In the year of our Lord nineteen-hundred-and-thirty-five, the Earth took to the sky.

All across the Midwest of America the topsoil simply blew away. Storms of choking black dust and red dust billowed across the land, smothering homes and livestock and hope. "The life of the land" as Nick Hayes calls it, went with it, swept up and away, leaving a hard, dead shell.

It's a vision straight from the Bible, you might think. A modern-day plague on a modern-day Egypt. "It felt that way to me," Hayes admits when he came to describe it in his new graphic novel. "It felt like a curse. It felt like it happened in a fairy tale. It just felt unreal."

The real cause was not divine wrath but industrial farming and drought, an ecological disaster to exacerbate the economic crisis of the Great Depression that saw people losing their homes and setting out - like the Joads in John Steinbeck's The Grapes Of Wrath - to find somewhere better, only to discover that there was nowhere better for them.

"In nature things are so tautly intertwined," Hayes points out. "It's like removing the bees from the food chain. It's the thing that the string is attached to that you've cut that starts the backlash."

Hayes's book is about all of this. About ecology, about the economy, about workers being blown about just like top soil. Oh and yeah, it's also about American folk singer and radical Woody Guthrie.

Woody Guthrie And The Dust Bowl Ballads is Hayes's follow-up to The Rime Of The Modern Mariner. When we speak, Hayes is still recovering from the "week-long circus" that was the book's launch. "Whenever I don't get enough sleep, I end up with man flu so I'm currently in bed. It's totally my fault. I don't deserve any sympathy."

But between yawning and feeling slightly sorry for himself he is telling me why Guthrie's story appealed to him. "It occurred to me that I could use Woody Guthrie's eyes and his ethics to look at a period of time that was not only a crisis point in economic terms but in terms of man's relationship with nature as well. It was in the mid-1920s that America produced the largest harvest that man had ever produced, and that precise same year saw the largest amount of people they ever had on benefit and food coupons and queues for the Red Cross. So there was this massive disconnect between economy and ecology.

"And then there was this final click when the book came into place when I realised that I was going to look at land. Fencing it off and issues of property and rights. Woody Guthrie saw land issues in the same way as Woody looked at folk music, which is that a song cannot be owned. It cannot be ringfenced. You cannot restrict people's rights or access. These songs are for everyone, which is precisely how the Native Americans saw land."

Hayes is, he admits, "a beardy, slightly pot-bellied folk fanatic". He has all Guthrie's music on iTunes. This was his chance, he says, to "push my own interpretation of the folk vibe. It was kind of important to me to make clear my ideas of lack of ownership, that these people are really just DJs for this open-source software music. With any luck there's very little ego in folk music. It's about the song."

There's a very 21st-century take on mid-20th century American folk for you. But then Hayes is a very 21st-century man, you could say. The only time he's been to America, he admits, was to Pittsburgh, "and that was on a booty call so my knowledge of the US landscape was not improved."

But, he points out, there's a "wealth of beautifully written books and films" about Guthrie and his times so there was no shortage of material. Hayes spent two years working on the book. And, it should be noted, a surprisingly quick turnaround for such a substantial tome. "I'm usually about a page a day but I went to Austria so I could draw two pages a day, essentially to work investment bankers' hours for ... What would it be? ... McDonald's wages I guess."

The result was worth it though. Hayes's drawings have a chunky sepia and woodblock quality to them, the pages pulse with visual and musical rhythms, and best of all there are times when the words on the page - on many occasions the least interesting part of a graphic novel - begin to dance.

"I think in graphic novels editors get a bit flighty when you use lots of words. At very base level because it makes it harder to translate into other languages. I think graphic novels are an equal mix of words and images and maybe the word aspect of it has not been capitalised upon. I think the absolute fascination is how words can be with or against the image that they're placed next to."

How does Woody Guthrie - the train-jumping singer from Oklahoma - emerge in all this? As selfish, self-obsessed, flawed, angry and driven. Hayes doesn't hide the fact that he treated his wife and child poorly. But then, as he points out, who is perfect in this world? "I don't have a wife to mistreat or a kid but I'm sure if I did I'd have f***ed up somewhere along the line, given past evidence. I think if you're going to write a story about someone's life you need that kind of grit."

True, though some critics argue that he has made Guthrie's father a more benevolent figure than the racist reality. "A lot of things just have to be cut for the edit, really. I considered looking at his treatment of women but it was the nature story that really remained strongest."

That and the way Guthrie reflected what was going on in the country around him. "Pretty much every myth about Woody Guthrie is debunked by the facts. He wasn't working class. He always had a bed, he never had to go on the road. He wasn't necessarily the mirror image of the people he sought to sing about. I think it's just about empathy. He saw those people and he empathised more with them than the clean shirts up in the banking sector."

Reading Woody Guthrie And The Dust Bowl Ballads it's hard not to hear echoes shivering down the years from then to now as people lose their livelihoods and are locked out - literally in this case - of the good life. "The idea of the 99% is one that pervades Woody Guthrie's approach to the story," suggests Hayes. "He just saw a latent unfairness there."

Does that sound familiar? As Guthrie once sang, "This land is your land." It still applies, whatever the bankers might say.

Woody Guthrie And The Dust Bowl Ballads is published by Jonathan Cape, priced £20

On Monday Herald Scotland launches a new graphic novel blog. You can find graphic content at www.heraldscotland.com/author/graphic-content