Abstract
Frankenstein is surprisingly well suited to stories aimed at children and is often adapted for young readerships. This chapter explores why, through a focus on graphic narratives. I examine five books: picturebooks Do Not Build a Frankenstein! by Neil Numberman (HarperCollins, New York, 2009) and The Monsters’ Monster by Patrick McDonnell (Little, Brown and Company, New York, 2012), graphic novels by Chris Mould (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997) and Marion Mousse (Papercutz, New York, 2009), both titled Frankenstein, and Margrete Lamond and Drahoš Zak’s illustrated novel adaptation, Frankenstein (HarperCollins, Sydney, 2005). These texts adapt Shelley’s plot or offer new stories based (sometimes loosely) on her novel’s characters and tropes, creatively exploiting pre-existing knowledge of the story and its iconography. The narratives’ complexities emerge through the interplay between pictures and words, both demanding and enabling active reading strategies by young (and adult) readers.
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Notes
- 1.
For a chronology of Frankenstein’s translations, see Romantic Circles https://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/frankenstein/textual
- 2.
- 3.
On advances from the fidelity debate, see Hutcheon and O’Flynn (2013).
- 4.
On the history of children’s literature including constructions of childhood, see also Carpenter (1987).
- 5.
- 6.
For discussions of postmodern devices in picturebooks, see Sipe and Pantaleo (2008).
- 7.
See Beauvais (2015) for a discussion of gaps in comics and picturebooks and of studies of how child readers interpret them.
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Alder, E. (2018). Our Progeny’s Monsters: Frankenstein Retold for Children in Picturebooks and Graphic Novels. In: Davison, C., Mulvey-Roberts, M. (eds) Global Frankenstein. Studies in Global Science Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78142-6_12
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