As much as we would like to convince ourselves otherwise, humans lack the ability to be objective. It is in our nature to interpret; to ask questions; to infer. If something is created, no matter how impactful it is, we will find a way to pick it apart. Apply that idea to a literary perspective, and it’s easy to see how a narrative is only as valuable as its interpretation. Whether a book gets a majority of good reviews or bad reviews, it still gets reviews; and therein lies its value. But critique doesn’t solely have to be based on black/white or good/bad reviews of a text. The brilliant thing about telling stories is that a narrative can mean something completely different to somebody else. Because of that subjective nature, no interpretation is wrong; and that's beautiful. One of the most important roles of literary interpretations is their ability to infer subtextual elements that - because of the narrow-minded social conventions of a given time- the author is not allowed to state on page. In no other literary form does this role apply more to than American superhero comics. But comics have a unique literary structure that allows for their fandoms to surgically infer and unapologetically critique the texts in ways unlike any medium before it. 

Enter Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. A book that has been picked apart in every perspective imaginable since the day it was published in 1818. There are so many ways in which this text has been interpreted, that there are more books about Frankenstein than there are in Shelley’s entire oeuvre- and rightfully so. Frankenstein is an inarguably  important text to the world of fiction, made only more interesting by the fascinating circumstances of its conception and the life of its author. While all approaches and perspectives of conventional literary criticism have been applied to her work, the methods of interpretation and critique applied to modern X-Men comics create unexplored queer readings of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

For the majority of their existence, comics have suffered many of the problematic trappings of American pop culture: blatant misogyny, toxic masculinity, and subtextually queer relationships that were not allowed to be stated on page. In a now infamous statement made by Marvel Editor-In-Chief Jim Shooter, he lays out that there are “no homosexuals in Marvel comics”(Kawasaki). This by no means was an uncommon notion for a corporation to proclaim in the 1980s, but is still a testament to the kinds of backward ass restrictions and prejudice common only forty years ago. That is not to say that there was no push-back from the artist and writers making these books. One of the most prolific writers of the medium, Chris Claremont, was a master of constructing subtextual relationships implied to be queer in his seventeen-year tenure as the writer of the X-Men. In his book “All the Marvels”, comics scholar Douglass Wolk explains that “ Claremont and many of the writers who followed him don’t always explicitly confirm those readings, but they take pains not to contradict them either.” (Wolk 149). Needless to say, Claremont did his best to portray the characters he wrote as honestly as he could and this would serve to have a lasting effect on the next generation of fandom.

Fast forward from the eighties to now, and the world is a very different place, especially in the world of comics. The male power fantasy driven narratives of the nineties and aughts gave way to a more socially aware movement of comic book fandoms in the teens that have helped cultivate inclusivity and diverse narratives into the medium. X-Men fandom stands at the center of this because of the way the mutant metaphor can be applied to many different marginalized groups, with the LGBTQ community being at the forefront of that. As Wolk puts it, “LGBTQ readers have embraced X-Men like few other comics, although its plots have often hinged on straight romances.” (Wolk 148). While a disproportionate amount of characters are still textually “straight”, that has not stopped the fandoms from insinuating their own “head canons” of these romantic relationships. Connor Goldsmith is a literary agent most known for hosting the spiciest X-Men podcast on the air, Cerebro. As Entertainment Weekly puts it “he and his guests excavate the many queer allegories that are possible with these colorful characters.” (Seija Rankin). Goldsmith and his weekly guest take a character and talk for hours about their publication history and personality- usually highlighting queer undertones in specific examples of the text. While his podcast sheds light on the purposefully placed subtext of Claremont’s X-Men, it also does a great job of interpreting the clunky and muscle bound narratives of the nineties/aughts that- though they weren’t trying to- ended up with their own queer undertones.

