The new mutants : superheroes and the radical imagination of American comics / Ramzi Fawaz.

Includes bibliographies and index.

Introduction: superhumans in America -- The family of Superman : the superhero team and the promise of universal citizenship -- "Flame on!" Nuclear families, unstable molecules, and the queer history of the Fantastic Four -- Comic book cosmopolitics : the Fantastic Four's counterpublic as a world-making project -- "Where no X-Man has gone before!" Mutant superheroes and the cultural politics of the comic book space opera -- Heroes "that give a damn!" Urban folktales and the triumph of the working-class hero -- Consumed by hellfire : demonic possession and the limits of the superhuman in the 1980s -- Lost in the badlands : radical imagination and the enchantments of mutant solidarity in The new mutants -- Epilogue: Marvelous corpse.

"In 1964, noted literary critic Leslie Fiedler described American youth as 'new mutants, ' social rebels severing their attachments to American culture to remake themselves in their own image. 1960s comic book creators, anticipating Fiedler, began to morph American superheroes from icons of nationalism and white masculinity into actual mutant outcasts, defined by their genetic difference from ordinary humanity. These powerful misfits and 'freaks' soon came to embody the social and political aspirations of America's most marginalized groups, including women, racial and sexual minorities, and the working classes. In The New Mutants, Ramzi Fawaz draws upon queer theory to tell the story of these monstrous fantasy figures and how they grapple with radical politics from Civil Rights and The New Left to Women's and Gay Liberation Movements. Through a series of comic book case studies --

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