The Art of Frankenstein : Alex Velazquez

Frankenstein Meets Norman Rockwell in this stunning digital image by Madison, Wisconsin 3D artist Alex Velazquez.

The Monster contemplates plastic surgery as a solution for a midriff bulge. It’s a pitch perfect homage to Rockwell’s distinctive style and the gentle humor of his old school Americana scenes, complete with a dead-on evocation of the classic Saturday Evening Post covers. Note the date on the issue, October 31.

This piece, entitled Dr. Frankenstein 90210, was the 2007 Grand Prize winning entry in the “Scared Silly” Halloween illustration contest sponsored by Zbrush Central and Wacom.

Velazquez generously shares a detailed, step-by-step Making Of.

See more of Alex Velazquez' amazing art on his website and blog.

The 2007 “Scared Silly” contest entries and winners, on Zbrush Central.

The Art of Frankenstein : Jez Hall

The artist says he was just messing around with Photoshop. Of course, when you are an accomplished animator, designer and storyboard artist, the stuff you knock out, the quick exercises, the doodles and whatnot tend to look awfully good. Such is the case here, a striking image created by British artist Jez Hall.

“I think it’s the Frankenstein Monster,” says Jez. Well, it works for me. This stark, powerful design would make a great Frankenstein book cover or a poster for a play or a movie.

The image here (and an interesting variant) appears on Jez Hall's art blog, Knunk, and you can see more of his energetic work on Viewbook.

Igor Reviewed

Igor, the animated comedy about a madlab hunchbacked assistant has opened to mediocre box-office and generally less than enthusiastic reviews. The film sneaked into theaters last week without fanfare, appearing well after for the School’s Out summer season and perhaps a tad too early for a Halloween connection. Meanwhile, Dread Central reports that a tie-in toy line has been canned.

The film begs comparison to similarly monster-minded animated features, like the Tim Burton-produced The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Corpse Bride, or Pixar’s Monsters, Inc. and Shrek. Most critics this week couldn’t help alluding to one or more of these, always to Igor’s detriment. Mike Mayo of The Washington Post says, “Igor attempts to do with horror stereotypes and clichés what Shrek did with fairy tales. Though it has clever moments, it doesn't come close to the polished animation, wit and originality of the big green guy”. Susan Walker of The Toronto Star writes, “ Igor, like the Frankenstein's monster at the centre of its tired plot, looks like something cobbled together out of used, very used, parts… its feeble satire will be of little interest to the Shrek set.”

Tracking reviews, we note that Jeanette Catsoulis of The New York Times calls Igor “an animated twist on the Frankenstein story that never sparks to life”. There is faint praise from Roger Moore of The Orlando Sentinel (via The Detroit Free Press) who calls the film a “decently animated misfire”, while David Germain of the Associated Press (via The Detroit News) is downright blunt, tagging Igor as “clunky… awkward… completely empty of laughs.” John Cozzoli of Zombos Closet of Horror reviews the film from a classic horror fan’s perspective, concluding that Igor “is neither exciting or emotionally satisfying”.

A bit more forgiving, and taking the film’s target audience into consideration, Michael Phillips of The Chicago Tribune reports that “Igor isn't particularly funny… But my kid went with it, and I had a fairly good time.” Kurt Loder of MTV.com finds that “the picture suffers from a humor deficit”, yet a couple of 10-year olds at the screening he attended “cackled and hooted through most of the movie” and its success may, indeed, “rely only on them.”

Considering an apparent consensus of downbeat reviews, one is startled by the unequivocal rave of reviewer Nomad posted on Dread Central, pronouncing the film “an instant cult classic… With nearly non-stop laughs from an amazing cast, an excellently written, thoroughly surprising story line with images you never thought you’d see in an animated feature before and top notch animation”.

Igor is written by Chris McKenna and directed by Tony Leondis. It features an all-star cast of voices led by John Cusack. John Cleese — Dr. Waldman in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein — is also aboard, as is Steve Buscemi whose character, an immortal rabbit with suicidal tendencies, is cited in most reviews as a show stealer.

The official Igor website, and here’s an online Igor game.

