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

The New Mutants is a fantastic, ambitious volume that makes far-reaching connections between the evolution of radical politics in post-war America and the popular fantasy of the comic-book superhero team. Fawaz reads the superhero as ‘a figure of radical difference mapping the limits of American liberalism and its promise of universal inclusion in the post-World War II period’ (3). Working chronologically, Fawaz interprets key developments in flagship comics from the 1950s to the 1980s alongside a wide range of contemporary activists, scholars and radical movements, from desegregation to ACT UP, showing how ‘superhero comics visually celebrated bodies whose physical instability deviated from social and political norms’, producing ‘a visual lexicon of alliances between a variety of “inhuman” yet valorised subjects as a cultural corollary to the cosmopolitan worldviews of movements for international human rights, civil rights, women’s and gay liberation’ (4).

The connections he identifies are far-ranging, striking and evocative, but they are not always well supported. While Fawaz provides many detailed close readings (particularly in his discussion of The Fantastic Four and the X-Men), too often he relies on carefully worded plot summaries that paraphrase the action using the terminology of contemporary radical theory. These passages effectively suggest the connections Fawaz makes between comic narratives and radical movements, but are not convincing evidence that the comics themselves are actively engaged in queer world-making projects. This gap is important because of the way Fawaz attributes intent and agency in The New Mutants.

Fawaz figures ‘superhero storytelling as a form of political theorising that sought to overcome the impasses of various left-wing political projects at moments when the ideals of a cosmopolitan left appeared to fracture from internal conflict or external backlash’ (33). He does not say that comics can be read or interpreted as participating in and responding to left-radical discourse; he consistently argues instead that comic book creators and readers were actively and consciously striving to articulate radical ideals. This is a strong claim that demands a higher standard of evidence that Fawaz’s discussion tends to fall short of. While Fawaz certainly shows that some, even many of them were doing so, he rarely includes such qualifiers. This unforced error is a continuing distraction in Fawaz’s otherwise exemplary discussion, particularly in the later chapters covering the 1980s.

Putting this central methodological concern to one side, Fawaz’s sweeping introduction is by itself worth the price of admission. Fawaz deftly sketches his project’s historical and political context, clearly situating his discussion within existing discussions in political, literary and comics theory. He combines concise summary and incisive synthesis with striking original analysis. Drawing on Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant’s work on queer world-making, Fawaz lays out the development of a post-war ‘comic book cosmopolitics’. This democratic, egalitarian ethos hinges on key trends Fawaz identifies in the writing and production of superhero stories. First, there is the shift away from solo urban crime fighting towards super-teams acting on a global or galactic scale. These stories helped develop cohesive new fictional ‘universes’ managed by comic publishers, encouraging stories focusing on ‘unpredictable encounters between an expanding cohort of super humans, aliens, cosmic beings … cross-cultural encounter rather than assimilation became the primary site of political world-making in the superhero comic book’ (17). Just as the narratives became more interconnected, so too did the developing participatory reading public, as the interactions of writers, editors and fans in letter columns and fan magazines produced an ‘affective counterpublic’ (19) that coproduced the narratives in unprecedented ways. Finally, Fawaz puts great stress (sometimes too much) on the comic ‘medium’s resurgent investment in the liberal values of antiracism and antifascism alongside its absorption of the more radical politics of New Left social movements’ (19), deriving both from key creators’ individual political engagements and from market pressure to cater to the cosmopolitan tastes of the...