Book review - Conversations with Lynn Johnston

 review by Neale Barnholden

McLaughlin, Jeff (ed.). Conversations with Lynn Johnston. University Press of Mississippi, 2026. https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Conversations-with-Lynn-Johnston

 Readers of Lynn Johnston's For Better or For Worse have always located an interest in "the truth behind the work" in Johnston's personal life, as Jeff McLaughlin's volume of sixteen interviews with the cartoonist makes clear. With eight interviews conducted during the run of the strip and eight afterwards, the most consistent throughline is Johnston's account of how readers from her children's friends to strangers around the world interpreted the strip as a version of her own life. In a way that's what the strip was designed to do: at one point John
ston figures her own work as suiting the syndicate's need for a comic strip by a woman that (unlike Cathy Guisewite's Cathy) was about family life. Guisewite, an early mentor, told Johnston to make sure that, unlike Cathy, she didn't end up sharing a name with her character. Nonetheless the strip, arising from Johnston's cartooning about her own life for her OB-GYN and his other patients, retained an authenticity that has led many to read it as a kind of roman a cléf about a specific family in addition to a well-observed strip about families in general. Regarding the fictional Pattersons as the real Johnstons is by far the most common reading of the strip, for good or ill. In a surprisingly revealing interview with Tom Heintjes of Hogan's Alley, Johnston, her parents now deceased, is candid about her mother's history of physical abuse of Johnston and her siblings. This makes it even more interesting that McLaughlin's collected interviews twice mention For Better or For Worse portraying father John spanking his son Michael, based apparently on a real incident. In a 1980 interview John's real analogue expresses his discomfort with it (6), and a 1983 strip showing the same scenario was later redrawn as part of Johnston's revisiting (xvii). It shows the complexity of Johnston's work that this is both profoundly important and true to life, and also that it later came to seem like it didn't belong.

Over the years the main theme of the interviews—that the strip is Johnston's real life—takes on many different aspects. Youngest Patterson child April, the Millennial of the family and the only one born during the strip's run, has no real life analogue. This let Johnston use ideas that would have embarrassed her actual children (119). On the other hand, when her real husband Rod, a dentist and implicit model for fictional father John Patterson, had a marriage-ending affair near the end of the strip's run, Johnston wavered in another way between the character and his model, musing in 2014 that she would "bump off the husband" if she followed the strip into the future, "and I know exactly how to do it" (95). In the event, the last regular FBoFW strip has John and Elly reaffirm their marriage vows, suggesting Johnston's balancing act between fantasy and reality, or the more elusive comedy and drama.

Another source for For Better and For Worse is Johnston's observations of her friends and family. A remarkable phenomenon described at many points is Johnston's sense that she knows her characters as one would know a friend. The epitomal example is her decision to have Michael Patterson's friend Lawrence come out as gay. Angry over homophobic reaction to the murder of her own gay childhood friend, comedian Michael Vadeboncoeur, Johnston decided to write a gay child into her strip in 1993. This plot is described many times in this volume, sometimes delving into Johnston's decision to respond to her calmer hate mail, sometimes focusing on the business of newspapers dropping the strip, sometimes on readers seeing rare representation of their own or their child's experience. In the context of the strip, it always shows Johnston's admirable if depressingly timeless commitment to showing the reality of life. Significantly, the storyline isn't ultimately wish fulfillment or grim drama.

In one revealing incident bringing together authenticity, comic strips, and Johnston's own life, Johnston recalls reading comic strips as a child on her grandfather's lap, and reacting against his criticism of Charles Schulz' writing of child characters dialogue. To his remark that "no child has these thoughts", Johnston recalls thinking "We may not have the same words, but we have the same thoughts and the same feelings." Schulz later became a friend of Johnston's, but his approach to realism stayed psychological, and early  in her own strip Johnston made the key decision to age the characters in real time, parting ways from the majority of family strips. This moment is also discussed frequently, but for what must be one of the most consequential artistic choices of Johnston's life, it goes strangely unexamined. The reader is left with the impression that Johnston did it primarily to keep a flow of inspiration from her own growing children (fixed at several years older than the fictional ones). Another famous incident (as a child, I owned the book memorial) shows a stark divergence with Schulz' style, as family dog Farley dies heroically saving April from drowning. Schulz was deeply upset at the idea, first threatening to send Snoopy to the hospital on the same week so that nobody would pay attention to Johnston's work, then raving to Johnston about how "stupid" the little girl was to play on the creek. We might think of Schulz as the hallmark of a new age of comics' psychological realism—and the recent 50th anniversary of Peanuts certainly suggests this in its interest in Schulz' own private life—but Johnston's mix of life's good and bad is very different. Johnston's people grow up, and with that, can die.

