Bart Beaty is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Communication and Culture at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture (University Press of Mississippi), and his book Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s will be published this year by the University of Toronto Press. His column, "Euro-comics for Beginners", appears regularly in The Comics Journal, and "Conversational Euro-comics" runs weekly on comicsreporter.com