A Review of Talia Dutton's M is for Monster

A Review of Talia Dutton's M is for Monster by Katie Hackett-Hill

Katie Hackett-Hill is a PhD student in the department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Arkansas. She leads the Northwest Arkansas Writing Project Invitational Summer Institute and is an ARTeacher Fellow. A former high school ELA teacher, Hackett-Hill’s research interests include arts integration, composition studies, and fostering joyful and socially-engaged pedagogies in the secondary literacy classroom. When she’s not reading or writing, she enjoys being outside with her family and catching up on the latest Frankenstein adaptations. ​

I was first introduced to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein through its adaptations. Growing up, my dad hogged the living room TV to play his compendium of old movies, and James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein was one of his favorite repeats. As a kid, I loved hearing him mimic some of the Creature’s first words (“Goooood, gooood!”) from Bride of Frankenstein.  And I don’t think I ever laughed as hard as when I saw Young Frankenstein in high school for the first time. It wasn’t until I graduated college that I finally got around to Shelley’s novel. Reading the original book sparked a whole new level of obsession with the story and its adaptations, and since then I’ve viewed dozens of Franken-things–books, movies, TV episodes, music, and even a board game–that continually make me see the narrative and characters anew.

Though I’ve encountered many versions of Frankenstein over the years, I haven’t seen a Frankenstein adaptation quite like Talia Dutton’s M is for Monster, released in 2022 by Surely Books, a publisher that specializes in showcasing the work of LBGTQIA+ creators. Ghosts from the original story and its progeny haunt the book, and as the best adaptations do, Dutton thoughtfully draws on, extends, and even transforms these well-known characters and visual motifs to reanimate the 200-year-old story for a contemporary young adult audience. Told in the visceral hybrid medium of comics, this adaptation adeptly–and literally–reimagines the core sentiments of Shelley’s novel to bring into focus questions about how we define monstrosity and enact identity and family. Together, these adaptions position young and old readers alike to see Frankenstein, and themselves, in new ways. 

​When M is for Monster opens, we are dropped into the typical tense creation scene of any Frankenstein adaptation. Dr. Francis Ai, also known as Frankie, is attempting to reanimate her dead sister Maura, who recently died in a tragic laboratory accident. Maura jolts awake while Frankie, donned in gloves, goggles, and eerie shadows, towers over her. The experiment is a success, and unlike Shelley’s Frankenstein who never names his creature, Frankie does instantly, calling it Maura, thus bestowing her with a seemingly fixed identity. Except that this reanimated Maura isn’t really Maura, only Maura’s haphazardly be-stitched body containing no memories from her previous life. For the rest of the novel, M–as she renames herself–navigates her new life while befriending the real Maura’s ghost and struggling to live up to Frankie’s expectations of who she’s supposed to be. Eventually, both sisters, alongside a small cast of supporting characters, must confront reality and accept each other as they are or risk the permanent fragmentation of their lives and relationships. 

​Throughout this retelling, I appreciated how Dutton stays true to Shelley’s characters while also evolving them into new realms, a move that arguably makes them more relatable to modern teen readers. For instance, Frankie and Shelley’s Frankenstein both give off mad scientist vibes–the close-minded, myopic, obsessive perfectionist types–that lead them to cling to science dogmatically, separate themselves physically and emotionally from others, and ignore the consequences of bringing the dead to life. Though both characters’ pursuit of science at all costs causes readers to jeer from the sidelines, Dutton ultimately imbues Frankie with greater complexity than Shelley does Victor, who remains a staunch, glory-seeking egoist throughout the original novel. Yes, Frankie is driven by scientific infatuation, but mostly by pervasive grief and the need to preserve life as it once was, similar to Dr. Jo Baker in Victor LaValle’s Destroyer, another standout YA Frankenstein graphic novel adaptation. For this reason, she is at times a more understandable and dynamic character than Victor, embodying the capacity for real change as she earnestly attempts to take responsibility for her past actions and carefully repair broken relationships. 

In the same way, M mirrors Shelley’s Creature while eventually forging her own path. Both creations are initially beholden to their creators because they deeply fear violence and abandonment, then are set free into the world to explore what it means to be human as they are haunted by visions of the past and present. Both also experience rejection, but to a different extent and with different consequences. While Shelley’s Creature is doomed to all-out rejection by his creator and society writ large despite his desperate pleas for acceptance, M eventually discovers her passions under the guidance of a caring neighbor, then gains the confidence to assert her unique identity and confront her creator in an emotional, yet productive way. Unlike the Creature who becomes mired in bloody cycles of vengeful violence, M’s character arc is full of promise and possibility as the world shifts to make a place for her. As such, Dutton transforms M into a relatable role model for teen readers who may also be struggling to assert identity, as well as a beacon of the bright future Shelley’s Creature could have had if only the people in his life would have loved him as he was. 

