The New Mutants

Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics

Ramzi Fawaz

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781479823499
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How fantasy meets reality as popular culture evolves and ignites postwar gender, sexual, and race revolutions. 2017 The Association for the Studies of the Present Book Prize Finalist Mention, 2017 Lora Romero First Book Award Presented by the American Studies Association Winner of the 2012 CLAGS Fellowship Award for Best First Book Project in LGBT Studies 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 – including The Justice League of America, The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, and The New Mutants –alongside late 20th century fan writing, cultural criticism, and political documents, Fawaz reveals how the American superhero modeled new forms of social belonging that counterculture youth would embrace in the 1960s and after. The New Mutants provides the first full-length study to consider the relationship between comic book fantasy and radical politics in the modern United States.

1. The Family of Superman: The Superhero Team and the Promise of Universal Citizenship

All men are brothers. Being endowed with reason and conscience, they are members of one family. They are free, and possess equal dignity and rights.

—DRAFT OF “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (June 1947)

Maybe that’s what our world needs—simple understanding among men, no matter what their race, color or creed!

—WONDER WOMAN, The Justice League of America #15 (November 1962)

Dear Editor: The Justice League of America is more than just a comic book. . . . It is every police force, every detective, and every citizen that upholds law and order. A spark of hope, a dash of faith and a lot of trust in human nature are all the Justice League members. They are constantly proving that the world can be a much better place to live in.

—DANNY ANDERSON, letter to the editor, The Justice League of America #15 (November 1962)

In the spring of 1991, with an Iranian fatwa weighing on his shoulders, Salman Rushdie issued a statement defending the novel.1 Against conservative claims of the “ungodly” character of contemporary literature, the same kinds of charges that had made the Booker Prize–winning author a target for assassination, he celebrated the novel as an exceptionally democratic literary form. According to Rushdie, the open-ended storytelling conventions of the novel—including its capacity for sustained character development and narration across historical time and space—allowed for a cacophony of worldviews to exist side by side in a single text, providing readers with multiple perspectives on reality. Near his conclusion he invoked a beloved literature of his youth, American superhero comic books, as an example of narrative fiction’s ability to reorient one’s outlook on the world:

Among the childhood books I devoured and kissed were large numbers of cheap comics. . . . The heroes of these comics books were . . . almost always mutants or hybrids or freaks: as well as the Batman and the Spiderman there was Aquaman, who was half-fish, and of course Superman, who could easily be mistaken for a bird or a plane. In those days, the middle 1950s, the super-heroes were all . . . hawkish law and order conservatives, leaping to work in response to the Police Commissioner’s Bat-Signal, banding together to form the Justice League of America, defending what Superman called “truth, justice and the American way.” . . . In spite of this extreme emphasis on crime-busting, the lesson they taught children . . . was the perhaps unintentionally radical truth that exceptionality was the greatest and most heroic of values; that those who were unlike the crowd were to be treasured . . . that this exceptionality was a treasure so great and so easily misunderstood that it had to be concealed, in ordinary life, beneath what the comic books called a “secret identity.”

Rushdie then compared the novelist to the “freakish, hybrid, mutant, exceptional beings” that were superheroes. He suggested that in a world where writers were persecuted for exercising literature’s capacity to depict a different way of life or present political alternatives to the present, a novel might function as an author’s heroic “secret identity,” a material expression of the writer’s superhuman ability to recast the world anew for readers from all backgrounds.2

How did it come to be that a cultural form so deeply associated with American nationalism and white masculinity—the superhero comic book—could be marshaled by an Indian British writer in defense of transnational literature in the early 1990s? Rushdie’s unlikely reference to the culture of superhero comics at midcentury points to a largely untold story about the historical and creative circumstances that made the superhero available as an icon of exceptionality and difference in post–World War II America. During the same years that Rushdie’s childhood imagination was swept up by tales of superheroic adventure, a creative renaissance in superhero storytelling was transforming a figure of juvenile fantasy into an embodiment of the values of postwar internationalism and human rights. Throughout the late 1950s what Rushdie referred to as comic books’ “extreme emphasis on crime-busting” increasingly gave way to stories about the development of international, and intergalactic, solidarities between previously independent heroic vigilantes to combat a variety of threats to global peace and security. Where previously these heroes were exceptional due to their superhuman abilities, now their exceptionality stemmed from being “citizens of the world.”3

No comic book helped reinvent the superhero as a global citizen more than The Justice League of America (1960). The Justice League narrated the adventures of a cadre of superpowered crime fighters who join forces as Earth’s guardians—among them DC Comics’ iconic heroes Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. It was one of the first postwar comics to revitalize the concept of an ongoing alliance between individual superheroes, and it helped the superhero team to become the most popular figuration of the genre in the second half of the twentieth century.

