A powerhouse one-of-a-kind book! By charting the radical transformations of the comic book superhero in the post-war period, Fawaz brings to light the extraordinary secret history of American Otherness. Truly fantastic. -Junot Diaz, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Fawaz draws on close readings and sharp analysis. -Pacific Standard Much that's ... Read morepreviously been crackling and exciting in the burgeoning field of comics studies has investigated the innovations of comic book form, or engaged with narratives of autobiography and realism that most closely mimic the prestigious kinds of storytelling recognized in literary novels. Now comes the sharp, smart, theoretically savvy exploration of the bombastic content of superhero comics, which Ramzi Fawaz's exuberant tour de force reveals that we trivialize to the detriment of our understanding of sexuality and race in postwar America, and of the ways we use fantasy to make and re-make the meanings of both. Among hypertrophic giants and mutations that grant world-conquering powers, Fawaz finds world-making that embraces universal difference as the basis for affiliative politics and puts the cosmic back into cosmopolitan-and queerness galore. -Darieck Scott,author of Extravagant Abjection The New Mutants is an eye-opening read, and Fawaz offers a way of reading superhero comics that is rooted both in scholarship and in the rich history of superhero narratives. It's clear that Fawaz is both a scholar and a fan, a dynamic that results in a book that should be appreciated by academics and true believers alike. -PopMatters This will go a long way towards making comics an acceptable medium of study in academia. -San Francisco Book Review Fawaz takes a hard look at the politics behind superhero comics in this...satisfying debut. [A]n enjoyable and perceptive study. -Publishers Weekly Fawaz takes readers into the wondrous world of American comic books, where we encounter an array of outcasts: the mutant, the cyborg, the alien, and the superhuman. This band of visionaries, Fawaz persuasively shows, pushed back against the constraints of postwar liberal citizenship, conjured new, emancipatory forms of social belonging, and called into question the meaning of the human being. A model of interdisciplinary scholarship, The New Mutants is a must-read, not only for comic book fans, but for anyone interested in understanding how popular culture fueled the gender, sexual, and race revolutions of the late twentieth century. -Natasha Zaretsky,author of No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968-1980 The New Mutant is not only one of the smartest critiques I've ever read, it's one of the most brilliant academic engagements with pop culture, period. -Patheos [A] well-documented study of the political and cultural evolution of American comic books, from the first appearance of Superman in Action Comics in 1938 to the present day. A strong piece of interdisciplinary research..well-argued, clearly written. -Library Journal I have never encountered anyone
not Art Spiegelman, R. Crumb, Douglas Wolk, Stephen Burt, or even Michael Chabon
who has addressed himself to superheroes with Ramzi Fawaz's generosity of spirit and unsatisfiable critical fervor. In this book, one is caught up in the way in which we and the likes of Superman, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, and the Silver Surfer share a common terrain of both history and imagination. All sorts of people will bring a long-nurtured, even fetishized familiarity to Fawaz's pages, and it won't survive
the most familiar stories are, here, radically, thrillingly new. -Greil Marcus,author of Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music Ramzi Fawaz's marvelous new book, The New Mutants, digs deep into the long history of superheroes and unearths a radical political tradition that has mostly gone unnoticed until now. -Popmatters Show Less