Imagine the Ladybird books of a more innocent age were reworked by a literate, anti-Establishment, slightly bonkers mind. Allow these books to range over unpopular, itchy subjects: the class system, the pain of puberty, the rigidity of compulsory education. Set them in a featureless everytown and blank out the faces. You are now approaching the work of Chad McCail.

Although its roots are in cartoons, children’s textbooks and public-information leaflets, McCail’s work is quite unlike anything else. It eschews the shouty showing off and visual bling of so much contemporary art, relying on the viewer to come up close, look and think rather than stand back and be dazzled. Once seen, it is never to be confused with anything else.

They may look simple, but McCail’s pieces are dense with ideas. His last outing was a show at Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in 2006. Now he has a small exhibition of screenprints at Edinburgh’s Printmakers gallery as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival. He claims the long gap is a form of paternity leave: his two sons are aged one and four. “It shouldn’t be like that, but it has been. It’s a slow process. Sometimes you get on a roll and it comes quickly, but it’s not always like that.”

McCail’s singular style has evolved out of necessity. People were initially bemused by his work. “I made a big picture, an aerial 7ft by 7ft pencil drawing, a map looking down from above of a revolution taking place in an urban area. It took three months. Nobody could work out what the story was because the people are that size” — he indicates a dot with his thumb and forefinger — “so it’s quite hard to work out what’s going on. So when I’d done that and nobody got the story, I thought I had to do something more explicit.”

He hit on the faceless characters with the illuminating caption underneath and off he went.

“I made these things with the text band underneath, a whole series that expressed the ideas that were contained in the other thing. I’ve got quite strong ideas about what’s wrong and how things could change, and it seemed interesting to explore propaganda and education because that’s where it came from.

“I think of education as propaganda, a whole set of ideas that you receive from this monocultural education process that everybody files through. There’s a set view of the world that comes out of that, so there’s an irony. By using that easy-to-read Ladybird font, I’m suggesting that my ideas are also like that: you begin at the beginning and it’s very simple.

“The first one went: land is shared, rich men give land back to the people, people build homes and grow food. It was really childish. That took a while to make, then it sort of clicked and I got on a roll with it.”

McCail had what he calls “a season in the sun, from 1999 to 2004”, when he was shortlisted for the first Beck’s Futures prize and appeared in the British Art Show. Then came the Pampers years. He admits: “I disappeared off the radar a wee bit.”

Now 46, McCail’s artistic agenda was shaped by his own childhood: his grandfather, a comic artist with the publisher DC Thomson, was also a communist. When he lost his job, the family struggled. His father, a lecturer in ancient Greek, put huge store on financial stability and academic success.

Growing up in Edinburgh, the young Chad attended a state primary. Then, aged 12, he went to boarding school. “I had an awful public-school experience, so I have an awful chip about it,” he says. “I’m trying to deal with my chip at the same time. Intellectually, it’s probably quite a good education, but emotionally it’s quite destructive — I don’t think it really works at all.

“I’d been at an ordinary school and then I had to go away, and there were all these posh kids who’d been at these schools since they were seven years old, and were highly institutionalised and knew exactly how to operate the system. I hadn’t got a clue. And they were really hard in comparison to the children I’d been with. They had to be, they’d lost their mummies and daddies at seven — they were basically not wanted.”

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