In this chapter, I develop a case study of The Justice League of America between 1960 and 1965 that shows how the comic book transformed the superhero from an icon of American nationalism to a champion of internationalism and universal citizenship. Even as they operated under the assumed banner of “America,” the Justice League members articulated their ethical commitment to the world in universal terms, refusing to limit their heroic service to anyone based on national origin, geographical location, or ethnoracial identity. This was impressed upon readers in the opening scene of the series’ first issue. In this sequence the Justice League member Flash encounters two extraterrestrial refugees, Saranna and Jasonar, fleeing a maniacal despot who has overtaken their alien home world. The Flash is initially introduced to readers in his civilian identity as policeman Barry Allen; just before he meets the alien exiles, he transforms into his heroic alter ego, a red-clad superhuman speedster. After hearing Saranna and Jasonar’s plight, the Flash reassures his companions, “Don’t give up hope! The Justice League of America has been fighting for liberty and justice on Earth—why not for a dimensional world? Perhaps we can help.”4 Where minutes before, the Flash had been an ordinary protector of law and order in a small American town, now, as a member of the Justice League of America, an intergalactic peacekeeping force, he speaks for anyone in need of aid across the galaxy.

A decade earlier comic book superheroes would not have brandished such grandiose claims to protecting the universe from tyrannical threats. The Golden Age heroes of the World War II era were resolutely nationalist in their vision of justice, fighting homegrown criminal masterminds and limited international threats to national security.5 Now The Justice League of America dramatized the conflicting relationship between national and postnational forms of citizenship by framing the team members as putative Americans, while linking the League’s commitment to political freedom with the interests of all life forms in the universe. It did so by visualizing the teammates’ civilian and superheroic identities as metaphors for their dual loyalties to national and global forms of citizenship. As civilians, the Justice League members were U.S. citizens; as superheroes, they were citizens of the world.

Central to The Justice League’s vision of intergalactic justice was a conception of science and technology as vehicles for cross-cultural understanding and humanitarian action. Despite their extraordinary powers, the members of the Justice League repeatedly defeat their foes using scientific know-how and ingenuity, displaying the universal application of science as both an instrument of justice and a transferable body of knowledge that can be shared between superheroes and ordinary people alike. The valorization of science as a form of knowledge that can be applied universally worked hand in hand with the series’ vision of postnational affiliation by locating scientific knowledge as a bridge between the Justice League and the wider world it served. By articulating the relationship between science and citizenship as a prerequisite to global service, The Justice League was the first comic series to make the superhero available as a popular fantasy for critiquing cold war nationalism and the state’s use of science as a tool of American military supremacy.

Late 1950s “team books” like The Justice League and DC’s Legion of Super-Heroes (1958) capitalized on readers’ eagerness to buy comics showcasing greater visual action among multiple heroes in a single story. Yet the resurgent popularity of superhero comic books in the early 1960s following more than a decade of declining readership cannot be explained merely by the presence of additional characters or the pandering of comic book creators to reader preference. After all, The Justice League was a remake of an earlier 1940s series, The Justice Society of America, which depicted a team of vigilante heroes who join forces to combat local criminal menaces none are capable of defeating alone. Despite its popularity in the immediate postwar period, The Justice Society went the way of most superhero comics in the 1950s that were indefinitely suspended due to reader disinterest. Why, then, did the return of the team book inspire resurgent interest in superhero comics in the early 1960s? While it paid homage to its creative predecessor, The Justice League presented the superhero team as a self-governing political body that engaged the world outside the urban stomping grounds of each member, and well beyond the borders of the nation. Consequently The Justice League offered a sustained exploration of the conflict between loyalty to national citizenship and a broader commitment to global justice. This conflict defined postwar American liberalism, an ideology that simultaneously aimed to bring about universal political freedom while stamping the future of self-determining peoples with the seal of Americanism.6 It was this contradiction between the political impulses of worldly egalitarianism and national economic and political interest that a new generation of readers responded to in their return to a mode of storytelling that had long been dismissed as childish escapism.

