Elizabeth Bobrick (Wesleyan University)
Translating the Mythical Female Body in the Graphic Novel: Emil Ferris’ My Favorite Thing Is Monsters
In graphic narratives, the visual is an aspect of the text, and the text is an aspect of the visual. In this paper, I will discuss the ways in which textual and visual retelling of ancient myths of rape and mutation are transformed and recontextualized in the graphic novel My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (hereafter MFTIM) by Emil Ferris. I will show that Ferris’ interpretation and manipulation of the cultural property of myth is a form of semiotic translation that produces meaning within a network of genres: noir detective novel, holocaust testimony, queer memoir, and horror comic book (Chute 2018). MFTIM is a complicated work with an internal, diegetic system of icons and paratextual allusions inscribed within two first-person narratives.
For example, Ferris repurposes the figure of Medusa and others to illustrate the story of the diagetic narrator, Anka, who was forced into sex work as a 12 year-old in 1930’s Germany. The story of Medusa is drawn, in both senses of the word, on her body. The myth, retold to her by two other women, is instrumental in her understanding of her own abuse. Medusa’s rape and her transformation into a monster mirror Anka’s fate: she eventually engages in sex trafficking for her rapist in order to escape a Nazi concentration camp.
Anka’s story is nested within a fictional first-person narrative of 10 year-old Karen, set in 1960’s Chicago. Bullied and even sexually assaulted by schoolmates, Karen tries to disguise her queerness by insisting that she is a werewolf, a monster of unstable identity and uncontrolled power. For Ferris, herself a victim of sexual assault as child (Porter 2018), and for her creation, Karen, art and imagination are sites of power (Chute 2018; Ferris, 2019).
Ferris is not the only contemporary graphic artist to have drawn on ancient myths of metamorphosis; however, MFTIM is neither an adaptation nor an illustration of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Ferris imports the Medusa story as well as visual allusions to other ancient mythical figures (e.g., Persephone) into a discrete, fully developed narrative context. By contrast, the webcomic Things Change by madinkbeard (2006-2009) is a partial, modern adaption of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Charlotte Northrop’s work-in-progress webcomic Metamorphoses, The Comic follows Ovid’s text closely.
The multimodality of comics allows scholars to look through overlapping theoretical lenses. MFTIM has not yet been the focus of published research, partly due to the lag time of publication. My reading of MFTIM is informed by comics scholar Hillary Chute, who has called for an integration of formal (e.g., narrative theory and semiotic analysis) and ideological (e.g., gender and sexuality studies) approaches to comics. (Chute 2018).
Comics has its own conventions of art and reception that place the reader of graphic narratives in dialogue with both drawing and text (McCloud 1993). In my presentation, I will explain pertinent terms of art specific to comics, (e.g., ‘icon,’ ‘gutter’) with images from MFTIM.