Related
Igor
The Assistant: Dwight Frye

Flash for Frankenstein

Out of London, England, artist Aaron Blecha produces illustrations and character designs for books, toys and video game companies.

His Monstersquid website and blog are filled with hilarious cartoons. I love his pirates, blobby aliens, drooling zombies, and Star Trek: Next Generation caricatures.

Blecha also does a mean Frankenstein Monster.

The black and white illustration at top is from a very brief, “blink and you’ll miss it” Flash animation clip.

Look here and see the Monster zapped awake and roaring. The most entertaining five seconds you’ll have today!

Frankenstein For Food

Frankenstein in Love, Clive Barker’s radical reworking of Mary Shelley’s themes, is being revived by the Will Act For Food theatre company of Chicago. The play opens on Thursday, September 25, and will run all the way through Halloween, until November 1st, at the Chemically Imbalanced Theater.

Tickets are very inexpensive — who charges $18 for a good theater seat these days? — and you can even shave of $3 in exchange for a non-perishable food donation. It’s all part of the WAFF’s mission of “professional artists devoted to feeding the Chicago community through theatre and service”, measuring its success by meals served, not just seats filled.

A special Cans For Cash night will be held Saturday, October 18, where the admission goes up to $30, but can be paid entirely in food, a dollar off the ticket price for every non-perishable food item donated. After the show, patrons are invited to mingle with cast and crew and enjoy refreshments and live music.

Frankenstein in Love is a challenging and provocative play that mixes Frankensteinian themes, political allegory, romance and gruesome Grand Guignol. It’s a bold, audacious choice of programming made even more interesting by the WAFF’s admirable commitment “to feed the Chicago community physically and artistically by raising food for the hungry while hand-in-hand creating thought-provoking theatre.”

Bravo!


Will Act For Food website, and their Frankenstein in Love page and presskit.


Related
My previous posts about the play:
Clive Barker’s Frankenstein
Frankenstein in Love

The Making Of The Curse of Frankenstein

Here’s the new issue, number 21, of The Little Shoppe of Horrors, the indispensable magazine dedicated to classic British horror films, mostly Hammer Films.

Featured is a ‘Making Of’ article about The Curse of Frankenstein, released fifty years ago, in 1957, the movie that first brought together Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, writer Jimmy Sangster, director Terence Fisher and the Hammer film crew, and instantly established Hammer Films as the number one horror studio of its time. Among the goodies in this issue is an analysis of Phil Leaky’s makeup work, and a look at the Tales of Frankenstein TV pilot by Ted Newsom.

The cover is by Jeff Preston, with inside art by Mark Maddox, Frank Dietz, Bruce Timm and others.

Here’s the Little Shoppe of Horrors website where you can place your orders. May I suggest you also check out the previous issue, number 20, an important history of Amicus Films.

Related:
The Director: Terence Fisher
Tales of Frankenstein

Dick Briefer's Frankenstein Links

Updating my previous post… There are quite a few Dick Briefer Frankenstein stories available on the net, if you don’t mind clicking around a bit. The rewards are great.

In addition to his Briefer posts this weekend (and the promise of more to come around Halloween time), Karswell of The Horrors of It All has three more stories sitting in his blog archives. There’s Frozen Alive (Parts One and Two), a story that starts at the North Pole and somehow ends up inside an Egyptian pyramid; a classic, harrowing tale called The Beautiful Dead, and a comedy-era story, Frankenstein and the Mummies.

Elsewhere: On Pappy’s Golden Age of Comics Blogzine (a delightful daily stop for me), you can find no less than 18 Briefer Frankenstein tales! This Link will take you to Pappy’s Frankenstein archives. Scroll down through the posts (all of them fun) to get to the Briefer stories. There are real gems to be found, like the bittersweet and horrific The Monster’s Mate, and the wildly imaginative World of Monsters, featuring dinosaurs and a vicious cat woman. In the comedy style, there’s lots to enjoy, too. Check out the surrealistic splash pages for The Curse of the Flying Dutchman and Frankenstein’s Job. You can also read the origin story, Frankenstein’s Creation, from issue number one, in 1945.

