Southeast China has just seen the arrival of India’s comic du jour. Rather than a translation of the North American Spider-Man to Hindi or Chinese, it consists of a strict trans-creation of the character. From the waist up his outfit is the same, tight-fitting and marked with the spider print, and the classic mask covers the face, but waist-down, instead of the blue and red tights he has a dhoti, the typical flowing chiffon Hindu trousers, and on his feet he wears the leather slippers with the upturned toes. They haven’t given him Oriental features, but he is darker-skinned than Peter Parker, and his adventures take place in Old Bombay, and rather than Green Goblin he’s faced by an adversary named Rakshasa, a demon from Indian mythology with the body of a man and the head of a monster. The Chinese love this kind of fusion, but that’s because they can compare against the original American products—products they can buy at the shops in Little America. One might say that the least important thing to the Chinese are the stories in themselves; their imaginations are drawn more consistently to enumerating the differences in a certain cartoon, the American and its Oriental bastard. Any Chinese craze always has the propensity to become dangerous, and now this mania is gaining ground on the surf craze; that was only for older people, whereas this one appeals to all ages, all sectors of society. It was the only way young Kao Cheng, a slum-dweller from the city of Punh, could come into contact with Ling-O, the daughter of a civil servant: they found one another at the same bookseller street stall, each immersed in a game of spot the difference. I found 43. Well, I found 377. And so on. But because the artistic direction and the script were in the hands of the Indian architect Jeevan J. Kang, there’s a deeper difference between the two versions of the superhero, a difference we might term “structural,” one that elevates him to new heights of rationalist turmoil. Indeed, in an attempt to retain the chimerical American je ne sais quoi, Jeevan has loaded not only the inks but also the story lines: rather than illustrated plots, they come to resemble theorems based on syllogistic concatenations so tightly plotted that, even when the story relaxes its grip for a moment and moves beyond the proliferation of fantasy, it’s quite clear that the narrating machine has broken down definitively, as when a motor emits its final sigh and enters the world of dream, yes, but never-ending dream. The Argentinian Jorge Rodolfo Fernández, in his Budget Suites of America room, is reading the following passage by Ernesto Sábato—out loud, over and over: “Borges sets out his stories as though they were theorems, for example in ‘Death and the Compass,’ in which the detective Erik Lönnrot isn’t a creature made of flesh and bone, but a symbolic puppet who blindly obeys—or clearsightedly obeys, it’s the same thing—a mathematical law: he offers no resistance, just as the hypotenuse cannot resist Pythagoras’ theorem; its beauty resides in its very inability to resist.”