To Dundee! Once home to jam, jute and journalism, now better known for computer gaming, all things artsy and crafty (get off the train and there’s Kengo Kuma’s V&A museum already rising from the ground on the city’s waterfront) and, yes, comics.

The Beano and The Broons are still going strong, the statue of Desperate Dan is frozen in mid-stride on the High Street and in his office in the Tower Building in Dundee University the world’s only Professor of Comic Studies is planning world domination. Or possibly just the next module of his Masters programme.

At 41, Chris Murray is a comic book sound effect in human form. You can almost see the exclamation marks trailing in the air behind him. He’s a full-on enthusiast for the comics medium, and the city where he was born and raised and still works. He did once consider leaving Dundee to go to Manchester for his PhD. But as he says if you want to study comic books it would be a bit perverse to leave the “capital of comics.”

Studying comics and helping others to do so is his job. His latest academic book, The British Superhero, is being published this month by University Press of Mississippi and he’s currently working on another book on the idea of the superhuman.

Spend any time with him and you may find yourself discussing the rise of the autobiographical comic strip, comic book censorship down the years (did you know that the British Communist Party teamed up with religious groups in the 1950s to attack comic books because it was worried about the pernicious influence of American culture?) and the progressive potential of the form.

Me I’m not always convinced of the latter. Frankly after a childhood of imbibing Stan Lee liberalism from Marvel comics I’ve become something of a superhero apostate. Isn’t their might-makes-right default position problematic? Doesn’t adolescent power fantasy - oh let's be provocative - ultimately lead us to Donald Trump?

He doesn’t say “don’t be ridiculous” but I think it’s implied. “Like any genre it’s a mode of discourse. It’s a mode of communication,” he points out, “and it’s one that doesn’t have one singular message.”

“We have to draw a line between the films and the comics,” he does concede. “The films I find politically extremely tricky. The first Avengers film, as enjoyable a romp as it is, is the Bush doctrine. And when the aliens turn up at the end they’re all Eastern looking.”

But, he adds, “I think you’ll find more sophisticated, engaged political commentary going on in superhero comics at the moment than has been around since the 1970s and 1980s.”

Murray started teaching modules in comics studies as part of the English degree programme at Dundee University around 2008. But establishing a Masters programme was always the goal. “There wasn’t anything like that in the world.”

The programme duly launched in 2011 attracting art graduates, history graduates and even the odd science graduate. The programme currently has 20 students. There is clearly an appetite.

When it was launched, however, former Glasgow South Labour MP Tom Harris snarkily tweeted: “Dundee University is launching a degree in comic books. That’ll show those who say degrees are being dumbed down!”

Harris’s tweet did not go down well on social media. “I hate Twitter but I was compelled to join Twitter so I could argue with this guy,” says Murray. Many others had beaten him to it.

“The idea was that it was a bunch of people sitting reading comics and indulging their fannish loves and not doing anything which would benefit them in the jobs market or indeed benefit the economy,” Murray suggests. In truth, the course is a mixture of academic study and practical application.

It has attracted people from academic backgrounds who want to be comics scholars (“They essentially want to take my job,” laughs Murray) and people who want to use it as a stepping stone into the industry. One of his former students Claire Roe is currently the artist on a new Batgirl comic for DC Comics.

We are now some years beyond the “comics are not just for kids” headlines in newspapers. Comic books can both be commercial successes (where would Hollywood be now without superheroes?) and works of art (Art Spiegelman’s powerful Holocaust memoir Maus won the Pulitzer Prize as long ago as 1992).

Increasingly, educational and public sector bodies are recognising the effectiveness of the medium as a means of communication. As part of the practical element of the course, Murray says, his students are working on a comic about organ donation for children. They have previously worked with a Tayside advocacy group on disability hate crime.

Why so? Because comics, Murray explains, work in very different ways to novels or films. “Reading a comic involved a degree of problem-solving. You have to interpret the image – a visual code – and you have to interpret the words – a linguistic code. You then have to bring the two together to produce a new meaning that’s a combination of both.

“The fact that you have to do the problem-solving makes it immersive. You don’t passively consume it. People say kids love comics because they’re easy. No. Kids love comics because they make them work.”

As a child himself Murray read the Beano and The Dandy, the Commando and Starblazer comics. “I stole my sister’s girls’ comics often because the artwork was better. I was a comics omnivore.

“When other kids were getting into computer games or saving up to buy the latest Reebok trainers I was not interested. They would need £60 to buy new trainers. If I had 60p to buy a new comic I was happy.”

In Dundee he’d buy his comics in a shop called The Black Hole and another called The Zoo and Graphic Book Shop. “It was run by this Swedish guy and his two very young daughters. They seemed to do most of the work. It was half a pet store and half a comic shop. I remember picking up V for Vendetta while standing on kitty litter with a parakeet screeching in my ear.”

These days he doesn’t take his work home with him. But that’s only because his wife Gill insisted he build a cabin in the garden. “Comics were taking over the house. There were a lot in the attic and the roof was straining under the weight. There was the weight of a small family car up there.

“Half the garden is taken over by a sizeable cabin and all the comics are out there so I’m often out there. She thinks she’s exiled me from the house but I could literally not be happier.”

Gill isn’t really a comics buff. “She comes along to comic conventions and she’s often off speaking to some guy I’ve never heard of who was a wizard in the Harry Potter films. That’s the level of her engagement.”

He’s more hopeful about his four-year-old daughter Kaitlyn who is already mad on comics. But in Britain we don’t really do comics for kids any more, do we? The Dandy has gone, so set aside The Beano and The Phoenix what do you have left? “It’s not the same industry and economy going on,” Murray admits, “but there is still a lot of work going on and we see our students getting work.”

As well as being professor of comic studies, Murray is also (deep breath) Associate Dean for Knowledge Exchange, Impact Enterprise and Employability. “The longest job title ever,” he admits.

As such he is part of the university’s attempts to plug itself into the city in which it is based. A city that is changing day by day. To visit Dundee today is to see a city in flux. Like everywhere else it suffers from the 21st century urban problems (boarded up shops in the city centre), and yet the waterfront is a steel-scaffolded symbol of the future.

“I think Dundee’s developed enormously in my lifetime. I look at the Perth Road and the university area and the development of the DCA and the V&A coming here. Dundee has a lot more confidence than it ever had.

“One of the milestones for me is the Desperate Dan statue which is such a focal point in the city centre. It’s a beloved statue now. When anyone comes they rush to get their picture taken with Desperate Dan.

“And because it’s right next door to the Caird Hall where we do our graduations when the comics students graduate I always meet them every year and go over to the statue and Desperate Dan doffs them. That’s the real graduation ceremony.”