Description
Book SynopsisWinner —2024 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awardsin Best Academic/Scholarly Work, announced atSan Diego Comic-Con International (2024)
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 hund
Trade Review
If you were ever curious how much each X-Man talks or thinks on the page, Deman’s book has cataloged and applied it in an essay written with deep love and admiration. It’s the perfect complement for anyone looking to revisit Claremont’s run or read his enduring stories for the first time. -- Eric Vilas-Boas * Vulture *
Deman’s book offers us extended meditations on gender in the X-Men. It is a masterful work on the ways Claremont’s run is not only iconic, but achieves a level of gender subversion at a time when comics stood by traditional masculine and feminine roles . . . this is an excellent work of scholarship showing the ways public and academic scholarship can meet to open up new perspectives on works of popular culture. * International Journal of Comic Art Blog *
Table of Contents
- Foreword. A Danger Room of One’s Own by Jay Edidin
- Introduction. X-Women to Watch Out For
- Chapter 1. Jean, Moira, and the Archetypal “Claremont Woman”
- Chapter 2. Storm: From Mother Goddess to Resolutely Indefinable
- Chapter 3. Ladies Night and the Second Generation of Claremont Women
- Chapter 4. She Makes Him Nervous: Cyclops’s Baseline Masculinity and the Exchange of Gender Power
- Chapter 5. Wolverine as Subversive Masculine Paradigm
- Chapter 6. A Spectrum of “Men”: Refracting Masculinities through Nightcrawler and Havok
- Conclusion. A Legacy in Waiting
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- References
- Index
