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

Slowly, but surely, American comics are being studied as a serious medium by scholars in academia. For a long time, along with science fiction, comics were seen as juvenile and not seen as worthy of studying and critiquing in a serious way. But since about the mid-1990s that has started to change with more and more academics studying comics in a serious way and providing us with academic rigorous books. This one focuses on that changing decades of the 1970s and the 1960s. By looking at comics created a bit before, in the 1950s, but mainly focused on the likes of The Fantastic Four, X-Men, and a few others Ramzi Fawaz looks at how these titles looked at society at large and the changing nature of America and what it means to be an American. This will go a long way towards making comics an acceptable medium of study in academia.

Since this is still a brand new genre of study most of these early books focus on the major publishers, DC and Marvel, and the big titles. What I would like to see in the future is start to look at indie titles, and also comics coming out of Europe as well.