Different interviewers seem to approach Johnston in her different facets, and reveal different responses. It's to McLaughlin's credit that he found interviews taking Johnston in somewhat different ways. She positions her strip as a feminist deconstruction of family strips written by working husbands (217)—think of the number of classic strip gags about men coming home from work, vs the number about cleaning up the house. In another sense her significance is the ongoing drama of the characters and the realism that flows from that. Still again, to some her Canadianness is important, and Johnston describes an early editor warning her to never use Canadianisms (254), thankfully overruled by other (American) editors.

This reminded me of the curious conversation at the beginning of American author Rainbow Rowell's 2011 novel Attachments, where two newspaper employees debate whether For Better or For Worse takes place in Canada. They locate part of the pleasure of the strip in the apparent riddle of whether today's installment will finally feature a bag of milk or a chesterfield. In reality the question seems quite obvious as Johnston's inspiration is exclusively from her time in North Vancouver, Lynn Lake, Hamilton, and other Canadian locations. Only the volume's Canadian editor Jeff McLaughlin, in an excellent capstone to the volume, asks about the strips' portrayal of Indigenous characters in a prolonged storyline set in a northern Manitoba community, receiving an answer that interestingly inverts the logic of Lawrence's homosexuality, in that Johnston did it to share a culture she expected her readers to know nothing about. Johnston's belief that settler Canadians are appalling unaware of indigenous culture and communities is rooted in her own experience and seemingly proven by this being the sole mention of the storyline.

McLaughlin's foreword notes that few interviews from during the strip's run were substantial, and also remarks that they were very repetitively focused on the same storylines (Lawrence coming out and Farley dying evidently); as a result the bulk of the book is retrospective. Johnston, however, is a complicated figure for temporality, having ended her strip with a years-long revision of her earlier work, to an extent that reminded me of Hergé's wholesale redraws of his work (with at least one motive for Johnston being the same as Hergé, the evolution of her drawing style). As with the best of the Conversations volumes, the interest for scholars is both the authorial voice and the intriguing threads to pull on. For my part, having recently read many Peanuts retrospectives, I was struck by the fact that Johnston, like Schulz, suffered from a neurological condition giving her a hand tremor—this despite the fact that unlike Schulz her art grew noticeable finer and more detailed over the years. Where Schulz' tremor has received some scholarly attention, I'm unaware of any medical interest in Johnston's work. And on the same lines, Johnston's career turn from medical illustration to cartooning is an interesting juxtaposition—and reminded me that Fred Kelly, a Canadian comics great of a different generation, made the exact opposite switch. While this volume would be fascinating and useful to fans of the strip, it is also an invaluable resource for scholars looking at what is indisputably one of the most important Canadian comics ever.

As a last note, it's made clear in this volume that Johnston was one of the last cartoonists to work with a two-decade long syndication contract, which enabled her work to sprawl for years and reach a relatively huge audience, even as it forced her to a rigid schedule of production and made her answerable to editors. A standout roundtable with Raina Telgemeier and Kate Beaton suggests a link between Johnston's work and the later prominence of memoirs in the graphic novel form. For Better or For Worse is perhaps the only daily newspaper strip to be so clearly recognizable as an ancestor of the form. I wouldn't suggest McLaughlin's selected interviews "reveal" For Better or For Worse as the memoir so many readers took it as, but I think some incidents make it clear that it was dedicated to a realism that approached memoir. For her part, as this book amply shows, Johnston has spent a career both acknowledging the authenticity of her strip, as well as disclaiming any one-to-one relationship between the Pattersons and her own family—and in a later interview, is magnanimous and generous to her the memory of her abusive mother. This book is a testament to the complexity of Johnston's work, a complexity connected directly to her conviction that gay children and overworked mothers (and dead dogs, and goofy sound effects) simply exist and are a part of life, which sadly continues to be a lesson worth teaching. "It's just stuff," Johnston remarks, introducing what seems like an alternate title to her strip: "Stuff that happens to everybody" (68).

