ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters rejects 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, or 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 narrative on the extradiegetic level, pointing to the ways that artists and their influences are likewise a form of family making.
