Devon Keyes

Devon Keyes is a PhD candidate specializing in contemporary comics, superhero fictions, and visual culture. His research seeks to explore and chart a “physiography of comics,” drawing upon post-structuralism, fiction theory, and comics studies to examine the how the (im)material production of comics yields endless “geographic” storytelling, narrative, and and fictive possibilities native to the shifting fault zones wherein word, image, and reader meet. His dissertation, entitled The New Mutant Diaries, argues against the prevailing reading of the X-Men multimedia franchise as one “fully realized” by writer Chris Claremont following its 1975 relaunch; instead, it situates Claremont’s run among a larger string of publication “Ages” throughout which mutanity remained under constant, rigorous reexamination and reinvention. From there, it further argues that the massive popularity and success of Claremont’s run has ultimately arrested mutanity in a “Long Uncanny Age,” whose underlying discourses of difference have shaped, regulated, and governed the production of mutant characters and narratives since the release of Giant-Size X-Men #1. To test these claims, each chapter of The New Mutant Diaries chronicles the production of each mutant “Age”, examining their underlying discursive networks and the shape of mutanity negotiated through them; simultaneously, to examine the effects such a cyclical production of mutanity (and it sudden historical arrest) has wrought, The New Mutant Diaries troubles the boundaries between critical and creative production—between fiction and reality—through an additional, epistolary narrative that documents firsthand the material consequences that our search for what mutanity means has on mutant bodies, their histories, their stories, their futures, their very lives.

Devon has published articles in the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Superhero Studies and Graphic Memoir and Nonfiction, and has shared his research in conferences organized by the Comics Studies Society and the Popular Culture Association. He holds both a B.A. in Language & Literature and an M.A. in English from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, where he produced a thesis which examines the paradoxical retconning strategies at work across DC Comics’s 1985 crossover series Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Outside of the office, Devon continues to put his love of comics into practice as an avid fancomics-maker himself, typically done with valuable assistance and input from his two cats, Magenta and Blue.