I was also thrilled that Dutton chose to tell this story through comics. Because of this, she’s able to invoke iconic visual imagery from classic (re)tellings of Frankenstein as thoughtful extended metaphors that transform themes from the original tale in an innovative way. For instance, Dutton dutifully embraces the iconic stitching motif that completes the Creature’s recognizable look in most Frankenstein adaptations, but for new reasons. Here, the stitches on M’s facade at once tie her to the long lineage of other Creatures while becoming a powerful, double metaphor for binding expectations and the capacity for us to re-make ourselves. Similarly, lightning, which has become a staple of Frankenstein adaptations for mood setting or theme building, appears many times through the novel in ways that fragment the panels, highlighting the central tension of fragmented versus whole memory, self, and family. The repetition of eyes and hands is also prominent, here becoming symbols of humanity and empathy–or the opposite–and eventually important representations of the characters’ evolutions. Finally, Dutton’s choice to use only variations of teals, blacks, whites, and grays replicates the moodiness and sublime imagery of Shelley’s Romantic era as well as famous Frankenstein movie settings to emphasize the emotional turmoil of the characters and the drastic ways they interact and interfere with the natural world. 

​And when it comes down to it, comics are darn powerful storytellers. For one, comics are an accessible gateway into any story, much like the Frankenstein movie adaptations were for me. But also, comics are just really good at doing certain things that happen to be important to this story. For instance, as Scott McCloud illustrates in Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, time is weird in comics (p. 94) as readers confront the past, present, and future on a single page or even within a single panel. In M is for Monster this time-​weirdness works particularly well. Throughout the novel, the panels set in the past and present are smushed against and even melt into each other to represent how the past shapes the present. But as the characters’ perspectives shift, eventually only panels set in the present appear, becoming a cozy, sensory celebration of everyday life (like a Studio Ghibli piece) where the past is fondly remembered, but stays in the past. And, importantly, comics have the potential to garner immediate emotional impact. As the Frankenstein movies force us to look at the creature, here we’re forced to look at M, at who she really is, and not just the fragmented or monstrous image we have of her in our minds. In visual form, we see her whole self and thus awaken our own capacity for empathy and reconciliation, the emotional tools that unlock the characters, and even us, from disconnection.

​Perhaps this is the novel's most striking feature: its reimagining of Frankenstein the horror sci-fi story to that of a family drama slash bildungsroman with elements of horror and sci-fi. This genre shift enables Dutton to speculate what if in interesting ways: What if Frankenstein’s creature were born loved, but as something other than it was? What if the creature had access to the tools to become who he wanted to be, and had the support to do so? What if Frankenstein accepted the creature as he was, if they got to know each other? What if the creator and creation had a sibling dynamic versus a parent/child dynamic? What if monsters aren’t born, but are created through our biases and exclusionary practices? Ultimately, how Dutton deals with these wonderings recasts Frankenstein as a story of optimistic possibilities, hope, and the life-building force of love. Reading the original novel alongside M is for Monster could be a memorable way for middle grade or high school students to ask these questions themselves, including: What if I accepted people in my life for who they are? What if I created myself despite the world’s expectations? I could also envision this work paired with texts like Monster by Walter Dean Myers, Pet by Akwaeke Emezi, or Scythe by Neal Shusterman to further explore themes of monstrosity, or as a way into Nicole Mirra and Antero Garcia’s speculative civic literacies.

Ultimately, this book provides an apt metaphor for adaptations and how we can view them in English education. Like the Creature and M, it begs to be seen as its own unique work, one that indeed stems from a creator and its long line of adaptations but that ultimately becomes something entirely new. As M first looks to Maura for how to embody Maura-ness, so does Dutton to Shelley, Whale, and others. She considers what makes Frankenstein Frankenstein–its characters, its themes, and visual motifs–then, like M’s brave and subversive venture into self-hood, extends and remixes these elements to stitch together a new work for a new audience. And for this reason, “it’s alive!” as Whale’s Frankenstein maddeningly exerts--M is for Monster, that is–a story that remembers the past as it echoes and shape shifts across history and cultures like Shelley’s monster, breathing new life into readers in our time. I, for one, can’t wait for it to breathe life into my classroom.