IS IT A bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Hen, Maggie, Daphne, Maw, Paw and the weans.

The creative team charged with rebranding Superman, the all-American comic book superhero, have revealed that they have drawn inspiration from The Broons, Scotland’s couthiest family.

Rather than using America’s sprawling cityscapes as cultural reference points, Frank Quietly and Grant Morrison say that their comic strips are more likely to embody the spirit of Dundee.

The Scots duo have been commissioned by DC Comics, the New York-based publisher, to create the next series of Superman stories. DC wants them to take the Superhero back to his 1950s roots, espousing traditional American values in simple good-versus-evil storylines.

The pair, who worked on Judge Dredd and Batman comics and also created the artwork for Robbie Williams’s new album, have come up with the unique Scottish slant to ensure that Superman’s humanity and innocence come to the fore. They plan to use the calamity filled world of Paw Broon as the model for clumsy Clarke Kent, Superman’s alter ego.

Quietly launched his career as a comic artist with a spoof of the Broons called the Greens, and his new comic is also shaped by his “obsession” with the Broons, characters created by the artist Dudley D Watkins that have run in The Sunday Post since the 1940s.

Like Watkins, Quietly and Morrison say they have created an entire world within a single frame, complete with tutting bystanders and giggling children. “The influence (in Superman) is seen in the way people move in the Broons. Both translate emotions like ‘scared stiff’ or ‘hair standing on end’ very literally,” said Glasgow-born Morrison.

“The way the Broons was drawn is that everyone was reacting to each other within the frame — it’s like its own virtual reality.”

In most American comics, Morrison said, the background characters do not react to the protagonists at the centre of the frame: “There’s a whole street scene at the end with Clarke Kent being clumsy, Lois Lane and the old man with his dog that’s so like those final street scenes in the Broons with Paw Broon and the whole family.”

The classic style, which Watkins developed from 1937 until his death in 1969, is well suited to the mood of a more innocent time, which Morrison is hoping to portray in the new Superman series.

DC Comics wants Morrison and Quietly to bring back mainstream readers who have not kept up with the plot twists of the continuing Adventures of Superman comics. The 12-part story takes up the classic tale of the superhero, born on the planet Krypton, sent to earth in a rocket by his scientist father and adopted in Smallville, where he took on the Clarke Kent identity.

The new comic will concentrate on the emotional aspects of Superman’s life, including his relationship with Lane, the reporter, and Lex Luther, his arch enemy. He will also be forced to face up to his own mortality when he is exposed to a potential lethal dose of solar radiation.

David Donaldson, managing editor of children’s publications at DC Thompson, said it was flattered that the Superman strip would be taking its lead from The Broons.

“It’s certainly a different take on these couthie characters who are rooted in the past. It will be great to see how they make the jump,” he said.

Professor Alan Riach, of Glasgow University’s Scottish literature department and who has a research interest in comics and popular icons, said that Scots found the nostalgic images of the Broons reassuring. But he claimed that the Superman relaunch would present a challenge to the duo.

“The real test for this pair would be to bring Superman to Scotland on a super-expedition. An encounter in the clouds that ends up with him dropping into Arbroath for some smokies, that’s what I’d like to see.”

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