"The great thing about the Greeks is their Gods represented all the aspects of humanity," Eddie Campbell tells me.

"They're an overblown version of the human. The idea that God would be perfect and the Devil would be vile and evil, that's a Christian idea. It doesn't exist for the Greeks. All the Gods are selfish bastards in Greek mythology."

Gods and monsters. It's the stuff of ancient belief systems. And the stuff of comic books. Campbell has spent much of his creative life exploring both.

Some introductions. Campbell is a Scottish expat who should be much better known in his country of origin. An alt-comic veteran, he's now living in London these days after nearly three decades in Australia. "I've set up house here with Audrey Niffenegger the novelist, my fiancee. We've been going out for a couple of years since I got divorced in Australia. So there was no need to stay."

It's late in the evening when I call. After ten. I phoned him an hour ago but he was just sitting down to dinner. So we've now reconvened to talk about gods and comic books and Jack the Ripper and the Celtic team of the late 1960s.

Back at the start of the 1980s Campbell helped pioneer the British autobiographical comic in his Alec strips. In the nineties, he provided the baleful, brooding art for Alan Moore's darker-than-dark graphic novel From Hell and spent more time than he cares to remember making up new stories for old Greek Gods and heroes in his Bacchus strips, based around the latterday adventures of the God of Wine and the few Greek Gods and heroes still living (not many in truth it turns out; a short, stocky, multi-ocular character called The Eyeball Kid has killed most of them).

More than 500 pages have now been gathered together in a new book, Bacchus Omnibus Edition; a tome that comes with the subtitle Volume One (there's more than 400 pages still to come). "I finished it over 15 years ago. When I look at it now it's like reading somebody else's work," Campbell admits. "It's like reading the work of some young whippersnapper because I started it as early as 1986, 30 years ago."

Give or take.

The result is a big baggy book full of the best and worst of Campbell's work. Spurred by a childhood love of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's Marvel take on Thor and a grown-up admiration for Robert Graves, it starts off as a rather too stiff take on superhero comics (it looks like the work of someone struggling to do something that didn't come naturally to him at the time). Then, about halfway through it just takes off, veering entertainingly and beautifully into discursive, deadpan, at times glorious disquisitions on the origins of wine, the nature of capitalism and the art of storytelling as it follows the adventures of the God of Wine through countless bottles.

"I was going to do an action comic but my own nature got the better of me and it started getting complicated," Campbell admits.

Dig deep enough in Bacchus - in particular the Doing the Islands with Bacchus sequence -- and you will find all the qualities that make Campbell's strips worth reading. The scratchy, idiosyncratic art; the notion that conversation is a goal in itself even in comics; the humanity and its attendant comedy.

The latter rather goes with the mythic territory, he reckons. "The Greek myths are full of life and humour. There's all this sombre seriousness about the Egyptian myths. All your servants buried in your tomb. There's not much room for laughs. There's no room for the element of mischief that you find in the Greek stuff."

And maybe he needed that mischief given that many of these strips were being written and drawn at the same time as he was delving into the inky blackness of Moore's dense script for From Hell, a brutal conspiratorial take on the Ripper story, coursing with horror and female anger. Not that much of that actually made it into the Johnny Depp movie version.

"The film turned it into a game. To us it was this deeply symbolic and tragic mess of human life and to turn it into a whodunnit seemed contrary to everything we believed about it - that murder is just a grotesque, horrible mess which is exactly what we decided to draw. And it's horrendous to have to draw that stuff because there's nothing attractive or interesting in the violence. It's all this turgid, horrible cutting up."

"As Alan said about the Yorkshire Ripper, he was just a mother's boy with a bad haircut. There's nothing romantic or interesting about these people."

Campbell can lay claim to being both. Now closing in on his seventh decade on the planet, he grew up in Clarkston in Glasgow, "out past the Victoria Infirmary where I was holed up for five days after I walked in front of a car". He'd have been eight or nine at the time. Late 1960s. Ask him about childhood and he starts to recite the Celtic team line-up of that era. "Simpson, Craig, Gemmill, Clark, McNeill, Murdoch, Chalmers ... They stick in your head like lines of poetry."

As a boy he wanted to be a cowboy, he says. "In fact I was one. In my head. Living in a big industrial town I did not see as an impediment to being a cowboy. Somewhere along the line I was reading a western comic and I noticed that somebody had scribbled their name. I was angry at first until I realised 'wait a minute, this is in the print'. And I put two and two together. When you're nine it doesn't occur to you that somebody has drawn this. It was like a bolt from the blue. Some man was sitting down drawing this thing. And from that moment I wanted to be that man."

There and then he transformed from comic book reader to comic book writer, albeit it would take him years to get into print. At the turn of the eighties, the family having decamped to England and Campbell stuck working in dead-end jobs, he started publishing his own strips, mining his own life and experience for material.

"I was reading Kerouac and Henry Miller at the time and I'd fallen in love with the idea of writing your own story, of writing down what you were seeing and what you're thinking as an interminable poetic palaver. I thought 'I can't be Henry Miller. I can't be Jack Kerouac. But what if I just do that into these comics I'm doing?' It's as simple as that."

That impulse reaches an apotheosis in Graffiti Kitchen, his account of an affair with two women, a mother and a daughter, possibly the best thing he's ever done (according to both him and me). It's a sublime mixture of candour and surrealist exaggeration.

Was he so open, I wonder, because he didn't think anyone would read it? "Oh I definitely thought someone would read it. You see, once you think yourself into being a person of interest ... Wait a minute, that's what the police say: 'a person of interest' ... Once you have convinced yourself you're an interesting person then you feel incumbent to do something interesting, to live up. That's why I got this self-mythologising idea that's happening in that book. Graffiti Kitchen is a kind of lunatic study in self-obsession."

Is it true though? Did you have an affair with a mother and her daughter? "There's nothing fictional about that."

The sequence where a giant bottom comes to his house, picks him up and then drives down the road as he sits in the cleft, however, may not be entirely drawn from life. It's one of the things he loves about comics, he says. "The way you can use the surreal to represent a mental state."

In the end that's one of the great things about the medium. Unlike Greek Gods, nothing is illegitimate here.

Bacchus Omnibus Edition (Volume One) is published by Top Shelf, priced £29.99