Last October, we took a look at Marvel Comics’ Frankenstein #1 (Jan., 1973), the first issue of an ongoing series that kicked off with an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel of the same name.  This adaptation, written by Gary Friedrich and drawn by Mike Ploog, would run for three issues, and probably still ranks as one of the most faithful takes on Shelley’s classic work ever attempted in comic books (even if Ploog’s design for the Monster owed at least as much to Universal Studios’ Frankenstein movies of the 1930s and ’40s as it did to Shelley’s text).

As you may recall, Friedrich and Ploog retold Shelley’s story within a narrative framework set a hundred year’s after its events, as an Arctic expedition led by Captain Robert Walton IV — the namesake and great-grandson of a character from the novel — discovered the body of Victor Frankenstein’s Monster frozen in a wall of ice.  The expedition not only retrieved the Monster, but inadvertently resuscitated him, setting off a chain of events which ultimately caused the wreck of Walton’s ship and the deaths of most of his crew. 

With their adaptation of the novel having concluded in issue #3, Friedrich and Ploog devoted the next issue to an original story (though still told in flashback) that bridged the gap between Shelley’s ending and Marvel’s beginning, as the Monster recalled how, after leaving the ship of the original Capt. Robert Walton with the intent of committing suicide, he instead found his way to a remote village of early humans (probably Neanderthals) who took him in.  He remained with those people in peace until they were attacked and slaughtered by another tribe; after wreaking bloody vengeance on the aggressors, the Monster had had the accident which resulted in him being frozen in suspended animation for a hundred years.

At the conclusion of issue #4, the final survivor of the shipwreck — Captain Walton IV himself — succumbs to his injuries, leaving the Monster alone once more… although, before he passes, he has a revelation to make…

After burying Walton and the last of the other crew members, the Monster of Frankenstein sets out upon the Arctic sea upon a crude raft… and that’s where we find him at the beginning of issue #5:

The epigraph with which our story opens comes of course from Creedence Clearwater Revival’s 1969 hit single (#2 on the Billboard Hot 100), “Bad Moon Rising”.  This song would go on to be featured on the soundtrack of any number of spooky movies and TV shows over the next several decades; but in 1973, it was still a relatively new tune, so this was probably one of the earliest references to it in a horror genre context.*

I find it interesting that Friedrich is very specific about the Monster’s “tortured mind” being the same as that previously housed in whatever anonymous dead body had “donated” its gray matter to Victor Frankenstein’s project.  Outside of the occasional reference to an “abnormal brain” being responsible for the Monster’s antisocial tendencies, that’s not an idea that crops up much in “Frankenstein” stories (at least not in the ones your humble blogger has seen or read).

We’ve arrived at the same scene that’s depicted on Ploog’s cover, the main differences being that in that version, the imperiled young woman is awake, and is black-haired rather than blonde.

Before we proceed, this may be a good place to note that although Ploog inked as well as pencilled the cover, the interior art has been finished by John Verpoorten.  If I’m going to be honest, I have to say that Verpoorten has never been one of my favorite inkers; nevertheless, I’m impressed with his work over Ploog’s pencils here (as well as in the preceding issue).  Ploog is a particularly difficult artist to ink well, and Verpoorten does s good or better job than virtually anyone else, in my opinion.

Though aghast at the villagers’ behavior, the Monster still sees no other recourse than to try to find shelter somewhere in the village.  Eventually, he carries his fragile burden to a barn on the community’s shadowed outskirts…

A sword in a tree?  Perhaps Friedrich is a fan of Norse mythology — or maybe he just really dug the use of this same motif in Avengers #100, or in Kull the Conqueror #7, or both.

It’s quite the coincidence that the barn selected by the Monster more or less at random turns out to be the one owned by the young woman’s father — but, hey, it’s a small village, right?  In any event, the woman tries to dissuade her strange benefactor from seeking help at the house, saying that her Dad is under the evil spell of “the demon in black robes“, same as everybody else in town — but our protagonist can’t believe that any father could truly turn his back on his daughter, and after his charge lapses back into unconsciousness, he resolves to take her to her parent…

The one-eyed, one-handed old soldier does better against the Monster than most men would — they don’t call him “the greatest warrior in the country” for nothing — but the end of their struggle is never really in doubt…

As the Monster carries the unconscious woman up into the forested highlands, he begins to allow himself to believe that his loneliness might be at an end.  He searches for “a place where she will be safe, and where he will have the opportunity to win her heart, if indeed such a thing is possible!”