Still more: Pure Excitement carries two humorous stories, here and here, and American Comic Archives has three, including the legendary Frankenstein Meets Boris Karload.

Briefer is worth exploring. You might have a hard time picking a favorite style, the gruesome or the giggly. I absolutely love his scary, morbid Frankensteins, but then again, the cartoony ones can go from silly to utterly mind-blowing at the turn of a page, and you can’t get enough of those, either.

Click and enjoy!

With thanks to Karswell and Mr. Cavin.

Dick Briefer's Frankenstein

Dick Briefer broke into comics in the pre-superhero days of 1936. Working out of the Iger-Eisner shop, he learned his craft punching out adventure and science fiction strips featuring characters with names like Storm Curtis, Crash Parker and Rex Dexter (of Mars!).

It was in Prize Comics number 7, in 1940, that Briefer introduced The New Adventures of Frankenstein, featuring a genuinely chilling creature, giant-sized, with a cruelly twisted face, as a pulp riff on the Universal Frankenstein movies of the Thirties. This gruesome Frankenstein messed with Prize heroes and World War Two Nazis until 1945 when Briefer submitted a proposal for The Monster’s own comic book, but with an unexpected twist… The Frankenstein comic book would be humorous.

The Monster was simplified and beautifully cartooned up, scars erased, given a button nose that rode up on its forehead and his suit redone in primary colors. From ’45 to ’49, over a 17 issue run, Dick Briefer’s oafish, heart of gold Frankenstein — now billed as “The Merry Monster” — romped with vampire, werewolf and ghost friends. Wild to the point of surrealism, Briefer’s funny Frankenstein stories were perfectly served by his gorgeous brush strokes. The series stands as a true classic of Golden Age funnies, which makes the next step in Briefer’s Frankenstein career all the more surprising. Three years after its cancellation, the title was restarted, picking up with number 18, but as a horror comic, returning to The Monster to its grim and grisly origins.

Face split in half and mouth tortured in a permanent snarl, this new incarnation of The Monster combined the earlier nasty Monster with the clean lines and lavish brushwork that had distinguished his comical doppelganger. The series ran another fifteen issues, its demise coming with the backlash against the very horror comics fad that had made its reboot possible. But Briefer was not quite done yet… In the mid-50’s, he doubled back to the comedic Frankenstein, doing up a set of black and white gags as a proposal for a syndicated newspaper strip. Unfortunately, it didn’t sell. Briefer then stepped away from comics and spent the rest of his career as a commercial artist.

A happy coda to Briefer’s story is that his Frankenstein was “rediscovered” and celebrated by a new generation of artists and comic book fans before he passed away in the early 80s.

Dick Briefer’s comics, with their unusual back and forth, horror to comedy arc, masterfully done in both registers, holds a unique and preeminent place in the pop culture history of Frankenstein. There’s a real need for a comprehensive collection of Briefer’s Frankenstein stories. All we have at the moment is a print-on-demand title, The Monster of Frankenstein, reproducing some of Briefer’s horror work in black and white.

Here’s a taste of Briefer’s range: Karswell, host of the ever brilliant and essential The Horrors of It All, has posted Briefer Frankenstein stories in both horror and comedy modes.

The first selection, The Monster and The Statue, is from the 1952 horror comic restart issue, number 18. Note: The post includes a mind-blowing photo — by Weegee! — of a Frankenstein/Dracula re-release marquee, the very subject discussed here and on the Greenbriar Picture Shows blog.

The second post, How I Had (and Lost) a Pet Dinosaur, harks back to the comic's cartoon era, from issue No. 5, in 1946.

Related
Dick Briefer's Frankenstein links

Frankenstein and Dracula Forever

An update: Part Two of Jim McElwee’s fascinating and meticulously documented tale of the Frankenstein and Dracula revivals is now up on his Greenbriar Picture Shows blog, complete with stunning pictures and posters.

This time, we learn about Realart Pictures, the film recycling company that squeezed extra life out of classic monster movies, we follow through to the 50’s Frankenstein and Dracula reincarnations of Hammer Films and American International, Shock Theater, and the Monster Boom of the 60’s.

