A data-driven deep dive into a legendary comics author’s subversion of gender norms within the bestselling comic of its time.

By the time Chris Claremont’s run as author of Uncanny X-Men ended in 1991, he had changed comic books forever. During his sixteen years writing the series, Claremont revitalized a franchise on the verge of collapse, shaping the X-Men who appear in today’s Hollywood blockbusters. But, more than that, he told a new kind of story, using his growing platform to articulate transgressive ideas about gender nonconformity, toxic masculinity, and female empowerment.

J. Andrew Deman’s investigation pairs close reading and quantitative analysis to examine gender representation, content, characters, and story structure. The Claremont Run compares several hundred issues of Uncanny X-Men with a thousand other Marvel comics to provide a comprehensive account of Claremont’s sophisticated and progressive gender politics. Claremont’s X-Men upended gender norms: where female characters historically served as mere eye candy, Claremont’s had leading roles and complex, evolving personalities. Perhaps more surprisingly, his male superheroes defied and complicated standards of masculinity. Groundbreaking in their time, Claremont’s comics challenged readers to see the real world differently and transformed pop culture in the process.

An examination of obsession, gender, love, and loss in contemporary rural America.

In Country Songs for Alice, a nonbinary, queer narrator passes through the crucible of love, romance, and heartbreak against the backdrop of rural America—a landscape which offers luminous belonging, even as the hazards of homophobia, loneliness, and isolation loom large. Part roadtrip, part mixtape, these poems are explorations of love, music, romance, pageantry, loneliness, and belonging in the rural places and small towns that seem to preclude queer culture. Country Songs for Alice not only tells the story of a relationship and its dissolution but reclaims country western imagery and aesthetics for a queer audience, dousing the narrator’s experience in the language of cowboys, horses, rodeos, trucks, and desert skies.
 

A book that bends time and fragments narrative.

In Small Altars, Justin Gardiner delves into the world of comic books and superheroes as a means for coming to terms with the many struggles of his brother’s life, as well as his untimely death, offering a lyric and honest portrayal of the tolls of mental illness, the redemptive powers of art and familial love, and the complex workings of grief.  
 

An examination of the art in superhero comics and how style influences comic narratives.

For many, the idea of comic book art implies simplistic four-color renderings of stiff characters slugging it out. In fact, modern superhero comic books showcase a range of complex artistic styles, with diverse connotations. Leading comics scholar Jeffrey A. Brown assesses six distinct approaches to superhero illustration—idealism, realism, cute, retro, grotesque, and noir—examining how each visually represents the superhero as a symbolic construct freighted with meaning.

Whereas comic book studies tend to focus on text and narrative, Super Bodies gives overdue credit to the artwork, which is not only a principal source of the appeal of comic books but also central to the values these works embody. Brown argues that superheroes are to be taken not as representations of people but as iconic types, and the art conveys this. Even the most realistic comic illustrations are designed to suggest not persons but ideas—ideas about bodies and societies. Thus the appearance of superheroes both directly and indirectly influences the story being told as well as the opinions readers form concerning justice, authority, gender, puberty, sexuality, ethnicity, violence, and other concepts central to political and cultural life.