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Fawaz, Ramzi. The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2016. 368 pp. 15 halftones with color inserts. Paperback. ISBN 978-1-4798-2308-6. $29.
American comic books and the superheroes that populate them are often derided as mere fantasies, but in his debut book, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics, Ramzi Fawaz argues that postwar and specifically post-Golden Age (after 1956) superhero comics were neither escapist nor power fantasies. Rather, they were world-making technologies that reimagined the possibilities of American social and political life by making outcasts, deviants, and "mutants" into heroes. Fawaz forwards feminist, queer, and cosmopolitan readings of major superhero comics, making New Mutants the most recent book in a lineage of scholarship on the gender, racial, and sexual politics of American superhero comics. Others include Frederick Luis Aldama's Your Brain on Latino Comics (2009), Adilifu Nama's Super Black (2011), Noah Berlatsky's Wonder Woman (2014), and Jos Alaniz's Death, Disability, and the Superhero (2014). It is therefore surprising that Fawaz fails to engage in any significant way with this growing body of scholarship, even where particularly well-traversed topics are concerned. New Mutants does, however, make strides in realizing how a selection of superhero comics rethought relations of difference in postwar America by embodying the methods of both liberal and radical political activisms, at the same time offering a powerful defense of fantasy as political tool.
New Mutants boasts seven chapters, plus introduction and epilogue. Fawaz's introduction frames his project as narrating how "postwar superhero comics made fantasy a political resource for recognizing and taking pleasure in social identities and collective ways of life commonly denigrated as deviant or subversive" (4). The first three chapters tackle the cosmopolitan ethics of "team" superhero comics that valued "the uncertainty of cross-cultural encounter and the possibilities afforded by ... diverse group affiliations" (16), presenting readings in chapter one of Justice League of America (DC, 1960-1965) and in chapters two and three of The Fantastic Four (Marvel, 1961-1968). Chapters four through six offer readings of comic-book storylines that, as Fawaz argues, embodied the most popular and politically radical genres of the 1970s-the space opera (Marvel, The Silver Surfer and The X-Men) in chapter four, and...