Being-becoming-monster: Mirrors and Mirroring in Graphic Frankenstein Narratives

I discuss several mirror scenes in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to demonstrate what I call being-becoming-monster, a phrase meant to emphasize that the being’s monstrosity is not an attribute of his beingness but emerges in relation to the gaze of others and his own view of himself through the eyes of others. I then perform an interior duplication of my own analysis by turning to reanimations of these mirror scenes in two graphic Frankenstein narratives—first, Frankenstein: The Graphic Novel, part of a series that makes classic novels more appealing to young readers, and second, comic artist Bernie Wrightson’s illustrated edition of Shelley’s novel. In the spirit of Shelley’s text and the creature it amalgamates, I assemble many component parts—mise en abyme, textual and graphic mirror scenes, animation and self-reflection, sympathy and ill feeling—in order to consider the comorbid conditions of the Creature’s being-becoming-monster and Frankenstein’s becoming ill.