Kendal Westphal

Professor Stowe

Cultural Studies & Pop Arts

1 May 2018

Four Misfits Visual Narrative

The creation of a visual narrative was an enduring but fun and creative project. My group

created a narrative entitled Four Misfits – although we were a group of five misfits – based on

certain themes that resonated with us throughout the course. The biggest theme we identified

with from Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing is Monsters was isolation. We noticed in the story

how the main character, Karen, seemed to be loner from a young age, and we all agreed that

youth tend to be more vulnerable to isolation and its accompanying emotions. Even though

Karen didn’t have many friends outside of her family, she seemed to accept that she was

different and was okay with it. This was rather inspiring because you do not often find children

taking pride in their individualism. We chose to represent this sense of acceptance in

isolationism in our visual narrative. As a group, we established the main plot of our story and the

roles each of us would take, then worked both individually and together to complete it.

The process really began in the Rare Book Room in the library. Looking over all the

drafts that went into producing A Wrinkle in Time got our creative minds moving and helped us

understand how much time and work would go into making our own graphic novel. After getting

together and finalizing the plot and theme, we assigned roles to each member. Emilio was

assigned author because he had a clear vision of the narrative in his head, and Maribel was

tasked illustrator because she is an incredible artist. Max, Christina and I did not have such

concrete skills to offer, but I like everything to look clean and organized so I chose to be editor,
and team leader and manager were chosen respectively. Assigning specific roles gave us the

opportunity to really use our strengths to the best of our ability and allowed everyone to focus on

one thing at a time. Even though it sometimes felt like I was not contributing much to the

narrative, I think assigning these roles was the best option as it allowed everything to be

completed in a timely fashion and we knew exactly which duties everyone was responsible for.

The creation of the website was a combined effort from all team members, creatively designing

the pages to reflect the theme of our story. Website design is one of the most important skills I

learned in this project because the online world will be even more prevalent in the future. As an

environmental science major, I will likely be asked at to create or manage websites dedicated to

specific environmental issues or institutions.

This class has taught me that the monster in pop culture is not as terrifying as it seems.

Rather, the monster is made to appear and act scary, but in reality it is only different from what is

‘normal’. Throughout the different eras of popular horror stories, the monster has always

symbolized an outcast – an individual who represents a marginalized portion of society. They are

feared by the rest of society, and yet “dwell at the gates of difference” as to show society what is

possible. People are attracted to monsters because they are different and show a kind of freedom

from what is normal and regulated. All of our discussions of the different types of monsters and

their origins has helped me see the monster as more than a gruesome demon, alien, or serial-

killer. If we look at the monsters depicted in popular arts, we can find our insecurities as humans;

the things that we are afraid of because they are different or uncontrollable. The most popular

monster changes over the decades because our fears and insecurities as a human race changes

over time. In America, these fears of difference were historically derived from racism and

bigotry, and the monsters reflected the dehumanizing characteristics that were assigned to people
of color. For example, the Frankenstein monster became popular in the years before the Civil

Rights Movement, and was depicted chasing white women and being attacked by a mob. The

monsters in American pop culture, as W. Scott Poole states, “are living representations of our

darkness, simultaneously metaphors and progenitors of the American way of fear and violence”

(Poole 4). Although the popular view is that the monster is scary, horror films also show us the

dark side in the “normal” human – the one that hunts and brutally kills these monsters. Overall,

this class has given me a greater appreciation of horror films and understanding that they are

contain heavy satire about society’s often misguided and ignorant fears.

Prior to this class, I was always too scared to watch horror movies, but now I feel as

though I cannot stop watching them. I see the monster now not as something to fear, but

something that is different, possibly misunderstood and the potential to connect with. In the

future when I see a horror film and read literature describing monsters, I will understand a bit

more about the setting and the characters, and analyze the monsters’ origins. Looking at my life

and social interactions, I contemplate what kind of horror story I would write. Would my

monster stem from my anxieties of the unknown with artificial intelligence? Would I critique the

blind discrimination of minorities in America? Or will I be the monster, cast of from society like

Karen in My Favorite Thing is Monsters? Karen’s character and inner story of isolation inspired

our plot in Four Misfits, in addition to being a constant theme throughout Poole’s Monsters in

America. Even though Karen is isolated from her peers at school, she still has her brother and

mother and several neighbors who see her for who she really is. This is true of most monsters,

where at some point in their stories there is someone who connects with and has empathy for,

which can be a turning point in how the monster survives. Besides, being a monster is not all bad

– as Karen states “I want to be a monster and only look with my not-blind-eyes at the machine”
(Ferris). By viewing the world from the point of difference, one develops a better understanding

of seeing the world without false glamour, and identifying what lies beneath.

References
Ferris, Emil. 2016. My Favorite Thing is Monsters. Vol. 1.

Poole, W. Scott. 2011. Monsters in America.