Badger Café: “The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics”

In his talk, Ramzi Fawaz will explore how 1960s comic-book creators began to morph American superheroes from icons of nationalism and white masculinity into 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. Examining a range of comic-book series, Fawaz will show how these comics provided readers a diverse range of new characters and creative worlds to interact with, while modeling ways of bridging divides of race, species, kin, and kind for their mutual flourishing and the good of the world.