The Universality of Whaam!

We'll confess, we often scoff at university courses that focus exclusively on contemporary pop culture—as much as we would have liked to have taken "The Simpsons as Satirical Authors," for example, we're not entirely convinced those classroom hours couldn't be better spent slogging through Ulysses.

But we'd make an exception for a comparative literature course on comic-book superheroes. The way in which various cultures have adopted and tweaked the Marvel/DC model is a source of endless...