 

Book Review — Hip-Hop and Comics

 Reviewed by Fer García, El Comicólogo

Howard, Sheena C., Justin D. Burton, and Brea M. Heidelberg, eds. Hip-Hop and Comics. University Press of Mississippi, 2026. 280 pp. $34.95. https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/H/Hip-Hop-and-Comics

 Even for those of us who consider ourselves deeply versed in sequential art history and well-acquainted with hip-hop culture, reading Hip Hop and Comics feels like stepping into a room where two familiar worlds reveal an unsuspected, shared architecture. We often think of these mediums as merely friendly neighbors, a Marvel variant cover here, an album art homage there. Yet this volume demonstrates that their relationship runs far deeper, bound together by the fundamental art of constructing a public persona. In both realms, the creation of an avatar, an alter ego, or a masked identity is not just a stylistic trope, but a survival strategy and a performative stage for navigating visibility, community, and social critique.

 However, mapping the history of two distinct, massive cultural movements creates an immediate tension between grassroots authenticity and academic framing. Scholarly collections risk over-intellectualizing what was originally born out of raw, spontaneous street-level expression. Editors Sheena C. Howard, Justin D. Burton, and Brea M. Heidelberg navigate this contradiction by anchoring the book’s early chapters in the physical realities of self-determination. The historical baseline established by Howard’s analysis of Eric Orr’s self-published Rappin’ Max Robot in 1986 and Darryl McDaniels’ DMC imprint matters because it repositions comics not as mere commercial merchandise, but as tools of raw independence.

This opens up a broader realization: at their core, both hip-hop and comics share a radically low barrier to entry. To make a statement, a cartoonist historically needed little more than a pencil, paper, and access to a photocopier -- a line of direct expression that today translates into a social media feed accessible across the globe. By connecting New York’s early underground print culture to public graffiti murals and grassroots comic making in contemporary India, the anthology proves that sequential art and hip-hop are twin social reactions to immediate economic and political environments. The jump from 1980s South Bronx to modern South Asia might initially feel geographically vast, but it reinforces the thesis that these mediums are global dialects of localized resistance.

 This suggests that corporate adaptations of Black culture must be examined with a far sharper critical lens. The middle section of the anthology turns toward Marvel Comics, examining the push-and-pull between pulp authenticity and corporate appropriation. While chapters analyzing Luke Cage and Hollywood cinematic adaptations offer useful critiques of how corporate media sanitizes the political edge of hip-hop and Black masculinity, the theoretical momentum truly hits its stride when contributor Stephen J. Tyson Jr. unpacks formal storytelling techniques. Seeing how comic page rhythms, panel arrangements, and visual sampling directly mirror hip-hop beat-making and sampling techniques offers an illuminating framework for how two different art forms communicate through shared structural mechanics.

 Where the book becomes most urgent, however, is in its rigorous interrogation of media, performance, and masculinity. The analysis contrasting Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks with white-created mainstream satires like The Boys feels particularly vital in our contemporary moment. In an era increasingly impacted by reactionary online subcultures and the toxic posturing of the "manosphere," these chapters illustrate how distorted notions of Black masculinity are constructed, performed, and challenged. Satirical comics and hip-hop culture become essential lenses through which these destructive tropes can be dissected and dismantled.

 Similarly, Johnny Jones’s chapter on the late Daniel Dumile (MF DOOM) and his adoption of the Dr. Victor Von Doom persona offers a profound meditation on grief, trauma, and identity. It demonstrates how a real-world artist can inhabit a supervillain's metal mask to build an impenetrable armor against industry exploitation while processing personal loss. Here, the comic book icon is not a corporate brand, but a living vessel for artistic self-preservation.

 This suggests that Hip Hop and Comics is ultimately designed for a specific academic audience. Potential readers seeking a light, casual coffee-table book on comic art homage or superhero pop culture may find themselves weighed down by the volume's dense sociological framework. The text demands active engagement with critical theory, cultural studies, and gender analysis. It stands as an indispensable, challenging work for music historians, sociologists, intersectional scholars, and academic theorists who want to understand how marginalized communities construct identity, resist systemic power, and speak truth through sound and line.

Book Review: Conversations with Rick Veitch

 Reviewed by Joe Hilliard

Conversations with Rick Veitch, edited by Brannon Costello, University Press of Mississippi, 2025. 226 pages. $25 paperback, $110 hardcover. https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Conversations-with-Rick-Veitch

Conversations with Rick Veitch is the 34th volume in University Press of Mississippi's “Conversations with Comic Artists” Series. It follows the structure of previous volumes with an introductory overview essay, a chronology of the creator's life and career, and then a collection of interviews in chronological order, starting with the oldest from 1987 to a 2023 interview with the editor, Brannon Costello. Costello frames it all neatly in that introduction: "Veitch is both a shrewd observer of the pitfalls of the marketplace and an eloquent spokesman for the boundless potential of creativity." (x) And that's what makes this book so compelling. Not just Veitch's observations, but the consistency of his opinions over those 35 years. There are several strands that run throughout and intertwine with each other. As Veitch puts it: "[l]ike say you wanted to get a handle on the quantum, you might be able to through dreaming, because on the deepest level, we are made up of quantum bits, so why wouldn't we be able to dream about how we interact in the quantum realm?" (75-76)