This stuff is pure gold. Don’t miss Frankenstein/Dracula Forever!

Related:
Dare You See It?

The Bride Speaks

Fred Passmore at Monster Memories has unearthed an interview with Elsa Lanchester — The Bride of Frankenstein herself — originally published in Marvel’s Monster of the Movies magazine in 1975. It’s a short, lightweight exchange with editor Jim Harmon and radio host Frank Bresee. You wish some film historian had sat down and properly grilled Ms Lanchester, but still, there are some interesting bits here.

Lanchester recalls how make-up chores on Bride of Frankenstein entailed “very long hours”, with Jack Pierce spending four or five hours on Karloff’s Monster and then three or four more on The Bride. “Boris would start at about half past two in the morning, and I came in about half past five.”

The pair would work a few hours and be released early so as to get enough rest to start over again in the wee hours of the following day.

The actress remembers Karloff as “a very, very intelligent man” and lends credence to stories of director Whale being less than kind with his monster star, saying, “James Whale treated him like a truck driver, when Boris was a sophisticated, educated man. He was a very nice person.”

The most tantalizing quote from the interview comes when Lanchester says she would have returned to the part if The Bride had been revived.

“Oh yes, I would have stayed with it. I wasn’t thinking about type-casting then.” Boris Karloff, she says, “had a lot to live down as an actor because he was thought of only as the Monster. I was sort of a spiritual bride, so that never attached to me.”

It’s fun to know that Elsa Lanchester would have donned The Bride’s electric beehive again if asked — “It would be interesting to do an elderly Bride”, she says — but the character's short and spectacular film career, barely 12 minutes onscreen, makes her that more magical, that more special and unforgettable. Universal’s Monster would be revived often, pulled from castle ruins, yanked out sulfur pits and chipped out of ice walls, given less to do with every reanimation, becoming a prop in late 40’s Monster rallies. The Bride flashed across the screen and our consciousness like a speeding comet, leaving an indelible afterglow, never to be dimmed in a parody of reanimation.

Elsa Lanchester’s life was an extraordinary one. She studied dance under Isadora Duncan, she was married to Charles Laughton, she earned two Oscar nominations, and she sang a duet with Elvis Presley. She played both Mary Shelley and The Monster’s betrothed in Bride of Frankenstein. She excelled at comedy. With time, she wore her age well, growing older in roles that suited her without the artifice of youth displayed by many of her contemporaries. She was feisty, eccentric, and a joy to watch, always.

There’s plenty to admire and remember in her work, but The Bride made her a cinema immortal.

You can read the whole interview, scanned from the pages of Monster of the Movies, on Monster Memories.

A profile of Elsa Lanchester on Cult Sirens.

Related:
The Short, Apocalyptic Life of The Bride of Frankenstein

The Meaning of The Monster

“I don't know why it is that Frankenstein's monster is my go-to guy to fight the blues” writes Arbogast, in a short post that manages, intuitively, to capture the meaning of The Monster, a metaphorical stand-in for the rejected, the oppressed, the lonely, the sad.

Needing to Feel Better… is a concise, wonderful reflection.

Meanwhile, The Monster as metaphor, and more precisely as a metaphor in American culture and its “racial resonance in the United States”, is the subject of Black Frankenstein, by Elizabeth Young, from New York University Press.

This is the real stuff, hardcore scholarship, meticulously researched. It’s a fascinating, provocative and challenging book.

I am currently plowing through this one and I’ll post a proper review when I’m done reading and thinking on it. Here’s the NYU page for Black Frankenstein, where you can access the book’s chapter-length introduction.

For those of you eager to dive in, Black Frankenstein is out now and its available through the Frankenstore.

Dare You See It?

Here’s a MUST READ, MUST SEE post, up on John McElwee’s Greenbriar Picture Shows blog, about the 1938 re-release of Frankenstein and Dracula, the legendary double-bill that kickstarted Universal’s second monster movie cycle.

