The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics

by Ramzi Fawaz

The academic rigor within The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics is necessary but not fully sufficient for it to make its point. Its not the details within comic books that matter or even the increased literal–and literary–relevancy of The Avengers or Iron Man and all the rest to contemporary pop culture. Its not even the fact that I learned “DC Comics” is like saying “ATM machine”, since it is “Detective Comics”; Detective Comics Comics will make me laugh forever, now.

No, the thing that is interesting about this book on a galactic scale is the reminder that one can apply academic trends, such as finding interesting ways to interpret, connect, and create ideas, onto a non-standard substrate—comic books, instead of Wuthering Heights. The fundamentally human reaction of trying to connect the disconnected heightens the appeal of intricate storytelling—sometimes, the mere fact that anyone can interpret a bunch of subtext within any piece of media gets swept away and locked into inaccessible places. Often, a book this rigorous in expounding its ideas is not one speaking directly to people who grew up reading Amazing Spider-Man rather than their parents’ subscription to der spiegel.

The proof that we can engage with most things in an intellectual way but tend to relegate the worthiness of deep readings to a core of “classics” highlights the major failing of modern academia: its gatekeeping and its hauteur, its grandiosity and its scorn. “Top” academic minds in 2025 are not sitting in the rarified quads of a collegiate Elysium, nor are they any longer thinking up new ways to convince people to click on website links for a fraction of a cent–they are now, through hundreds of hours of filming, editing, and posting—forging the modern American mythos: internet rumor; conspiracy; deep lore. QAnon has become our Batman: citizenry who are desperate to parse a sacred text in search of any sort of guidance seek it out under the pretense that it is literal and true. People ready to pierce the grand allegories of our time with insight or provocation, kids bursting with stories to tell about their particularized experiences in our post capitalized world, are relegated to message boards and facebook groups, tiktok essays and just chatting livestreams, polishing the veneer that a story about the world is only impactful if people believe in it as fact. It is here that the baking together of narratives to explain what is happening makes the world in which we all eventually live—even though such interpretive skills and rhetorical turns could work just as well as allegory, as satire, as literature. Tens of thousands of people could be employing interpretive reading to allegorical fictions rather than picking apart “clues” about which Wayfair dresser traffics humans—these skills, so en vogue to grab attention on social media, are scorned as pointless, soft-skilled, and weak when relegated to the classroom. Honestly, what do American voters think they’re doing except forging a mythos of competence when spinning up a “four-dimentional chess” or “drain the swamp” paeans in support of la grande campagne against a rogue’s gallery of comic-book level villainy? This is just English class, but the books are Trump tweets and website errors filtered through numerology and kabbalah (though if I had to liken it to a comic story, it would be more Inspector Gadget than Batman. Gadget without Penny or Brain. Garfield without Garfield person, this one’s for free).

If the vast majority of reactionary American voters respond to the hyper-rhetorical flourishes of modern politics—calling migrants rapists, for example—as rhetoric, “Oh, he’s just saying that,” without being able to point at what that rhetoric signals–a dehumanization of an entire socioeconomic class of people—then the rhetorical becomes the reality, even though it is turtles all the way down. This, historically and through simple logic, is politics in service of crisis:

Simultaneously the narrative profusion of “crisis” events in postmillennial superhero comics symbolizes the full absorption of the comic book industry into the workings of neoliberal capital. Rather than being exceptional narrative occurrences that punctuate broader stories of fictional world making, earth-shattering crisis events–including the deaths of iconic heroes, the destruction of alien planets and star systems, the erasure of fictional timelines, and the extinction of entire populations of humans and superhumans–are now the primary storytelling mode of superhero comics. These narratives are relentlessly exploited for their ability to sell comics because of their visual spectacle and violent unmaking of fictional worlds. They embody in fantasy form the actual temporal rhythms of the neoliberal security state, which unfolds historically as a series of seemingly never-ending political crises, economic shocks, acts of local and state violence, and mass death in the name of corporate profit and upward mobility for the privileged few at the expense of the world.

Policy positions are simply vibes until they aren’t. That’s not great. The New Mutants as text gives retrospective context to how comic book media reflected society in decades past, which is useful both as a tool to understand comics but more useful as a way to use a knowledge of comics as tool to understand the culture in which it arose. I wasn’t alive in the 1970s—I don’t know that “...[i]n the early 1970s, relevance became a popular buzzword denoting a shift in comic book content from oblique narrative metaphors for social problems toward direct representations of racism and sexism, political corruption, and urban blight.” Are our current comics direct representations, or more metaphorical? Does anyone currently apply insight into our escapist media, or will it be left to future phD candidates to uncover the world-making power in Thor: Ragnarök? We are all making our modern myths, but they seem not to be drawn from fiction: politics have become the myths that make us, even when we know they are based on almost nothing at all.