What Claremont was able to accomplish then and what Goldsmith is able to do now, can be directly attributed to the medium in which these characters live. Comics have a narrative tool unique to the medium that elevates reader inference to another level. Comics are temporal and sequential by nature. This means that any amount of time can and will pass from panel to panel. And in between those panels we as readers participate in what Scott McCloud defines in his comic textbook “Understanding Comics” as closure(McCloud 63). In McCloud’s words, comics are “a medium where the audience is a willing and conscious collaborator and closure is the agent of change, time and motion.”(McCloud 65). Because time passes in the space in between panels known as the gutter, our brains are forced to put together what happened in between those panels. This is a key element of the medium because it makes the reader intimately connected to the pace and inference of the narrative. Whether or not we mean to, when we read a comic we are actively participating in closure. Applied to queer subtext in superhero comics, this inherent property of the medium amplifies the ability for speculation and inference dramatically. While we are not able to see two characters involved romantically with each other on panel, their conversations, gestures, and mannerisms make it is easy for our minds to speculate on the truth of their relationship.

This concept of closure can be repurposed for our means to analyze Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Frankenstein is a work of prose and being so does not contain illustration, panels, or gutters. But Shelley constructed the text in a somewhat unconventional way that allows us to apply the same idea of closure to the narrative. Frankenstein is written in a frame narrative, meaning we read the events from three different perspectives: Walton, the ship captain that takes in and befriends Frankenstein; Victor Frankenstein, the central character of the text; and the creature, Frankenstein’s bitter and vengeful creation. Separating the narrative into these different perspectives creates a need to question the validity of the supposed truths of the narrative itself and allows for insinuation into the motivations of the characters involved. 

The first notion of queer subtext in Frankenstein comes from Captain Walton with letters to his sister. Walton professes “I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me; whose eyes could reply to mine.” (Shelley). We could perceive this as a platonic need for a friend, just as much as we could perceive a lot of other things with our eyes thoroughly rolled into the back of our heads. This sets the tone for the nature of the relationship between him and Frankenstein throughout the text. Frankenstein is introduced to Walton by happenstance- flying past his stuck ship in a sledge- and the two are immediately infatuated with the other- it’s adorable. Walton goes on to transcribe the tales of Frankenstein and establishing this relationship from the beginning primes us for a queer reading of the narrative that progresses. 

Through the lens of Walton, we get the doomed story of Victor Frankenstein and his creature. On the surface, their relationship is that of protagonist/antagonist but when analyzed through a queer lens shows a relationship more closely attributed to fraught lovers endlessly chasing the other in a blind fit of obsession. As Benjamin Bagocius points out in his article “Homosexual Calm: Pausing To Listen To Queer Shame In Frankenstein”, the queer subtext begins after Frankenstein awakens from a dream of “horror” where he kisses his fiancé Elizabeth for the first time after creating the monster (Bagocius). From this point on, the monster serves as the object of his obsession labeled incorrectly as hatred of self and of the creature he has wrought. 

Further readings of the text only heighten the queer subtext of the two's relationship as it evolves into an unhealthy reliance and constant vie for the other's attention. When the creature asks Frankenstein to make him a female counterpart, Frankenstein makes the attempt, only to destroy it before giving it life. His reasoning for this is given in the form of shallow excuses like “she might become ten thousand times more malignant” and “They might even hate each other”…ok, bud. Telling himself these things implies that he destroys his second abomination out of some moral high point, but it is easy to infer his ulterior motives. It is easy to insinuate that the reason Victor doesn’t destroy his monster, is because that would take the monster’s attention away from him- and he does not like that. Not one bit! Up to this point, Frankenstein has been under the constant eye of his creature who prowls in the shadows wreaking havoc in his life. The creature has murdered his little brother and sworn vengeance upon Frankenstein’s entire family. A person of sound mind and feeling would treat this threat as a serious afront and seek to protect the ones he loves. Victor does the opposite. He decides to take two years away from his fiance to visit England, knowing the monster will follow. This implies that Victor is more concerned with the attention he is receiving from the creature than the affection and protection he should be providing for his wife-to-be. And honestly, what was that conversation like? “Hey babe, I know we're supposed to get married in a month but I really need to go to England for two years with my bestie to just vibe.” Oh, Victor…you horrible beautiful idiot. 