And it's best to start with Veitch himself, as both an outsider looking in and insider looking out. His life really encapsulates the comic book world from the early-70s to the present: from underground comix creator to student of the first class at the Joe Kubert School of Cartooning, to mainstream books like Swamp Thing and Aquaman at DC, to his around-the-world of independents with Alan Moore, to self-publishing, to educational comic work, to his newest ebooks. It's interesting to see even as he works on the production side, as detailed in the 1963 interviews and his discussions on self-publishing, he talks of the art, not the business. In 1992, a prescient Veitch is looking forward, seeing what the corporate beast is up to. "People in twentieth-century America live, eat, breather, and defecate superheroes. All the time. Without even thinking about it. But the only problem with that is nearly all the superheroes are owned – lock, stock, and work-for-hire – by a few major companies who have no reason to evolve their characters beyond a certain adolescent level. And if this archetype is as vital and important as I think it is to our culture, then it has to grow. To keep it stifled is in a way to keep our whole culture stifled." (43) His constant concern with the art form, not the business, permeates the interviews, and indeed, his life. "My goal has always been to promote the art form, to explore the art form, to feed the art form, and maybe the collapse or the semicollapse that we're watching now is actually a good thing, because maybe new ways to get comics from creators to readers will develop." (155) This is Veitch in 2021 talking about the covid-caused collapse of Diamond Comics well before its final 2025 implosion. Veitch has consistently had his finger on the pulse of the comic world. "The people who run the business in comics are not thinking about the art form." (155) And the art is preeminent to Veitch.

Intrinsically tied to his view of the art form is Veitch's work in dreams. His dream comics, his most personal work, rolls directly from his early reading of Jung to the present. "It's deeper than that, a unique art statement providing a fifty-year record of the dreams of a modern human being that culminates in a real transformation late in life. For anyone who is searching for the meaning in their interior lives, it provides a model and, more importantly, a reason to keep going. Decades of dreamworking churn through all of the bullshit we have accumulated and open a door to something really beautiful and indelible." (189) It's where the art comes from. His Roarin' Rick's Rare Bit Fiends goes deep into that well, exploring not just his dreams, but that of other creators. Indeed, he see dreams as a source, that quantum connection. "If Keith Richards got the base riff for "Satisfaction" in a dream, he's still the author. Now there are a couple of possibilities there. One is, it's something he heard a bazillion years ago and it just sort of surfaced, it came back. The other possibility is that music is a mystic realm, where this stuff all exists. I like to think of it that way." (82) That view is echoed in Jenny Boyd's Musicians in Tune: Seventy-Five Contemporary Musicians Discuss the Creative Process (Fireside, 1992) where she quotes Richards: "I don't sit down and try and write songs, I wake up in the middle of the night, and I've dreamt half of it. … I am not saying I write them all in my dreams – but that's the ideal way." (Boyd, 102) For some artists, dreams are the backbone of self, and creation.

This leads directly into the next major theme of Veitch's conversations. Fundamentally, he sees community as necessary for the continued development of comics, as not just an art form, but in any form. "We want everybody to succeed; we want the art form to grow. We want everybody to have a chance at doing it. Manhattan publishing is much more about straight capitalism, selfishness; everybody's in it for themselves. If you can screw your buddy, you've got to do it." (98) Going back to his time with Joe Kubert, at the beginning of his career, Veitch expands that communal aspect. "We [Kubert and Veitch] would sit, and I’d pitch an idea to him, and the two of us would start playing with it. That's when I first really learned the pleasures of collaboration, where two people kind of surrender their egos to the story itself. It's not about who comes up with the idea that gets used. It's that it's the right idea for that story." (207) It's a mentality he goes back to again and again. Not I. We. As he notes in discussing his 1980s work with Alan Moore, John Totleben, and Stephen Bissette. "It was like, We gotta fix this, this is a beautiful American – worldwide – art from, and it's being strangled by business practices. So that's the difference. We were ambitious for ourselves to a point, but I think we were more ambitious for the art form itself." (119) When Americans used to think bigger about what society could do, should do, as he reflects on his own art education, and getting into the Kubert school. "This is back when our government actually would step in and help people when there was unemployment." (86)

Editor Brannon Costello neatly ties Vietch’s career together with last interview, pulling these disparate thoughts into one beautiful knot. Quoting Vietch's Azoth: "[F]antasies are all about generating wish-fulfillment scenarios for our fears and desires. But imagination tackles reality head on. We use our imaginations to build things, solve problems, make art." (214). Leave it to Veitch for the final word, looking to the future, dreaming the future as he always has.