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Sometimes I am reminded how delightfully unwieldy any act of interpretation is: ”[S]uperheroes position themselves flying upward, showing their social status “above” regular people–Green Arrow jumps down from high atop a pedestal to signify his travel amongst the indigent.” This is awesome, but no way can I believe this interpretation is intended–it is, however, the exact type of creative understanding that deep reading engenders and a wonderful illustration that the process, not the result, is what matters in an academic setting.

That is what The New Mutants is all about–process. You can quibble with any conclusion in the book–of course you can (and I see that like, eight percent of the goodreads reviews do just that), that is the nature of the system–but sometimes the results realize the promise of the process. Chapter Six was, to me, a delight: early parts of the book focus on The Superfriends and The Fantastic Four, milieus I have little knowledge of and less interest in. What’s the draw of The Fantastic Four? Even after this book, I still don’t understand why they have any sort of enduring popularity:

Often themselves scorned by the public they claimed to serve because of their mutant physiologies[…]the Fantastic Four were also figuratively racialized by the stigma of biological difference…The Fantastic Four narrated race in species terms by defining it as a form of biological difference from humanity…[This] conflation of the categories of race and species had the effect of flattening out the specificities of ethnoracial experience [and] rarely directly addressed the vicissitudes of U.S. racial conflict in the 1970s.”

They’re the prototypes for the X-men mutant allegory, and not really great ones. Even the entirely reactionary power-fantasy grounded, pro-authoritarian bootstrap-simulator of Dungeons & Dragons has given up their adherence to the biological distinctions of race between, say, elves, dwarves, and humans. Consider how many young nerdy white dudes internalize miscegenation solely because dwarf girls have beards. I like a classic High Fantasy story, but let us not pretend that the humble farmboy-to-Lord hero’s journey isn’t a modern myth that props up a system of implicit merit—in other words, the gospel of wealth—in those that succeed, regardless of how they got there (family connections, noble blood, inherent goodness, financial windfall, martial prowess) deserve to be there. If you try, you too can become King—provided you’ve got the midichlorians, strength in the One Power, virtue in your belief.

this comes across as comically (pun clearly intended) dickish of mr. fantastic

I am not inhuman myself, so I will admit that “It’s clobberin’ time” is a pure delight. But Mr. Fantastic? Human Torch? Miss me with that Leave It to Beaver 1950s kitsch. I can give it up for the interesting interpretation of Sue Storm, though:

In her revolutionary 1963 polemic, The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan identified the domestic housewife as a paragon of women’s social invisibility, a figure whose professional ambistions and political influence were rerouted toward the maintenance of normative family life. It would be in performing that same role that Sue Storm would become a literal invisible woman, capable of vanishing from sight at will. Unlike her teammates, who fail to identify with normative masculinity, Sue is better understood as disidentifying with proper femininity. According to Muñoz, disidentification describes an attempt to transform the limits of one’s subject position by performing it in unexpected or unpredicable ways.

Even though the vast majority of The New Mutants parses in detail comics I had no overt familiarity with, when the chapters hit upon my personalized reading list, they hit hard. Chapter Six, Consumed by Hellfire, combines perhaps the two capital-c “Comic” arcs that I know (and like) best–the arrival of Dark Phoenix and Spider-Man’s trial with the black-suit Symbiote. They are read together as a sort of representational demonic-possession narrative, and both are expanded outward to absorb prominent concerns of their era:

Jean internalizes Phoenix’s actions as her own, interpreting her consumptive desires as an effect of a flaw in her moral character, consequently absolving the institutional forces that corrupted her mind and body. This final desperate action solidifies Jean as the paragon of the neoliberal subject, forced to take personal responsibility for the institutional consequences of market rationality. As Wendy Brown elaborates, neoliberalism “configures morality entirely as a matter of rational deliberation and costs, benefits, and consequences [so that] the rationally calculating individual bears full responsibility for the consequences of his or her action no matter how severe the constraints on this action.”

Sincerely, it is awesome and amazing to interpret Dark Phoenix exploding a star and wiping out an entire civilization as metaphor for the rampant global destruction wrought by extractive capitalism. When Jean Grey personally accepts responsibility for alien mind-control—mind control being directly representational for the sociocultural pressures she has no say in effecting—I see myself recycling my plastic hummus containers while Deepwater Horizon leaks 134 million gallons of oil into the ocean. Sincerely, specters of the 1970s U.S. gas shortage still haunt our cities in 2025—“right on red” rules have certainly killed more pedestrians and trained multiple generations of drivers to be more impatient, simply to decrease idling in cars for an average of about 20 seconds per driving trip, at best. Even the Dept. of Transportation knows it sucks:

Motorists are so intent on looking for traffic approaching on their left that they may not be alert to pedestrians on their right. In addition motorists usually pull up into the crosswalk to wait for a gap in traffic, blocking pedestrian crossing movements.

