Kissing the Mermaid: Resistance, Adaptation, Popular Cultural Memory, and Maya Kern's Webcomic How to Be a Mermaid

Maya Kern's webcomic How to Be a Mermaid (2012) retells H. C. Andersen's “The Little Mermaid” tale as one of love and awakening between a princess and a mermaid. By building on Andersen's sexual tension, explicitly queering the tale, and distributing her webcomic for free, Kern challenges Disney's pervasive and powerful animated version. Reading her webcomic intertextually with both Andersen's story and Disney's remake of it, I trace her resistance and the ways in which she opens the tale up for new readings.