Against a traditional understanding of national citizenship as a legal relationship to the state, The Justice League posited “ethical citizenship” as a form of belonging based on an individual’s performance of good deeds that promote global peace and solidarity while “making the world a better place to live.” By presenting the Justice League members as paragons of ethical citizenship, the series offered a vision of postnational political affiliation that worked against the narrow frame of cold war antagonisms. The series opposed the cold war politics of containment by activating a competing strain of liberal thought grounded in postwar internationalist initiatives, such as the Atlantic Charter, the United Nations, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the wake of the atrocities of total war and the Nazi final solution, these treatises and institutions framed the rights of all human beings to peace, prosperity, and economic opportunity as superseding the interests of national citizenship.7

The Justice League embodied these values in the teammates’ dual identities as literal or figurative immigrants to the United States who maintain multiple loyalties to the human race and their own home worlds. The original Justice League roster included the iconic heroes Wonder Woman, a mythical, warrior princess of the Amazons gifted with superhuman strength, speed, agility, and invulnerability; Martian Manhunter, a shape-shifting Martian possessing the ability to fly, enhanced senses, and extraordinary strength; Flash, a superhuman speedster able to move faster than the speed of sound; Green Lantern, an ordinary man chosen by the alien Guardians of Oa to wear a power ring that materializes anything its wearer imagines; Aquaman, the super strong sea king, able to communicate with all marine life and control the Earth’s oceans; and Green Arrow, an archer and gymnast of unparalleled accuracy and physical agility who gained his “powers” through exceptional training. The classic heroes Batman and Superman served as auxiliary members, with other DC heroes, including the size-shifting Atom and the winged aviator Hawkman, joining the team in later adventures.

Questioning the assumed “American” character of this diverse group of heroes, one reader wrote to the editors, “I believe the name Justice League of America isn’t right. It should be Interplanetary League of Justice. Let’s consider J’onn J’onnz—is he really an American? Hardly! We all know he was born on Mars! Superman is a native of the planet Krypton. You’d have to stretch a long point to consider Aquaman an American. And of course Wonder Woman’s birthplace is the Amazon Paradise Island.” Despite the heroes’ un-American origins, the editors stressed, “It’s not the birthplace of our super-heroes that counts—it’s their allegiance to their ‘adopted’ country.”8 Here the editors highlighted a contradiction at the heart of the Justice League’s vision of ethical citizenship: even as that they sought to reaffirm the League members’ American affiliations, they stressed the voluntaristic quality of national citizenship, recalling the language of Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that “everyone has the right to a nationality,” and “no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.”9

On one hand, then, the League members were framed as ideal immigrants, “adopting” the American way of life and offering loyalty to a national government; on the other, their performance of global civic acts suggested that assimilating to any nation or community was a willful choice individuals could make, or unmake, at their discretion. The series’ ambivalent attachment to a distinctly American form of political freedom even as it appeared to espouse postnational humanitarian values reflected its continued commitment to liberal thought—particularly the values of self-determination, freedom from institutional coercion, and scientific rationalism—alongside an egalitarian vision of human action taken in the name of a collective good. In this sense the Justice League’s reinvention of the superhero sought to recuperate an increasingly insular and self-interested American liberalism by articulating it to the concept of universal human rights.

“To Fight All Foes of Humanity!” The Justice League’s Universalism

The Justice League of America was introduced to readers in the March 1960 issue of The Brave and the Bold, a variety adventure serial. In their first story the newly formed Justice League face off against an alien menace, Starro the Conqueror, a giant, space-faring starfish in search of material resources to feed its boundless hunger for energy. “Starro the Conqueror” was arguably the first superhero comic book narrative to present a villain capable of obliterating life on Earth, expanding the scope of superhero storytelling to include the entire planet as well as life throughout the cosmos. The depiction of a colossal starfish as a menace to mankind might have seemed ridiculous were it not for the real threat of nuclear holocaust in this period, which many assumed would wipe out life on Earth and mutate plant and animal life into monstrously enlarged forms. In this context Starro was a genuinely fearful allegory for the potential destructive outcomes of atomic warfare. The global scope of Starro’s plan to eliminate humankind and ravage the planet’s resources is counterbalanced by the distinctly American locus of its malevolent activities: as the narrative unfolds, Starro seeks to access America’s nuclear arsenal to foment a global atomic war that will release extraordinary amounts of radiation it can absorb as a source of energy. At the same time as it fights for the survival of mankind, the Justice League must protect America’s military resources and secure its borders against an alien threat.

This contradiction between global guardianship and national security would form the conceptual core of the series and is vividly displayed in the comic book’s opening splash panel (plate 1). At the center of the page appears Starro’s five-tentacled body, its long arms extending to the edges of the spread. Seven circles frame its limbs, featuring silhouettes of each of the Justice League’s members....