McElwee writes entertainingly about Universal’s all-thumbs attempts at finding a companion feature for their horror classics, mix and matching Frankenstein and Dracula with assorted titles, but never together, to indifferent box office. It was a private exhibitor, Emil Umann, who would come up with the idea of showing Frankenstein and Dracula together at his Los Angeles theater, the Regina. With the first showing, on August 4, crowds were already lining up. Additional shows were added and still patrons had to be turned away. Within a week, the papers were reporting on the phenomenon and Bela Lugosi was popping over for daily personal appearances.

Universal would soon shunt Ulmann aside and launch the “Horror Boys” double-bill across the country — with Lugosi in tow — to terrific business. Seattle reported crowd too big to handle, and there was even a bona fide riot in Salt Lake City.

The house was sold out by ten o’clock in the morning. Four thousand frenzied Mormons milled around outside, finally broke through the police lines, smashed the plate glass box-office, bent in the front doors, and tore off one of the door checks in their eagerness to get in and be frightened.

John McElwee’s Greenbriar Picture Shows is a miraculous blog, always entertaining, crammed with fascinating, revelatory details and always accompanied by superb iconography. This time, we are treated to wonderful We Dare You vintage newspaper ads and trade ballyhoo.

This is one post you can’t miss. Go see, fast, and while you’re at it, explore the site’s archives. It’s a treasure house. You could become addicted, as I am, to the Greenbriar Picture Shows.

Here is the post, The Pair That Curled Your Hair, and stand by for Part 2 that will follow the Frankenstein/Dracula tandem into the 40’s and beyond.

UPDATE: Part Two, Dracula/Frankenstein Forever, is posted, and it's terrific.

Related:
The Selling of Frankenstein

Frankensteinian : The Snow Man

In the early thirties, the success of James Whale’s Frankenstein made the film a point of reference. New films, even plain mysteries, were advertised or critiqued as being “Frankenstein-like”, or “in the vein of Frankenstein”. It even applied to cartoon shorts, as in this curious review by James Francis Crow in a Hollywood Citizen News entertainment column dated August 24, 1933:

Ted Eshbaugh, touted as the first worthy competitor to Walt Disney, has completed the first color cartoon of The Wizard of Oz series, and it will be released soon by a major studio, this column hears. 

Another of Eshbaugh's creations, called The Snow Man, in an Arctic locale, applies the Frankenstein theme to cartoon comics. The snow man builded by the little Eskimo hero and his animal pals comes to life and spreads havoc in the north country. But our hero runs to the North Pole Power Plant, turns on the Aurora Borealis, and melts Mr. Snow Man. 

A fish the icy Frankenstein has swallowed is found swimming in the placid lake formed at his demise. 

The Snow Man, all in color, will open at Tally's Criterion tomorrow.

As far as being a “worthy competitor”, Ted Eshbaugh was indeed the first of Disney’s would-be rivals to produce color cartoons, but he was never a true contender. He would produce or direct a handful of titles, the most significant being a 1933 adaptation of The Wizard of Oz, with music by Carl Stalling. Promoted as the first of a series, the short was embroiled in legal problems and never reached theaters. The record is unclear, it was either a case of Walt Disney having an exclusive agreement with Technicolor, or Samuel Goldwyn owning the film rights to the property.

The Snow Man, produced in 1932, features a nasty North Pole bogeyman with scary claws and a literal stovepipe hat. The Frankenstein theme suggested by reporter Crow is incidental, the snowman being a creature assembled, brought to life and going on a rampage. A year later, the film might have been compared to King Kong instead.

The theater mentioned in the article, Tally’s Criterion, was called “The first truly ‘deluxe” movie theatre in Los Angeles” when it opened, as The Kinema, in 1917, boating 1800 seats and a spectacular organ. It was one of the first theaters to install the Vitaphone sound system in 1927 and Al Jolson himself traveled cross-country to attend a showing there of The Jazz Singer. The theater cycled through several names until it was damaged in a fire, abandoned, and demolished in 1941.

See The Snow Man on YouTube.

“At Last — Movie Cartoons in Color”, an article about Eshbaugh’s methods, published in Modern Mechanix, in January 1932.

Source of the newspaper quote: Old Movie Section.

