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He is bemused by the Robin-less state of most modern Batman literature; the Boy Wonder was conspicuously absent from blockbusters Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. “(Frank) Miller’s Dark Knight Returns turns Robin into a woman… (Miller) really tries to avoid the whole Batman/Robin relationship.”

a possible unit on Donald Duck. The problem isn’t Donald’s lack of pants; rather, it’s the imperialist ideology he presents. “Babar is often read as a parable about colonialism,” Prof. Enns explains. “Babar is educated in Europe and that’s the reason why he’s the king of the elephants.” Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-winner Maus, a Holocaust fable told, like Orwell’s Animal Farm, through the use of animals-as-people. “I’m going to look at it through this question of racial representation. The choice to represent Jews as mice and Nazis as cats… It’s offensive, but in an intentional way… it’s impossible to accuse Maus of being Nazi propaganda. That’s silly… but (Art Spiegelman) is definitely playing on the history of Nazi propaganda.”

It’s really going to be more like sociology or anthropology. Cultural studies ask the question of ‘what do comic books reveal about the culture that produced them?

“Pop culture says more about us than our highbrow culture,” he continues. “If you go back to the 18th century, the tools that dentists use say more about class differences than any of the great works of literature the culture produced.”