Academia goes pop

The Kansas City Star (registration required; try BugMeNot) uses last week's "In Godzilla's Footsteps" conference as a chance to examine the academic pop culture movement:

"Why shouldn't it matter to us if a comic book or a movie is seen by 15 million people, or 50 million people? Why shouldn't it be as important as a Shakespearean sonnet which was read by a few thousand people then and is only read today because it's assigned in class?"