At this year’s Modern Language Association Convention in Toronto, Ontario, Canada (January 8-11, 2026), I will be speaking on a roundtable Aesthetics, Politics, and Ecological Overshoot, and panel, Comics as Physical Objects. I have included the information and tentative abstracts for each paper below.

52. Comics as Physical Objects

Thursday, January 8, 2026, 1:45-3:00 p.m.

Presiding: Edward Whitley (Lehigh U)

Presentations:
1. “A Queer Print History of Comics,” Margaret Galvan (U of Florida)
2. “The Comics Megatext: Floppies, Trades, Marvel Unlimited, Podcasts, and The X-Men,” Bradley Fest (Hartwick C)
3. “Multimedia and Digital Materialities: The Blue Age of (Web) Comics and Fostering Multimodal Literacy,” Devon Harvey (Queen’s U)
4. “Framing Matter: Materiality and the Medium of Comics,” Christina Kraenzle (York U)

This panel has been arranged by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing.

The Comics Megatext: Floppies, Trades, Marvel Unlimited, Podcasts, and The X-Men

As Douglas Wolk recently pointed out in his book about reading all of Marvel Comics, “The twenty-seven thousand or so superhero comic books that Marvel Comics has published since 1961 are the longest continuous, self-contained work of fiction ever created.”[1] Though a bit smaller, the over six thousand comics that constitute The X-Men (1963–) also makes it one of the longest narratives ever written. Both are what I call in my current book project megatexts: a massively unreadable twenty-first century form created through collaboration and digital technology to achieve a scale beyond what a single author could do alone and that requires incredibly nontrivial effort on the part of readers to completely traverse. In this talk, I will explore the emergence of comics as a megatextual object in the twenty-first century. In the age of floppies and trades, comics megatexts were largely inaccessible in their totality. With the emergence of platforms such as Marvel Unlimited and paratextual forms like podcasts such as Jay and Miles X-Plain “The X-Men” (2014–), we can now read comics megatexts as megatexts. For all intents and purposes, then, the comics megatext has newly emerged as an accessible and thus coherent form that, like other megatexts, also importantly calls forth collective and creative reading and criticism. Approached in this way, The X-Men in particular offers us a continuously transforming megatextual object that is also a beacon for collaboratively exploring how to build alternative communities and ways of thinking and being for an infowhelming world.

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[1] Douglas Wolk, All the Marvels: A Journey to the End of the Biggest Story Ever Told (New York: Penguin, 2021), 1.

602. Aesthetics, Politics, and Ecological Overshoot

Sunday, January 11, 2026, 10:15-11:30 a.m.

Presiding: John Maerhofer (Rutgers U, New Brunswick)

Speakers: Federico Correa Pose (U of Southern California)
Bradley Fest (Hartwick C)
Christopher Gortmaker (U of Chicago)
Brenda Odria Loayza (U of Toronto)
Pedro Gabriel Soares Daher (Maine C of Art and Design)

Megatextual Eco-Utopia: Jonathan Hickman’s X-Men and Mutant Poiesis

[That was the talk’s original proposed title. After writing the talk, its title is now “The Megatext as Overshoot Form: The Krakoan Era of The X-Men and Mutant Poiesis,” and its content differs significantly from what is below. I am happy to email the talk to anyone interested. Edit added on January 12, 2026.]

In 2019, in one of the more audacious reboots of a long-running megatextual franchise, Jonathan Hickman reimagined the now decades-long political aspirations of Marvel Comics’ X-Men (1963–) franchise in explicitly eco-utopian terms. Rather than continuing to pursue his decades-long dream of mutant and human peaceful coexistence, in House of X/Powers of X (2019) Professor X creates a separatist sovereign nation on the sentient living island Krakoa, an achieved utopia for all mutants. Notable even in its genre for its exploration of alternative presents and various futures, The X-Men franchise’s subsequent five-year pivot fleshes out the politics of a separatist utopia where no mutant dies and the dead are reborn. Despite the ecologically harmonious, sustainable technologies the mutant nation develops and despite their offer to share their miraculous, life-saving drugs and technology with the rest of the world, humans nonetheless turn toward the genocidal destruction of what appears the last, best hope for the continued flourishing for organic life on the planet. As such, Hickman’s eco-utopia emerges not from the dreams of the 1960s but from the despair of the present, a somewhat reactionary imaginary attempting to respond to the slow violence of climate change and the rise and resurgence of far-right, ecocidal extremism in the United States and around the world. Ultimately, however, the mutant survivors of Krakoa discover that their story was not one of separatist paradise gained but historical subjectivity achieved without the yoke of human bigotry and hatred, enabling them to build their world with others, crafting its institutions and practices, its culture and its politics—in short, mutant poiesis—the swift, violent destruction of which should serve as a warning for us in this moment of political destituency.

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For previous essays of mine on megatexts and unreadable texts, see:

“Toward a Theory of the Megatext: Speculative Criticism and Richard Grossman’s ‘Breeze Avenue Working Paper.’”

“‘Is an Archive Enough?’: Megatextual Debris in the Work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis.”

“Reading Now and Again: Hyperarchivalism and Democracy in Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s Thinking Literature across Continents.”

“Writing Briefly about Really Big Things.”