"I see myself as an artist now who, instead of doing dystopian things, needs to do things to provide solutions to the problems of our world, or at least provide a spiritual direction for people to look toward to find a meaning in their lives." (200)

Book Review: Critical Directions in Comics Studies edited by Thomas Giddens

Critical Directions in Comics Studies. Thomas Giddens, editor. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020. <https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Critical-Directions-in-Comics-Studies>

 Book Review by Stephanie Burt, Professor of English, Harvard University

In our experience, matter ordinarily comes in three varieties: solid, liquid, gas. Critical approaches to an art form come in three varieties too: first, fan takes and essays aimed for those who already care about the primary texts. Think film-fan magazines, or letter columns, and then The Comics Journal; think Samuel Johnson’s essays, too. These can be a gas: they circulate rapidly, though-- confined to periodicals-- they may not stick around.

Second come more ambitious and more formal explanations, either showing new audiences how to take the art form seriously, or else laying out tool sets other critics can use. In our field that’s Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics; in another it might include E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel. These takes often demonstrate canon formation too, along with counter-canons, anti-canons, and anti-formalist populism (think Pauline Kael). They are the liquids of critical thinking: some move slowly and smoothly, some try to cover everything, and they rarely vanish into thin air.

Third come the books and articles after a canon, a working history, and a formal vocabulary have solidified. Extended works of criticism respond to earlier works; models from other disciplines sometimes alien to practitioners—Continental philosophy, say, or data analysis—build out a robust academic field, taking part in continuing debates that exceed one art form’s discursive world.

Critical Directions in Comics Studies is by these standards a very solid book. “Critical” in the title connotes not only literary and comics criticism (though that too), but self-conscious multidisciplinary approaches to an academic field, with overtones of critical legal studies, Continental Marxist thought, and other radical critique. Its best parts will lead almost any comics critic to ideas they might not otherwise have find.

If there’s a through-line, it comes from legal studies (five of thirteen contributors, including editor Giddens, come from the law): comics, according to much of this volume, reveal the assumptions that underpin modern society by breaking its stated or unstated rules. Christopher Pizzino’s opening chapter adds a persuasive reading of Kyle Baker’s magnificent Nat Turner (1986), with its frame-breaking, texture-heavy pages, to a perhaps unhistorical broader claim. There’s something especially mediated, material, embodied about a comic book, Pizzino suggests, so that “its great theme is violation,” whereas—with its disembodied prose—“the novel is on the side of the law.” (p. 27) Pizzino supports this contrast via the anticomics discourse of the 1950s. But almost every moral panic around a new art form has ventured similar claims: the new art (whatever it is) excites readers’ bodies, rather than guiding their minds. Consider video games in the 1980s, or Gothic novels via Northanger Abbey (1803). Pizzino’s emphasis on physical pages also raises questions: is the stunningly successful webcomic Check, Please! not embodied? Or not a comic?

Yasemin Erden gets more reliable results in her serious reading of (wait for it…) Marvel’s Deadpool, “a being without an essential nature” (p. 61) whose utter, disorienting, ridiculous freedom makes him an existentialist antihero, his “identity tied up with the breaking of things generally: of rules, of people, of walls.” (p. 69) (OK, but what makes him funny?)  Maggie Gray offers a careful history of comics-making at the countercultural 1970s Birmingham Arts Lab, with its anti-elitist, anti-commercial mission, “distributing expertise… and democratizing culture and media.” (p. 123) And Matthew J. A. Green examines Utopian visions in Mary and Bryan Talbot’s The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia (2016), a graphic novel about Louise Michel, who took part in the Paris Commune of 1870 and ended up in New Caledonia. Non-UK readers may, and should, discover the intricacies of the Talbots’ joint works here.

Books like this one often focus on indie comics, but the most complex of its persuasive arguments takes on a classic Marvel hero. Timothy Peters looks at secular law and Christianity in two runs of Daredevil, whose alter ego Matt Murdock is both a blind lawyer and (since Frank Miller’s run in the 1980s), a devout, troubled Catholic. Kevin Smith’s 2003 story “Guardian Devil” shows Matt deceived by material entities, as if Creation were full of snares (a deeply Protestant position). Miller and David Mazzuchelli’s “Born Again” (1986) instead finds a “participatory legal aesthetics,” showing in Daredevil’s actions and in our experience of comics form how our bodies exist as “part of the law.” (p. 99) Like Matt, we must connect justice to equity, rules to cases, spirit to all of the senses, removing the law’s metaphorical blindfold.

