A review by ckeeve
The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics by Ramzi Fawaz

4.0

Probably the best cultural critique of the superheroic genre that I've seen in a while. Fawaz engages superhero comics from the 1960's to 2000's through the lens of queer theory, focusing on bodies, mutation, and monstrosity, matching shifting impressions and effects of the superheroic body to shifts in American social and political life. It would have benefited the text for Fawaz to have been more bold and "weird" with it, and make a more original intervention (drudging through the X-Men as a queer allegory isn't saying anything new). For the first half of the book (1960's - 1970's), Fawaz relies on tenuous logical connections that aren't immediate to the reader or well explained, but the latter part (1980's to 2000's) of the text is where he really hits his stride.

The close readings of archived comics aren't spectacular, but Fawaz has a compelling talent for sociopolitical contextualization. Also, the inclusion of fan letters as sites of analysis, critique, and debate was clever.