The 100 Heads of Frankenstein

Pictured here is but a small sampling of sculptor Bill Luciani’s amazing 100 Heads of Frankenstein collection, featuring Frankenstein Monsters, Frankenstein creators, and assorted weird Frankenstein assistants, all immortalized in latex.

The collection was recently on view at Maskapalooza, a celebration of monster masks and related memorabilia held in connection with Monster-Mania Con II, in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.

See more pictures on the Classic Horror Film Boards (the above is courtesy of photographer Marian Clatterbaugh, co-publisher of Monsters from the Vault), and there’s also a large selection on view at Dread Central.

Friends of Frankenstein

Have you noticed the new Friends of Frankensteinia feature on the sidebar?

If you have a Blogger account (you don't have to be a blogger), show your love and join the Faithful Followers of Frankensteinia!

You can also link up with Frankensteinia on MySpace and Facebook.

Frankenstein Music

I’m guessing that Mary Shelley Overdrive took their name off a Sabertooth mini-series published by Marvel Comics in 2002. The South Carolina, post-punk band madly mixes original material — self-professed “unmitigated foolishness” — with reckless covers of everything from Devo to Bo Diddley to the Batman Theme. And if that’s not crazy enough for you, they give most of their music away.

Dial up the band’s website to access free downloads, and admire the splendidly trashy record covers and graphics.

Freakenstein hails from Pori, “the Liverpool of Finland”. The band describes its music as “melodic aggressive punk rock” with gothic themes influenced by “horror movies, comics and splatter nightmares”.

Check out Freakenstein’s website for news, bios and band photos. The comic book-style illustration of the Freakenstein character and its victim is by Kari Kuusinen.

The Newcastle-based alternative pop band Dog Years has released a CD entitled Frankenstein Songs, suggesting something patched together and out of control. The band keeps a MySpace presence.

The fabulous cover art for Frankenstein Songs is by Richard Thomas Short. His website is a delight.

Vampire Frankenstein

Posted on The Horrors of It All this weekend is a rousing story from the Golden Age of horror comics that remixes traditional horror themes, running the Frankenstein story headlong into a vampire tale.

In The Vampire Maker!, originally published in Adventures into Weird Worlds #13 (1952), a Frankensteinian scientist is in the final, furious moments of bringing his giant monster to life, even as the local angry villagers are storming the castle. They had better make haste: Dr. Gottfried is not content with pumping artificial life into a stitched-up revenant. This monster is a supersized, bloodthirsty vampire with tusk-like teeth and giant bat wings!

Frankenstein and The Vampire have always walked side by side. They were both conceived at the Villa Diodati, in 1818, when Mary Shelley created her Frankenstein and John Polidori, under the influence of Lord Byron, brought forth Lord Ruthven, The Vampyre.

The two characters, the man-made Monster and the Vampire, were soon mixing it up on stage in 19th century melodramas and in outlandish burlesques. In the early 1930’s, the Monster and the Vampire — now Dracula, inspired by Polidori’s Ruthven — came to the movies within months of each other. In decades to come, they would cross paths, opponents or tag teamed, in countless B-movies and comic books. In The Vampire Maker!, the Monster and the Vampire literally come together as one. They are combined.

The story unfolds at breakneck speed, enthusiastically drawn by a young Carmine Infantino showing clear signs of the bold, dynamic style that would become his trademark. There’s a twist at the end, of course.

The boomerang trick ending was a hallmark of the horror comics. In The Mad World of William M. Gaines, Frank Jacobs’ 1972 biography of the eccentric publisher of the classic EC horror comics (and, of course, Mad Magazine), there’s an anecdote about a young reader who sent in a story idea. The story was about a man obsessed with sharpening pencils. There were pencils all over the place and the man would spend all his time maniacally running the pencils through a sharpener. Then, one day, a giant flying saucer lands and when the aliens step out, they look like giant pencils. They grab the guy, shove him into a machine, and sharpen his head to a point. Gaines said the story was unusable, but the kid got the idea, he understood the formula for horror comics: You sharpen the pencils, the pencils sharpen your head.

Read The Vampire Maker! on The Horrors of It All. There’s also a sequel — a rare occurrence in classic horror comics —called Terror in Town that deals with the direct aftermath of Dr. Gottfried’s experiment. That one is drawn by George Tuska. Both stories are a lot of fun.