What if the best thing to do with the law is to break it, to smash an entire society in hopes the future will build something else? That revolutionary, or anarchist, hope animates several writers here. Two focus on Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta, whose anti-hero or hero in his Guy Fawkes mask brings about (according to Peter Goodrich) “the destruction of Parliament, the end of representational politics… so as to take back the theatre of the political and embody it in the community.” (p. 257) Giddens himself recommends the graphic novel 100 Months (2010), which the British artist John Hicklenton completed as he was dying: its demonic heroine Mara “is the unstoppable wave of beyond that destroys, that undoes and razes” a humanity ruined by capital. (p. 229)

These essays enlist Walter Benjamin (despite his protest against the aestheticization of politics!) and Giorgio Agamben (“bare life cannot separate itself from sovereign power”) (p. 210) in a somewhat predictable anti-political politics. People who have lived through revolutions rarely end up so excited about them. Fortunately the collection does not end there. Instead it concludes with another legal scholar, Adam Gearey, examining the 2010 graphic memoir To Teach, in which the onetime Weather Underground revolutionary and present-day expert on pedagogy Bill Ayers, together with artist Ryan Alexander-Tanner, model the open-mindedness teachers require: “unless you confront your own self-certainty, you become lost in your own impeccable radicalism.” (p. 293)

Matter actually has four states, not three. Under high enough heat and pressure, it turns into plasma, a gooey high-energy state that eliminates boundaries between atoms. Comics criticism, too, has a fourth state, in which it becomes its own hand-drawn subject. In a trio of “comics interludes,” Giddens, the education researcher Lydia Wysocki and the literary scholar Paul Fisher Davies cartoonify their preferred, and self-conscious, approach. Wysocki parodies Olivia Newton-John’s music video for “Physical,” whose stills give Wysocki a model for her light-hearted, multi-modal, heteroglossic, frame-by-frame affair. “Let’s get critical,” her headband-wearing athletes demand. “Let’s get into critical.” (p. 106) There’s a lot to get into here.

A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 23-2.

Book Review: Ms. Marvel’s America: No Normal

by Matthew Teutsch

Jessica Baldanzi and Hussein Rashid (eds.) Ms. Marvel's America: No Normal.  University Press of Mississippi, 2020. 280 pp. 978-1496827012, $30. 
https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/M/Ms.-Marvel-s-America

While Kamala Khan first appeared in the background of a panel in Captain Marvel #14, she formally debuted on the last page of Captain Marvel #17 in November 2013, with the writer hinting that the second-generation Pakistani immigrant, Muslim-American teenager from Jersey City would become the next Ms. Marvel. In February 2014, Khan became the latest Ms. Marvel, also becoming, as Jessica Baldanzi and Hussein Rashid note, "the first Muslim superhero to headline her own series" (vii). Khan, created by editor Sana Amanat and writer G. Willow Wilson, is more than a "Muslim superhero" as she does not embody one, monolithic identity. As Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins and Eric Berlatsky point out in "'The Only Nerdy Pakistani-American-Slash-Inhuman in the Entire Series': Postracialism and Politics in the New Ms. Marvel," Khan "is American and Pakistani, human and Inhuman, brown and white," and I would add a teenager, a comics' culture fan, a video game fan, and more (66).

Baldanzi and Rashid's Ms. Marvel's America: No Normal serves as the first scholarly volume on Khan, collecting essays from scholars in various disciplines. While Baldanzi and Rashid mainly focus the scope of the collection on Ms. Marvel's first volume, issues #1-19, the editors provide readers with a wide range of articles that examine everything from the troubled publication history of Khan's predecessor Carol Danvers, to discussions of identity and politics within the series, to insights into using Ms. Marvel in the classroom, to the atypical fandom surrounding Khan. In this manner, the collection serves as a starting point for numerous discussions surrounding Khan in relation to the comics' industry, teaching, activism, fandom, and more.     

