Smarty Pants From The American Scholar

On Sunday, Black Panther made history as the first superhero movie with a Best Picture Oscar nomination. And though it didn’t win that one, the film did win the most Oscars in the history of superhero movies. Given those historic firsts, and the inevitable onslaught of superhero movies that 2019 will bring, we're revisiting one of the first episodes from the podcast. Professor and comic book fan Ramzi Fawaz joined us to talk about origin stories, the X-Men, and what the queerness of the original mutant family can tell us about comic book heroes today.Go beyond the episode:Ramzi Fawaz's The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American ComicsRead his essays “Notes on Wonder Woman” and “The Difference a Mutant Makes”Watch the trailers for The New Mutants and Dark Phoenix, both coming out this summerRead the case that William Moulton Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman, makes for superheroes—and “Why 100,000,000 Americans Read Comics”Check out our interview with lifelong nerd and critic A. D.