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Biff! Pow! by Marc Horne, July 24, 2011, The Mail on Sunday

Their costumed crusaders regularly battle arch-rivals in the gloomy backstreets and fetid alleys of Gotham City and New York.

Now a real-life feud has erupted between the Scottish writers widely regarded as the dynamic duo of comic books.

Grant Morrison, who has penned acclaimed adaptations of Batman and the X-Men, has blasted Spider-Man and Fantastic Four writer Mark Millar. The pair are arguably the most influential figures in the multi-billion-pound global comic book industry.

Mr Morrison, a 51-year-old Glaswegian, acted as a mentor to Coatbridge-born Mr Millar, 41, and the pair worked together in the past on a series of popular superhero sagas.

But now Mr Morrison has accused his former close friend, who was behind the hit film Kick-Ass, of being a 'shallow sensationalist' who destroyed his faith in human nature.

Hitting out at his one-time protegé, he said: 'There's a tension between us, based on past history. There's not good feeling between myself and Mark for many reasons. He destroyed my faith in human fucking nature.'

The writer with US-based DC comics now appears to regret giving his former fan his big break.

In his new book Supergods, Mr Morrison states: 'I met Mark Millar when he was 18 years old in 1988 and turned up at the door to interview me for a comics fanzine. Soon we were speaking on the phone every day, usually for four-hour stretches. I supposed I was flattered by his ability to find everything I said funny, so I overlooked the potential for disaster in our unequal friendship.'

He claims that his recommendation led to the ten-relatively unknown Mr Millar being offered the opportunity to write for a hit Marvel comic series entitled Authority.

But according to Mr Morrison, a former pupil of the now-closed Glasgow independent school Allan Glen's: 'As soon as we were working together on American superhero dramas, the division of labour became lopsided.

'I worked with him on the plots of the first five issues and I even ghost-wrote one of them when Mark was ill and fell behind. As Mark's star began to rise, our collaboration fell by the wayside and he went his own way.'

It understood the elder writer felt a deep sense of betrayal when his contribution went uncredited in the published work.

Since then, Mr Millar's strip Kick-Ass, which featured a foul-mouthed schoolgirl assassin, has been made into a blockbuster film starring Nicholas Cage.

In 2008, a film adaptation of his work Wanted, which starred James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman, made more than £250 million at the box office. Mr Millar recently teamed up with celebrity friends Jonathan Ross and Frankie Boyle to launch his own adult comic called Clint.

He is currently working with Universal Studios on a big-screen version of his work Supercrooks.

Mr Morrison believes his former colleague and other writers are now focused on securing lucrative Hollywood deals rather than creating original and intelligent work.

He said: 'Wanted the movie bore only the slightest relation to the comic book, and the (screen) writers boasted how they'd only bothered to read the first issue.

'The comic book is just a pitch now, a stepping-stone to celluloid validation.'

Mr Morrison, whose plots are shaped by his socialist values, also hit out at what he regards as the exploitative and amoral nature of his erstwhile friend's later work, accusing Mr Millar of using 'the language of the lowest common denominator.'

In a thinly veiled attack on the plots of Wanted, where the lead character is a bullying rapist, and Kick-Ass, an ultra-violent account of vigilantism, he rails against the trend for 'pre-packaged rape, degradation, violence and "bad-ass" mass-murdering heroes'.

Last month Mr Millar, who has created his own publishing line, responded to claims on an online forum that a rift had opened up between himself and his one-time mentor.

He said: 'I hung around with Grant for a long time in the Nineties.

'I haven't seen him in about a decade or something. There are no hard feelings.'

E.T.A.: Bob Mitchell had posted scans of the article back in July.