The first section, "Precursors," contains two essays which examine two of the most prominent forerunners to Khan: Carol Danvers and Dust (Sooraya Qadir). In "Mentoring Ms. Marvel: Marvel's Khan and the Reconstitution of Carol Danvers," J. Richard Stevens looks at Danvers' publication history and the lead up to Khan's appearance in Ms. Marvel where she receives the superhero mantle from Danvers. Stevens dives into Danvers' source texts, pointing out that while she became a symbol of feminism as a female superhero in the male Captain Marvel's 1960s series, "her role in the series was to serve as a damsel in distress for Captain Marvel" before she received her superpowers and her own Ms. Marvel series in the late 1970s (7). With her series cancelled, she was arguably raped while part of the Avengers and written out of the team. Upon her reintroduction as Captain Marvel in 2012 and the subsequent creation of Khan, Danvers became a mentor to the teenage hero, bringing an "interaction between second-wave feminism and post-feminism" to the series, even though as Stevens argues, the positioning makes her "less relevant to the concerns of millennials" (17). Martin Lund's contribution examines the representation of both the X-Man Dust and Khan within "superhero comics [which] use space to frame issues of identity and belonging," specifically following 9/11 (22). Lund emphasizes that out of her one hundred and twenty-two appearances, Dust only speaks in sixty-eight of them and plays a leading role in three issues. Lund focuses on issues where she speaks, and he details how Dust merely exists and "functions strictly as an Other," playing into readers' preconceived notions about Muslim men and women (28). With Khan, he argues focus is on "to what extent and how she negotiates a sense of cultural citizenship that is both flexible and multicultural" instead of the question of whether or not she belongs (31). Ultimately, Khan's position as both an outsider and someone who feels at home in Jersey City makes her relatable to readers, and it also underscores the internal struggles she has with her own identity as a teenage girl, Pakistani-American, Muslim, daughter, and superhero.       

The essays in "Nation and Religion, Identity and Community" present varying, and differing, examinations of the ways that Khan and Ms. Marvel navigate the community and setting in which she exists.  Focusing on the multiple identities and spaces that Khan occupies and navigates, Hussein Rashid's "Ms. Marvel is an Immigrant" argues that we need to look at the ways that Khan, not Ms. Marvel, traverses and engages with the multiple pulls in her life, and in this manner "we can more clearly see how the hybridity process functions and the changes it makes" (48). Throughout the essay, Rashid shows that we do not need to read Khan "as a Muslim superhero" because reading her narrative in this manner "flattens her character and misses the ways in which she is doing important cultural work"; rather, we need to think about Khan "as a superhero who is Muslim" (61). David Lewis' "Hope and the Sa'a of Ms Marvel" explores the ways that Islam influences Khan's narrative and works in conjunction with her identity and community within the narrative. Lewis argues that these connections showcase that "Khan's religious identity is not peripheral to her mission as a superhero; it is quietly integral" (126). It is central because it informs her reaction to the apocalyptic events outside of her control and the ways that she works to save her community in Jersey City, even as New York and other areas encounter the same destructive forces.   

In their essay, Dagbovie-Mullins and Berlatsky examine the ways that Ms. Marvel exists as the product of large corporations who value the bottom line more than they value true diversity; as such, while Khan and the series presents positive diverse narratives, "it is also important to acknowledge the limits of the post-racialist discourse in which it partakes" (84). These limits cause the series to be more apolitical and assimilationist instead of speaking to national and global politics.  Jessica Baldanzi's "'I Would Rather Be a Cyborg': Both/And Technoculture and the New Ms. Marvel" looks at Dana Haraway's 1984 "Cyborg Manifesto" in relation to Ms. Marvel. Ultimately, Baldanzi argues that through interrogating discussions and terms used to describe technoculture Ms. Marvel "find[s] interconnections rather than divisions" that point to the work that we still have to do (110).  

Building upon the previous section, the essays in "Pedagogy and Resistance" draw attention to the impact that Khan has within the classroom on students in the real-world, not just within the pages of Ms. Marvel. Drawing on the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire and on critical race theorists such as Mari Matsuda and bell hooks, Peter Carlson and Antero Garcia's "The Transformational Resistance of Ms. Marvel in America" shows the ways that "Khan's civic voice and agency are intertwined with her personal identity; her growing, adolescent sense of self; and her initially conflicted feelings about how her superpowers are presented" (134).  By tracing Khan's movement towards transformational resistance throughout the series, Carlson and Garcia point out how the series helps students, especially students of color, explore and come into their own civic voices and duties.

