USLAN GREW UP IN NEW JERSEY, the son of a stonemason and a bookkeeper, and escaped into comic books. He first discovered the Harvey Comics—Richie Rich, Casper, and Little Archie, by Archie Comics Group—and later Superman, which turned into an obsession. (He would write letters to the editors notifying them of "boo-boos" he spotted on the pages.) At age eight, Uslan graduated to the scarier Batman comics, where like many children, he found a hero to emulate. "I truly believed that if I studied real hard, and worked out real hard, and if my dad bought me a cool car, I could become this guy," Uslan, now 60, says. "That was when I said, 'I want to write Batman comics.'"

The ABC Batman series Uslan saw on TV didn't reflect the comic-book superhero he so loved. Producer William Dozier reportedly instructed Adam West, who played Batman, to deliver the caped crusader's silly lines "as though we were dropping a bomb on Hiroshima, with that kind of deadly seriousness." All of this pained Uslan, then a nerdy teenager. "The whole world was laughing at Batman and that just killed me," he says. "One night I vowed to erase from the collective consciousness those three little words: Pow! Zap! and Wham! I said, 'Somehow, someday, someway, I am going to show the world what the true Batman is like.'"

The true Batman, to Uslan, was the character originally co-created in 1939 by DC Comics' Bob Kane and Bill Finger, who imagined Batman as a shadowy creature that stalked criminals under darkness. Kane and Finger drew their inspiration from divine heroes throughout the ages, as Superman's creators has done before them, only they made Batman out to be more like Zorro and the Shadow, the dark mystery men of silent movies and pulp fiction. While the makers of Superman "played with the bright and impossible, Bob and Bill expanded that meme by adding the coin's other side, the dark and improbably possible," writes Travis Langley, a professor of psychology at Henderson State University. "Duality and obsession, his enemies' and his own, fill his stories." (Later, after Robin was written, Batman was softened to fall in line with Superman and the publisher's other more agreeable heroes.)

As an undergraduate, Uslan attended Indiana University, which at the time had an experimental curriculum department in the College of Arts & Sciences that allowed any student to pitch an idea for a non-traditional course that had never been taught before, and if the faculty approved, teach it. Naturally, Uslan created a course on comic books as modern day mythology ("the gods of Egypt, Greece and Rome still exist, although today they wear spandex and capes"), and presented his case before a committee in an Amazing Spider-Man t-shirt—"for impact," he later said. One dean, Uslan says, scoffed at the idea of comics as contemporary folklore. Uslan asked if he was familiar with the story of Moses. The dean said he was, so Uslan asked to indulge him by recounting the tale. Then, Uslan asked him to recall the origin of Superman, which begins with a scientist and his wife placing their infant son in a little rocket ship. "Suddenly, the dean stopped talking. He stared at me for what I was sure was an eternity," Uslan writes in his memoir, The Boy Who Loved Batman. "And then he said, 'Mr. Uslan, your course is accredited.'"