13 August 2024
I am so excited to learn that J. Andrew Deman, a former colleague of mine and a friend, has just won the Eisner Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Work! The book he won for is The Claremont Run: Subverting Gender in the X-Men (University of Texas Press) and it’s a very deserved win.
This year the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards (the 36th annual) were held on 26 July in San Diego. Considered the “Oscars” of the comics world, the award is named for Will Eisner, a pioneer in comics creation and a graphic novelist. All the award winners for this year were selected from works published in 2023.
But enough about the award, what about the book that won? Below is the publisher’s blurb, and you can read an interview with the author at the University of Texas Press website.
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.
And here’s praise for the book:
In The Claremont Run, J. Andrew Deman presents truly impressive data and shows the ways one might track how gender is represented in comics using various quantitative measures. The author’s qualitative analysis is also well developed and helps make the quantitative data relevant for all types of comics scholars. As questions about how the genre takes on identity politics become more and more prevalent, analyses like Deman’s, which develop complex syntheses rooted in data, will undoubtedly become foundational.
~Sam Langsdale, coeditor of Monstrous Women in Comics
J. Andrew Deman utilizes a mixed-methods framework to highlight how Chris Claremont’s work on the X-Men offered an innovative approach to gender and sexuality. Deman’s research supports the often-lauded progressive stance attributed to Claremont by documenting the subtle ways in which his run centered a wide range of female characters and by carefully reconsidering the expectations linked to masculinity. The Claremont Run, in considering gender and bodies, emphasizes how Uncanny X-Men provides pathways for transformation and offers the reader an important way to see the series in a new light.
~Julian C. Chambliss, coeditor of Assembling the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Essays on the Social, Cultural, and Geopolitical Domains
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
The Claremont Run is a dynamic and convincing piece of literature that brings attention to gender dynamics with a specific era of X-Men. Deman pushes deeply into the psychological, cultural, and societal aspects that Chris Claremont challenged, but Deman also analyzes minor characters to highlight that Claremont wanted each character to subvert gender norms . . . Deman’s overall expertise and compelling argument throughout the books creates a quick-paced and convincing piece of literature for both scholars and everyday readers.
~The Journal of Popular Culture
Well-reasoned and insightful…[The Claremont Run is] an excellent resource for those looking into gender studies within the comics industry or for those comic fans looking for scholarly analysis.
~Technical Communications
Oh, and finally, my interest in this is not just that I’m super excited for my friend. I also indexed the book. The metatopic entry from the index can be found in the portfolio section of my website. Here’s another teaser from the index—the entry for Wolverine:
Logan/Wolverine: about and general bio, 89; animal nature and masculinity, 90, 92, 100–101, 107–109, 111; as antihero, 93; Beauty and the Beast paradigm, 48; body and gender essentialism, 95; as Canadian, 89–90; class and masculinity, 101–103; comic book covers, 37f; on covers, 36–37; cowboy archetype, 22, 92, 106, 113; emotional intelligence and empathy, 57, 99–100; gangster archetype, 132–133; gender and Apollonian/Dionysian divide, 103–104, 105f; gender deviance, 22; interior monologues, 16; as killing-machine (or not), 90; masculinity, toxic, 91–92, 93, 94, 96–97, 98, 103; masculinity and superpowers, 94–96, 96f; masculinity interrogated and undermined, 22, 90–91, 93, 99, 110; masculinity of, 43, 91–92, 93–94, 105–106; mentoring junior X-Men, 100; misunderstanding of character, 90; noncombative physical contact, 15f; nurturing behavior, 110, 110, 113; out-of-costume to in-costume ratio, 65f; physical representation, 16f, 36, 107, 108f; primitive masculinity symbolized, 100; relationship with Cyclops, 97–98; relationship with Jean Grey, 28, 97–98; relationship with Mariko Yashida, 98, 104–105, 105f; relationship with Nightcrawler, 22, 118–119, 120–121; relationship with Storm, 42–43, 100–101; relationship with Yukio, 48–49, 60, 104; as samurai archetype, 22, 104–105, 106, 113; violence and hegemonic masculinity, 90, 98–99, 101–102, 103, 106; Yukio and, 105f