.

The Scottish comic-book writer is reteaming with Batman Incorporated artist Chris Burnham for the six-issue horror miniseries Nameless, launching later this year from Image Comics. The comic was announced Thursday at the Image Expo convention in San Francisco.

"We're taking all the dark stuff that Western culture's kind of obsessed with — the zombies and everything — beyond the limit and doing hopefully for now what H.P. Lovecraft did for the wartime generation," Morrison says.

The book centers on a man named the Nameless, a protagonist who's a hero only in the post-modern 21st-century sense of the word, according to Morrison. He's a screw-up but he's also super-smart and, much like Benedict Cumberbatch's modern take on the literary detective in Sherlock, "super high functioning in how he makes connections between things," says the writer.

"I got that idea from Batman, him being this high-level thinker and everything for him is important and meaningful."

The writer's staying mum on the details of the series, but he teases that Nameless' thoughts will be revealed through first-person narration captions that Morrison hasn't used a lot in his work thus far.

"I wanted to take it beyond that Frank Miller hard-boiled thing into a quite weird stream-of-consciousness, Lovecraftian kind of thing," Morrison says. And while Nameless could return for more stories, "really this one is about the big test of the human experience against a nightmare."

When it comes to horror, Burnham feels that the creators as well as the audience all have similar reference points, so with Nameless he wants to dig a little deeper and weirder instead of mashing up two things folks already like.

"Everyone's read the exact same books, seen the same movies and TV shows, so everything's starting to feel a little comfortably same to me," the artist says. "I don't want the readers of a horror book to feel comfortable at all."

What Burnham does feel at home with — and in a good way — is working with Morrison. They wanted to continue to work together after their run on Batman Incorporated ended last year, but also experiment with storytelling techniques in the way panels work on the page.

So far, Burnham has been playing with the contrast between very straightforward layouts and "the weirder, chopped-up, trippy time-warp stuff," he says.

Burnham teases that the visuals "will run the gamut from 'quietly eerie' all the way up through 'cut out my brain so I don't have to remember seeing this!' "

They also yearned to have a much darker story than they ever could doing Batman, so they're tackling a variety of fears and terrors — maybe even some that folks are experiencing and not even know it.

One of the things that scares Morrison the most that he's exploring is the basic nature of being human.

Mankind projects a lot of things onto zombies and their horror-movie ilk, but "this notion of disease or decay as being outside us, it's what we live," Morrison explains. "I've been studying nihilistic philosophy, which is basically the most depressing stuff on Earth. These guys are saying we basically live in a condition of extinction. No matter how well humans do, no matter how we strive, no matter how much effort we put into our families, that one day the fan will burn out and the universe itself will have a heat death and every atom will shut down and freeze to an absolute stillness.

"It's the bleakest world view, so Chris and I want to take this right on board and do a comic about it. It's that kind of existential horror. The stuff that when you wake up at 4 a.m. in the morning and think, 'Wow, I'm getting older…' — it's like that but taken to the max."

He's also been doing a lot of "strange" research, too, reading up on weird occult practices, Satanism and "the darkest stuff we could get," Morrison says.

Thankfully, he has an escape if he gets too creeped out — the writer's currently penning an all-ages sci-fi animated film as well.

"I can go right over there and back to the screenplay, and suddenly I'm in the world of dancing prairie dogs," Morrison says with a laugh.

"A really good piece of art captures a mood, and (Nameless is) capturing the darkest possible mood but also making it entertaining and exciting."

He's also made sure to spread the weirdness before it reaches his fan base.

"Grant is definitely leading me down a crazy labyrinth of rabbit holes. There is some really unsettling stuff out there. And I'm always looking for the most horrific stuff the internet has to offer," Burnham says. "I think we've successfully deranged our minds enough that we'll be able to freak you out."