In "'Classroom Heroes': Ms. Marvel and Feminist, Antiracist Pedagogy," Winona Landis looks at the ways that Ms. Marvel works in the classroom as "a feminist, anti-racist pedagogical tool" (154). Landis does this by highlighting the ways that she incorporates Ms. Marvel into her classes and the ways that students respond to Khan and other characters within the text. While she does, as others do throughout the collection, note some of the problems with Ms. Marvel, Landis points out that "it is the nuance and imperfection therein that allows this comic . . . to reach wide audiences and to affect students in noteworthy and powerful ways" (167). Kristin Petersen's contribution showcases the ways that Khan's fashion functions a visual form of resistance, specifically by tracing Khan's costume from the un-pc costume that Carol Danvers originally wore to the more conservative Ms. Marvel costume which she fashions out of her burkini, leggings, and sweatshirt. Khan's costume and fashion works to "visually demonstrate that the intersection of cultural values that Ms. Marvel represents are essential to American culture" (185).

The fourth section examines comics fandom and Aaron Kashtan's and Nicholaus Pumphrey's essays each challenge the narrative of comic fans solely consisting of male fans who constantly resist change. Kashtan highlights Khan's own fandom of comics and shows how as a fangirl "Khan demonstrates that comics are not the exclusive property of white male fanboys, and that traditional comics fandom is not the only way to be a fan" (192). Kashtan details the ways that Khan positions herself as a fan of comics, science fiction, video games, and more; he shows how she navigates these spaces as well, engaging in massively multiplayer online role playing games and writing fan fiction about her favorite superheroes. In all of these endeavors, Khan counters earlier depictions of fandom in comics through "her creative (or 'transformative') fan practices and because her fandom is presented in a generally positive light" (197). Pumphrey continues Kashtan's exploration by looking at "the racist and sexist commentary from white male fans" to the introductions of Miles Morales and Khan to the Marvel Universe (207). Pumphrey presents statistical evidence highlighting the misnomer of comics' fans as "fanboys," and he argues that calls for continuity in comics "preserves the institutionalized racism of the 1960s" (215). At its core, Pumphrey's essay explores the tensions between fans' reactions, comics company's bottom lines and marketing strategies, and the growing need for "diverse representation" in the medium (221). In this manner, Pumphrey points out that while Morales, Khan, and other characters present diversity, the continued presence of "the fanboys of yesterday" push back, and in order to move forward "diverse representation needs to be mandatory and widespread from the top down."

Overall, the collection presents a wide range of examinations of Ms. Marvel. In this manner, the essays provide ways to look at Kamala Khan and the series while the last two parts of the collection present teachers with ways to incorporate Ms. Marvel into the classroom and challenge the still-prevailing myth of comic book readers as solely white males. At the end of the collection, Shabana Mir's interview with G. Willow Wilson touches on the themes that the essays in the collection explore. Along with this, the "Coda" contains an a single-panel piece by José Alaniz that encapsulates the importance of Khan through the anecdote he shared of encountering Madia, a deaf teenager from Somalia, who tapped Alaniz on the shoulder as he read Ms. Marvel and told him, "That girl is me."        

 

A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 22:2.

New book on recent Mexican comic books

http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/1132
¡Viva la historieta! Mexican Comics, NAFTA, and the Politics of Globalization
By Bruce Campbell

240 pages (approx.), 6 x 9 inches, 20 b&w illustrations, introduction, bibliography, index

9781604731255 Unjacketed cloth $55.00S

9781604731262 Paper $25.00S

Unjacketed cloth, $55.00

Paper, $25.00
A study of how a nation's comics artists grapple with economic upheaval

¡Viva la historieta! critically examines the participation of Mexican comic books in the continuing debate over the character and consequences of globalization in Mexico. The focus of the book is on graphic narratives produced by and for Mexicans in the period following the 1994 implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), an economic accord that institutionalized the free-market vision of relationships among the United States, Mexico, and Canada.

Eight chapters cover a broad range of contemporary Mexican comics, including works of propaganda, romance and adventure, graphic novels, a corporate "brand" series, didactic single-issue books, and a superhero parody series. Each chapter offers an examination of the ways in which specific comics or comic book series represent Mexico's national identity, the U.S.'s influence, and globalization's effects on technology and economics since the passage of NAFTA.

Through careful attention to how recent Mexican comics portray a changing nation, author Bruce Campbell reveals a contentious range of perspectives on the problems and promises of globalization. At the same time, Campbell argues that the contrasting views of globalization that circulate widely in Mexican historietas reflect a still unsettled relationship between Mexico and its superpower neighbor.

Bruce Campbell is associate professor of Hispanic studies at St. John's University/College of St. Benedict. He is the author of Mexican Murals in Times of Crisis.

Illustration--From Guía del migrante mexicano (Guide for the Mexican Migrant), courtesy Ministry of Foreign Relations, Mexico
240 pages (approx.), 6 x 9 inches, 20 b&w illustrations, introduction, bibliography, index