Participants
The Last Monster: Allusions to Mary Shelley's Novels in Marvel's Hulk: The Last Titan
Kimberly Jacobs
University of Cincinnati Clermont College
ML0162
4200 Clermont College Drive
Batavia, OH 45103
(513)-732-5217
kimjacobs@mac.com
The recent commercial success of Marvel Comic’s Spiderman on film has increased popular attention to both Marvel and the comic book industry. Currently, Marvel is publishing a series of trade paperbacks called “The End,” about the final days of various heroes of the Marvel universe. Peter David (writer) and Dale Keown (artist), in Hulk: The Last Titan, no. 1, show a simultaneous debt to Mary Shelley’s two best known novels, Frankenstein and The Last Man. David develops the familiar story of Dr. Bruce Banner, a scientist, and his alter ego the Hulk, a physically advanced, superhuman, yet emotionally-driven creature who at times controls Banner. In “The End,” Banner’s frail, ancient body cannot die because the Hulk will not allow it. Banner/Hulk has outlived all other humans after a nuclear incident, just as Mary Shelley’s protagonist, Lionel Verney, has mysteriously survived all other Europeans wiped out in a plague. “The End” is narrated by both Banner and Hulk, and juxtaposes point of view from the positions of two antagonists who are fused together more tightly than Frankenstein and his creature. It also demonstrates a need for a “recorder” to account for how the story is being told after all human existence has ended, so just as Shelley includes the “sybilline leaves” portion at the beginning of The Last Man to explain the manuscript, David uses an alien recording device to follow Banner and Hulk around.
This study will examine allusions to the plot developments of The Last Man and Frankenstein in The Last Titan, as well as discussing the ways in which genre and subject may be inextricably laced together. I see David and Keown’s work, then, as an extension of Romantic themes such as millenarianism and the unique struggles of the superhuman/superhero. While the narrative structure of the graphic novel/comic book form would seem to differ dramatically from the belle lettre novel, I contend that Shelley’s narrative innovations, as well as her futuristic and speculative themes, prefigure the development of an enduring popular genre. Indeed, Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of the most enduring icons of modern American pop culture, and current scholarly interest in The Last Man demonstrates a widening consideration of Shelleyan philosophical themes in the academic world. The boundaries between popular culture and the literary world often crisscross one another, and in The Last Titan we can see ideas similar to Shelley’s being disseminated in a distinctive, and possibly more suitable, art form. The interplay of text and image in graphic novels gives writers and artists options for playing with the textuality of their story; in fact, it stretches the very idea of textuality into a form that is largely neo-Romantic. Shelley’s narrative experimentation—with multiple narrators in Frankenstein leading to readerly ethical inquiry rather than an imposition of authorial point of view, for example—is a natural for extension to a form that depends on such interplay.