Jean Grey is our pedestrian stand-in, Phoenix Force is the impatient driver blasting through a crosswalk, and yet somehow Jean blames herself for both gas being expensive and daring to cross a street while she has the right-of-way signal? Preposterous!

You can do this, too! You can think about media like this. It’s fun. No one needs to pretend outlandish things are real-life events for them to be impactful in your mind. Like, if you think the financial elite are bleeding the general citizenry dry, you don’t have to act like they literally drink blood in ritual sacrifice or harvest the hormones of indigent children. It can function as metaphor and still mean something. Flat Earth could be a stand-in for distrust in systemic education or fiat history or whatever, without actually thinking you can fall off the side of the planet (maybe?). I can accept that Phoenix eradicated a planet–and function with that as a narrative reality that impacts how I interact with the world–without believing it happened in reality. I can believe in Venom as a stand-in for the fear of downward economic mobility—of slipping from the middle class into the lower—that stokes fear, hatred, and resentment within the United States:

[Venom] represents a specifically classed figuration of the symbiote suit, the two bound by shared affective “venom” toward the people and institutions that contributed to their fall from grace. As [Eddie Brock/Venom]’s narrative suggests, it is the experience of performing the work of “lower-class” journalists that “rots” his soul, making him susceptible to the hatred, self-loathing, and resentments that drew the symbiote to him.

The-Man-Who-Would-Be-Venom was found out by Spider-Man for fabricating his journalistic work, a comics portent of The Jonah Lehrer Saga. Would Lehrer seek revenge on Spider-Man, given the power? Venom would. Venom did! But then he got kind of popular, and so became a good guy, sort of, I dunno. I am certain we have stories that serve as metaphor for the constant need to rehabilitate fictional supervillains. Can we rehabilitate someone who shoplifted trail mix from Walgreens with the same vigor as Vegeta, or is that reserved for those with mystical/physical/institutional power overwhelming?

Again, it is the process that matters–it doesn’t need to be comics, or even pop culture writ large. Anything will work, if you want to look at it in context, in scope, in detail.

Speaking of details, let’s zoom in from our cosmic expanse of the grand narrativization of all things and unravel an interesting comic thread that was revealed to me in the pages of The New Mutants: costuming. If we were to have new hero costumes that are grounded in the aesthetics of our time, right now, rather than as throwback or reference to the comic canon, what would they be? At the modern end of sartorial history, where fashion cycles back with increasing speeds to mine the microtrends with on-demand shipping and cheap labor, what are the cool mutants wearing? The New Mutants makes the point that a lot of the flashier costumes we still have–Storm is the major example–are grounded in the Disco era: Tiaras; side-cutouts; capes a plenty. The fin de siecle X-Men (2000) movie tried to create its own version of Wolverine—do you remember Hugh Jackman in basically a black bodysuit? How tedious. Even if everyone in that film dressed bland, blander, blandest, its aesthetic lack of aesthetics grounds it in its era. The “joy” of the newest Hugh Jackman Wolverine is that he’s just wearing the yellow costume popularized by the cartoon. Yawn.

You know what did a good job? Marvel Rivals. They made their own version of Wolverine without boring everyone or just re-creating what the comics did.

I think I sort of answered my own question—Marvel Rivals is what you get when you make costumes in 2025. That, however, is mostly reimaging characters that already exists. Starting from scratch, what sort of thing does a hero wear? There are always new X-men—but the X-men of the 1990s look, honestly, like the teens of today.

what year are you from? I honestly saw a kid dressed like this on the bus.

The drive from Marvel back towards the X-men, while likely mostly fuelled by rights-acquisitions from corporate megamergers, also pokes at where the prevailing culture hits:

The mutant has now become a stolid icon of neoliberal flexibility, adapting with clenched jaw and an instinct for survival to the heightened crises of late capitalism. Such crises now repeatedly include the genocide of socially undesirable or economically unviable mutant populations. Of course, representing the genocidal destruction of mutants has made billions for Marvel.

Mutancy, with its possible expression of unique powers and often un-”pass”-able physical characteristics, does feel representational again—you’re born into your class, and it will take some radical reworking of the status quo for mutants to even be allowed to eke out a living. The government, unlike in something like Captain America, isn’t there to help you. Science, unlike in the Fantastic Four or Spider-Man, won’t progress humanity into tolerance. Some people are simply born into a structure that doesn’t like them, and it’s not them who need to change, but the structure.

You might learn facts about the comics industry within the pages of The New Mutants. You might internalize some interpretive readings of classic comic storylines that will help you understand why they were appealing. But the most crucial thing The New Mutants will do is remind you that everything is equally made up. All the rules we live by, all the social mores and cultural standards we enact, all the religious texts or Golden rules we try to instill are stories meant to shift and cajole how we think about the world. That makes Phoenix as important as Johnny Appleseed or Odysseus, Jane Eyre or Winne-the-Pooh. Comics, like all stories, matter. You can learn something from anything, if you’re willing to look.