Ramzi Fawaz

In The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics, Ramzi Fawaz argues, “Postwar comic books used fantasy to describe and validate previously unrecognizable forms of political community by popularizing figures of monstrous difference whose myriad representations constituted a repository of cultural tools for a renovated liberal imaginary. The New Mutants tells the story of these monsters and the world of possibilities they offered to readers who sought the pleasures of fantasy not to escape from the realities of cold war America but to imagine the nation and its future otherwise” (pg. 5). Fawaz draws upon the work of comics scholars such as Bradford Wright, gender and Cold War scholarship from K.A. Cuordileone, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and feminist and queer theory.

Fawaz links the Justice League to postwar internationalism while arguing that the Fantastic Four’s “recurrent depiction of the family as a site of generative conflict and willed affiliation aligned its values with left-wing political movements that similarly sought to recast social relations as chosen bonds anchored by shared values rather than social conformity or biological kinship” (pg. 72). He analyzes the tone of books like Silver Surfer and the space sagas of the X-Men though the lens of feminist theory, arguing that both the Surfer’s maudlin soliloquys and Jean Grey’s unleashed power tapped into more typically coded female storytelling archetypes. Back on Earth, Fawaz argues that the urban folktales that permeated books like Green Lantern/Green Arrow, Captain America and the Falcon, and Luke Cage: Hero for Hire “absorbed and redirected the burgeoning language of identity politics in the post-civil rights period” (pg. 176). They similarly tapped into creators’ concerns amid the restructuring of the comic book industry that limited creators’ power and right to their work. The last third of Fawaz’s study focuses on the theme of demonic possession, either in the form of the Phoenix Force that possesses the X-Man Jean Grey or the alien symbiote that attempts to bond with Spider-Man. Fawaz argues, “By linking demonic possession to visual expressions of nonnormative or ‘perverse’ performances of gender and sexuality, these stories paradoxically relied on a misguided erotophobic (or antisex) logic that indirectly echoed another emerging discourse of this period: the feminist sex wars” (pg. 203). The stories captured the backlash against capitalism co-opting social movements just as comic book creators entered a period of greater uncertainty in the profession. Fawaz concludes with an examination of the Death of Captain America, suggesting “that the contemporary obsession with images of the superheroic body subjected to physical torture or death is ultimately related to public perceptions of citizenship as a bankrupt category of political life and the failure of postwar human rights discourse to prevent mass suffering and global violence” (pg. 271). In place of these movements, “creators now promise audiences the pleasure of seeing their own diverse identities – as gays and lesbians, Muslims, Buddhists, Catholics, and African and Asian Americans – represented in their favorite superhero comics, but no sense that the heterogeneity of those identities could and should change the world” (pg. 279).… (more)