Monster of Frankenstein #1.

Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon. 

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This very evening, the British TV channel known as Legend is showing Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, mere nights after it showed Bride of Frankenstein.

Truly, this surfeit of Modern Prometheusness can only be a cue for me to look at another stab at bringing the monster to life.

And, this time, it's one from fifty years ago.

It's strange to think that when I first saw the Universal take on the tale, that film was only forty years old but seemed far more ancient then than this take does now - even though this take is, at present, fifty years old. What madness is this?

The take is, of course, Marvel Comics' Monster of Frankenstein #1, a natural bedfellow for the company's early 1970s Dracula and Werewolf comics. Several years ago, I reviewed issue #15 of this series but have reason to believe the first issue's a very different beast to that book.

Rather peculiarly, we begin with sea captain Robert Walton IV and his quest to find the monster. Why he's seeking it, we aren't told, only that his great-grandfather had also encountered it. Presumably, his great-grandfather being the sea captain of the same surname from the original novel.

This Walton clearly has an unerring sense of direction because no sooner have we met him than he's found his quarry, encased in a block of ice in the Arctic where it, presumably, resides beside the blocks of ice that hold the Thing From Another World and Captain America.

No sooner have the vaguely rebellious crew got the ice cube aboard than Walton starts to explain its back-story to the cabin boy. 

From this narration, we learn of the monster's creation by Victor Frankenstein and of how the scientist, having created it, instantly decided to destroy it.

Needless to say, the creature didn't greet that plan with good grace and proceeded to murder Victor's brother and frame an innocent for the deed, causing her execution.

Deciding cowardice is the better part of valour, Victor flees to the mountains but the monster catches up with him and, now confronting him, is about to reveal what it's been up to since he last encountered it.

But that's where our flashback must end, as Walton's ship is suddenly gripped by the mighty fists of a storm that threatens to sink it and its crew.

At this point, the vaguely rebellious crew becomes determinedly rebellious and demands to throw the creature overboard.

But unbeknown to them all, even as they clash, in the ship's lower quarters, the storm's turmoil has shifted the block of ice too close to an open fire and, now, that ice is starting to melt...

As we all know, the original novel's a classic but how does this interpretation stand up?

It's OK but it does suffer from the decision to tell the tale of the monster's creation in flashback.

Granted, that's what the original novel does but there's a reason no one ever makes a Frankenstein movie that's faithful to the book. Thanks to this decision, it means neither the scientist nor his creation feel like they're the tale's protagonist and we never really get to know them or their motivations. Despite the comic being set at sea, this lends a distinctly dry feel to proceedings.

It also seems, at times, as though story elements have gone missing. For instance, we're told of the murder of Victor's brother William and the subsequent trial of Justine Moritz for the slaying but, apart from a single panel, early on, we've never been introduced to these characters, giving them an air of the shoe-horned.

Mike Ploog's artwork is suitably Ploogy and he admirably captures the sense of being storm-tossed, although this story is the first time it's ever struck me just how similar to Herb Trimpe's his style could be at times.

Meanwhile, Mike Gary Friedrich's script is, in all honesty, unremarkable. His dialogue often dominated by attempts to plaster over gaps and cracks in the visual story-telling.

So, overall, it's an unexceptional comic about which I don't have a lot to say.

I will comment, however, that its cliffhanger does make me want to read the next issue. So, I suppose that, in that sense, the comic's succeeded in doing its job.