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Killer Bodies offers a history of the single most critically derided subgenre in American superhero comics: the “bad girl” comics of the 1990s, which chronicled the blood-soaked adventures of barely dressed and improbably proportioned action heroines for an audience of adolescent boys. While not in any way attempting to rehabilitate the genre, which for the most part amply deserved its reputation as sexist and borderline pornographic, this book situates it within its original cultural context, as the result of a matrix of influences that included third-wave feminism, neopaganism, “girl power,” the rise of the internet, the growing popularity of manga, supermodel beauty ideals, and the mainstreaming of pornography. It explores why and how the figure of the antiheroic, physically aggressive, sexually objectified heroine arose within American comics culture, and the commercial and ideological factors that led to the genre’s rapid rise and equally rapid decline amidst the crisis-racked comics industry of the mid-1990s.

Winner — 2024 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards in Best Academic/Scholarly Work, announced at San 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 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.