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| The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics
ISBN: 9781479840021
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / NYU Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Comic books strips etc -- United States -- History and criticism; Superheroes in literature;
Fawaz, an English professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, takes a hard look at the politics behind superhero comics in this uneven but satisfying debut. Drawing on queer theory, Fawaz proposes that superhero comics from the Silver Age (mid-1950s to early '70s) onward have consistently reflected contemporary political debates, particularly around marginalized groups. In his view, post-WWII superheroes, in contrast to their prewar counterparts, were "queered" by their portrayal as vulnerable and threatening outsiders. For instance, the Fantastic Four, introduced in 1961, gain their powers through "bodily vulnerability" after being accidentally exposed to "cosmic rays" that made their bodies' molecules "unstable." These abilities, Fawaz writes, "produced nonnormative or `queer' effects" shown as "expressions of deviant gender and sexuality." By contrast, the X-Men, from their first appearance in 1963, are outsiders empowered by genetic mutations and confronted by an intolerant public. For Fawaz, their appearance "dramatized the politics of inequality, exclusion, and difference" in line with the concurrent civil rights movements. This is a strong work with minor pacing problems; some studies are more fleshed out than others. Nonetheless, this is an enjoyable and perceptive study and any failings would be easy to fix in a (fingers crossed) follow-up. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Fawaz Ramzi :
Ramzi Fawaz is a Romnes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics and co-editor of Keywords for Comics Studies . With Darieck Scott, he co-edited the special issue of American Literature , "Queer About Comics," which won the 2019 best special issue award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. |