Do explore Karswell’s The Horrors of It All. It’s a prolific, immensely enjoyable and consistently mind-blowing blog devoted to the classic horror comics.

Related:
You, Frankenstein

Frankenstein's Laboratory

Electric arcs crackling overhead, vats pulsating with eerie green light, the scientist prepares the slab to receive The Monster. In the illustration below, phosphorus blue light bathes the lab’s powerful generator.

These digital illustrations were created in 1998 by Stephan Martiniere at Industrial Light and Magic for the proposed animated feature known as CGI Frankenstein. Seems the project was canned almost as soon as it was announced. The script, by Brent Maddock and S.S.Wilson, called for Dr. Pretorius, late of The Bride of Frankenstein, to seek The Monster and use its neck electrodes to power his new experiments. The film was meant to have the look and feel of the classic Universal monster movies, and even The Wolfman was penciled in for a part.

A tantalizing clip of the animated Monster, barely fifteen seconds worth, was produced. It can be seen on Ain’t It Cool News (scroll all the way down to see it).

Stephan Martiniere recently added a prestigious Best Professional Artist Hugo to his already crowded trophy shelf. The artist’s website overflows with fabulous art and concept designs. You can see his Frankenstein art large-size here.

Martiniere was also featured on io9, complete with a nice portfolio of works.

Related:

CGI Frankenstein

The Art of Frankenstein : Charles Burns

I try to achieve something that’s almost like a visceral effect. The quality of the lines and the density of the black take on a character of their own — it’s something that has an effect on your subconscious. Those lines make you feel a certain way.

— Charles Burns

Here’s a gorgeous Frankenstein Monster and Dracula group portrait done for The New Yorker in 1994. Can you name all the movies represented?

American illustrator Charles Burns is best known for his psychological horror comics that conjugate teen angst and sexual awakening with deformities, mutation and bizarre diseases, all rendered in a meticulous, black and white ligne claire style. Burns’ preoccupation with adolescent horrors and eerie physical transgression culminated in the acclaimed graphic novel Black Hole, patiently created over a ten-year period. Time magazine says, “Visually, it's one of the most stunning graphic novels yet published”.

Several of Burns’ earlier stories made heavy use of pop culture iconography. El Borbah was a combination private eye/masked wrestler inhabiting a freakshow world of weird characters, a bold marriage of Chester Gould and Hergé. The wonderful Big Baby stories, at once creepy and enormously touching, dealt with a small boy living in a fantasy world of cool movie monsters awakening to the cruel and dangerous real world of adults. You can glimpse a Karloff Frankenstein poster, and a Great Garloo toy on the cover of the Big Baby collection.

The Frankenstein/Dracula family portrait is part of a major exhibition of Charles Burns’ drawings starting September 5 at the Adam Baumgold Gallery in New York. See a preview of the show here.

A list of all the movies referenced in the New Yorker illustration is here.

The quote at top is from The Believer.

An interview with Charles Burns by Peter Breedveld, and another one from Vice magazine.

A fan’s portfolio of Charles Burns art, including the Goon Squad cards.

Related:
Another group portrait: Legion of Frankensteins

Marion Mousse's Frankenstein, Volume Three

The final volume of Marion Mousse’s French-language graphic novel adaptation of Frankenstein is out, and there’s great news for those of you who were hoping to read this in English…

In Volume 3, The Monster frames Justine, and Frankenstein reneges on his promise to build a mate, which leads to more horror and a continent-spanning chase that leads back to the book’s beginning, at the Arctic.

The publisher’s site has sample pages. Click on the small arrow under the cover to see them.

Now comes word that all three volumes of Mousse’s adaptation are being translated and collected into a single 144-page book under the storied Classics Illustrated logo by American publisher Papercutz.

The English version is due out in January '09 in hardcover and paperback editions. You can pre-order now through the Frankenstore.

Related:
Marion Mousse’s Frankenstein, Volume One
Frankenstein Events of 2007
Marion Mousse’s Frankenstein, Volume Two
Alternate Cover Art for Volume Three