Author: Shiamin Kwa
Source: The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies, edited by Frederick Aldama
Publication type: Chapter in a book
Abstract: My Favorite Thing is Monsters by Emil Ferris proposes a rejection of the unidirectional and teleologically fixed narrative of the individual’s relationship to her family. Instead, Ferris uses the graphic narrative form to map out a new conception of the notion of inheritance. This kind of inheritance suggests the productive possibilities of making something new with each copy, including even the production of a new version of the past, a new origin, a new queered family that can include more than simply the people who contribute their DNA or normative social conventions. Instead of a biological family, the people upstairs from Karen form her family unit. Significantly, this version of people upstairs is carried over into Ferris’s text as well, creating a highly allusive text on the extradiegetic level, pointing to the ways that artists and their influences are likewise a form of family making.