This sentiment is rescinded back by the monster towards the end of the text after the eventual murder of Elizabeth by the creature. Victor, finally seeming to hold his creation accountable for his actions, embarks on a hunt across Europe for the creature. It is a long and perilous journey, but thankfully he is never far off of his tail because the monster leaves notes and food for him with messages like “ Follow me; I seek the everlasting ices of the north, where you will feel the misery of cold and frost, to which I am impassive."(Shelley), which can be loosely translated into modern English as “Chase me, zaddy.” The monster is seen here edging on the very man that wishes to kill him for the same reasons Victor is chasing him- they are obsessed with each other. To the very end these two can think of nothing else but the other, until they eventually both die of exhaustion. 

The frame narrative makes these conclusions so easy to draw because the narrators are so unreliable. With Walton, you have a doe-eyed positive thinker that is emphatic because he has gained the one thing he was searching for- a friend “whose eyes could reply to mine” (Shelley). The story is told to him from the POV of our most unreliable narrator- Victor Frankenstein- who, while continuing to acknowledge the severity of his situation throughout the text, never seems to take real action to change his circumstance, and instead repeatedly stokes the fire of his perceived “nemesis”. And that leaves us with the creature’s narrative, which is simply his point of view told by his perceived “nemesis” transcribed by a man who is arguably in love with him. With this amount of confusion, it is strikingly easy to allow our own “head canon” to go wild.

This could have been done by Shelley on purpose for reasons similar to that of someone like Chris Claremont. By sowing so much doubt into the validity of her protagonist’s narrative, she allows the book to be up for interpretation without her having to be scrutinized by intellectuals trapped by the social conventions of their time. We also have to take into consideration the circumstances of the book's conception. Rumor has it that the idea started as part of trading of ghost stories on a ski retreat with her husband Percy Shelley, sister, and Lord Byron. And listen, we're all adults here, we know that a “ski retreat with Lord Byron” is literally anything other than an actual fucking ski retreat with Lord Byron. By using three relatively unreliable narrators to tell her story, Shelley takes herself out of the line of fire by her contemporaries and leaves the narrative to be interpreted two hundred years later in a society more accepting to the idea of queer romance. Chris Claremont was essentially doing the same thing with his X-Men. Editorial mandate didn’t allow him to state on page that Mystique and Destiny were a canonically queer couple, but it was so heavily implied that when they were finally allowed to kiss on panel it trended on Twitter for a week- it fucking ruled!

The world has shown us time and again that it’s not always ready for what we have to put out into it-and that's a shame. If we were to go back and try to identify every work of fiction whose maincharacters were supposed to be queer, we would be left with an astounding condemnation of the close-minded outlook of the world that was- and for many, still is. But therein lies the power of a story. The minute that the author hits send, it no longer truly belongs to them. It belongs to us, the readers, and to every reader that comes by it in the future. And to each of us readers, the meaning of the story is completely our own and indelibly correct. While many of our favorite characters in fiction and their authors were constrained by the social conventions of their time, that doesn’t mean they can’t be queer now. These characters are not permanent in the same way we are. They are not real, and therefore are not bound by the laws of reality. They are symbols and they are beacons that represent less who they are on the page and more what they mean to us as individuals.The board of stockholders that make up Marvel comics will never say outright that every mutant in an X-Men comic is queer. But I know Chris Claremont, Connor Goldsmith, and the thousands of listeners to his podcast(myself included) would say otherwise. And those numbers don’t lie. Admittedly, reading Victor Frankenstein as queer still does not position him to be a hero in the same way the X-Men are. But it at least provides new context for his actions. Victor wasn’t out of his mind, he was just in love and didn’t know what to do about it. And in his position, I can’t say I would have acted anydifferentlyt.

Works Cited

Bagocius, Benjamin. “Homosexual Calm: Pausing to Listen to Queer Shame in  Frankenstein.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 54, no. 1, 2022, pp. 1–25., https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2022.0000.

McCloud, Scott. “Chapter 3.” Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Harper Perennial, New York, New York, 2010, pp. 66–100.

Seija Rankin,   Patrick Gomez. “The 10 Best Podcasts of 2021.” EW.com, 2021, https://ew.com/podcasts/best-podcasts-of-2021/.

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein: Original 1818 Uncensored Version. Enhanced Ebooks, 2014.

Wolk, Douglas. “Chapter 10.” All of the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told, Penguin Press, New York, New York, 2021, pp. 136–170.