While the Monster can hardly believe that he’s slept so heavily that the villagers could creep in and steal Lenore away without him hearing a sound, no other explanation for his beloved’s absence seems possible.  And so he begins to make his way down out of the highlands, vowing vengeance upon any who’ve harmed her.

Along the way, he encounters two unexpected sights: first, the bloody carcass of a slain wolf, thrown over the limb of a tree; then, an abandoned, tattered dress which he recognizes as Lenore’s, and footprints leading away from the dress, in the direction of the village…

It’s interesting to compare Ploog’s werewolf design here not only with his own Werewolf by Night character, which closely follows the “fur-covered human” model popularized by the 1941 movie The Wolf Man, but also with his fellow artist Bernie Wrightson’s lycanthrope from DC Comics’ Swamp Thing #4, which had been published just a few months earlier.  Like Wrightson’s beast-man, the werewolf Ploog gives us here has a decidedly more lupine head than does Jack Russell’s savage alter ego in the WbN series; though, unlike Wrightson’s, however, this creature’s legs and feet are mostly human-looking.

The young man who’s shown cradling the dead Lenore in his arms isn’t identified in Friedrich’s script.  Perhaps he’s a former lover, although the coloring of both his hair and his clothing (the latter of which matches the color scheme of Lenore’s dad’s outfit) suggests a sibling relationship.

In the conclusion of Frankenstein #4, Robert Walton encouraged the Monster to seek his creator’s descendant for the purpose of finding help.  The final panel of issue #5, however, tells us that the Monster will now take up that quest solely for the purpose of killing the last Frankenstein.  Friedrich doesn’t belabor the point, but the implication is clear; the Monster who took to the sea on his raft at the end of the last issue still had some hope of living a normal human life.  That hope has died with the beautiful but deceitful wolf-woman named Lenore.  It’s a somber ending that serves to compound the tragic feeling of this genuinely moving story.

---

In the opinion of your humble blogger, Frankenstein #5 was as good as this series ever got.  Mike Ploog would return for one more issue (doing full art, even, for the first time since issue #3), but the story in #6 was less emotionally involving than its predecessor, and thus less satisfying (though Ploog’s giant spider-monster was certainly worth the price of admission).  With #7, John Buscema became the series’ regular artist, and though his work was as reliably excellent as you would expect, it simply didn’t convey the same macabre atmosphere as had Ploog’s.  Still, as significant as the shift in art styles was, it wasn’t as critical to the series’ fortunes going forward as two decisions made not long afterwards on the story end of things.

The first of these, and arguably the most damaging — at least if you appreciated the effort Marvel had made thus far to be faithful to Mary Shelley’s work — was to contrive an injury to the Monster’s vocal cords that made him permanently unable to speak (this happened in issue #9).  The intention was clearly to make Marvel’s Frankenstein Monster more like the version audiences were familiar with from movies and television; but, by limiting the ability of the title’s protagonist to communicate freely with other people, the move also made it more difficult for Friedrich (and the writers who eventually followed him) to include the kind of character work that had made stories like “A Monster Walks Among Us!” so memorable.

The second change, which didn’t come about until issue #12 — and which was correlated with a second Frankenstein Monster series that had since launched in the black-and-white comics magazine Monsters Unleashed — was to shift the temporal setting of the title from the end of the 19th century to the present day.  While this allowed the Monster to cross over with, say, Spider-Man (always good for sales — or such was the prevailing assumption in the Marvel offices, at any rate), it ultimately resulted in our protagonist becoming just one of multiple inarticulate horror-types prowling the shadows of the Marvel Universe, along with Man-Thing, Werewolf by Might, the Living Mummy, the Golem, and probably some others whose names escape me at the moment.  In the end, none of the changes prevented the title being cancelled with its 18th issue, released in June, 1975.

None of the above should be taken to mean that there were no decent issues of Frankenstein published after #6; indeed, there was fine work done by several later contributors, artist Val Mayerik being perhaps the chief among them.  Some of that work is in fact good enough to be worth its own blog post (though whether that’ll actually happen will depend on what competition crops up in any given month over the next two years).  For now, however, we’ll take our leave of Marvel’s Frankenstein with #5 — an issue which, in addition to giving us an inkling of how good this series might have become had it continued in the same direction and with the same creative team, remains a very fine comic book, all on its own.

 

*It definitely wasn’t the earliest, however, not even in comic books, as this reference had been preceded by at least one prior example: Doug Moench and Tom Sutton’s “Bad Moon on the Rise!”, a horror short story published a couple of years earlier, in Eerie #36 (Nov., 1971).