Halloween, and other causes for celebration...

“Las Vegas loves Halloween¨, announces this week’s issue of the Las Vegas free newspaper, Seven, featuring a green bodypaint Bride of Frankenstein in a mummy-bandage bikini. The model, Olivia Lakis, poses in makeup by Natasha Chamberlin, who also created the striking Day of the Dead Princess on the cover.

Of special interest — ahem! — the very blog you are reading gets singled out in Seven as a Site to See by journalist Geoff Carter! And a nice writeup it is, too. The whole issue is available online as a PDF file.

Frankensteinia also gets rated as an Internet Pick of the Week by Johnny Dee in the October 30th issue of the UK’s The Guardian! I couldn’t be prouder to get a mention in my favorite newspaper. And congratulations to friends and fellow bloggers Jeanette Laredo of Monster Land and Curt Purcell The Groovy Age of Horror for being listed as well!

Halloween time is always good for us horror bloggers and my hits were in record territory all month. A lot of credit for the traffic belongs to John Rozum, Head Pumpkin of the Countdown to Halloween event that saw an astounding 200+ blogs participating this year. Onward and Upwards, John!

I hope you enjoyed the Book Month event on Frankensteinia. A lucky thirteen books were covered here in October, with sincere thanks going out to guest bloggers Craig Yoe, The Vicar of VHS and Martin Powell for their excellent contributions.

I’ve got plans for more special events and I’m very excited about the posts I have lined up for the coming days and weeks of November. I’ve got a lot of Frankenstein art to gladden your eyeballs and some great “archeological” posts that will track Frankenstein through its earliest theatrical appearances, and even further back, all the way to Mary Shelley’s very inspiration for her masterpiece! I’m looking forward to sharing it all with you.

Happy Halloween!

Dick Briefer's Frankenstein Book Giveaway: LAST TWO DAYS!!!

I’ve got Craig Yoe’s new book, DICK BRIEFER’S FRANKENSTEIN, in my hands, and I can’t stop smiling. It’s gorgeous! From the die-cut cover to the beautifully reproduced art, the production values are off the scale. Craig provides a wonderful, entertaining and informative introduction, and the strip selection is excellent.

I’m especially proud to give away 2 copies of DICK BRIEFER’S FRANKENSTEIN, signed by author Craig Yoe, thanks to an exclusive arrangement with Yoe! Books and IDW Publishing.

Giveaway contest closed. Winners to be announced.

Frankenstein: The Legend Retold A Guest Post by Martin Powell

Above, the striking original cover art — sans overprinting — by artist Patrick Olliffe for Martin Powell’s adaptation of Frankenstein, first published in 1989.

I asked Martin to tell us how he came to Frankenstein, and how he came to write his celebrated graphic novel. Here’s what he had to say…

When I was a boy, visiting relatives in the country, I often sat in the dewy night grass and stared at the blackened woods, wondering what nameless monsters lurked and haunted behind the tangles of ivy and oak. My older brothers (and several imaginative cousins) were quick to impress such fanciful phantoms upon my youthful gullibility, and I was always eager to hear more, collecting each spooky story like other boys accumulated gum cards.

I suppose everyone has thrilled, at one time or another, to a ghost story, relishing a sense of ghoulish wonder at what really may be awaiting us in those darkened forests.

Mary Shelley certainly did.

Of all the classic authors, she’s certainly been the most influential to me, especially through Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus. It has always seemed remarkable that Mary composed the greatest of horror stories while still in her teens. A very tough act, indeed, for any writer to follow.

The very first time I read the novel was a life-defining moment, changing me forever. I must have been about nine years old when I excitedly saw Frankenstein, as a paperback, on the top of my cousin Charlotte’s dresser. I’m sure I must have audibly gasped with astonishment. Charlotte kindly gave me that book, which I stared at during the entire long drive home, mesmerized by its enigmatic Karloffian cover. Already, I was hooked. I would read the book many times during the years to come, each time finding rich new layers that I had never dreamed of before, falling under its phantasmagoric spell again and again.

Ultimately, I was inspired to write my own graphic novel interpretation of Frankenstein. The powerful story had long haunted me, accumulating as a dream-project that was actually conceived when I was still in high school. My project proposal almost seemed to compose itself, and it’s more to Mary Shelley’s credit that my submission immediately found a publisher.

Next to Mary’s initial inspiration, it was the art of Patrick Olliffe, whom I was most fortunate in recruiting, which made the endeavor a success. It was perfect casting. Pat’s wonderfully moody and enigmatic black and white illustrations established a tangible atmosphere within a single panel. I remember having many lengthy, enjoyable phone conversations with him, in those days before the instant accessibility of the internet, as we planned our translation of Mary’s classic tale of terror. Early on I’d decided against stressing the popular “technology out of control” theme in favor of focusing on what I felt was the true soul of the story, that of an unwanted child.

In particular, I recall an in-depth discussion concerning what our Monster should look like. Pat and I obviously needed to avoid the famous design created by Jack Pierce, and owned by Universal Studios, and we relished the awesome possibilities that lay before us. This was a being, we reasoned, fashioned from the available raw materials of the late 18th century. Neck electrodes, square head, and over-sized boots suddenly seemed strangely out of place, even if they had been allowed.

Instead, Pat rendered a gnarled, towering, patch-work horror. His creature is wholly original, bringing Mary Shelley’s tantalizingly vague descriptions into the stark and terrible light. It is wondrous, pitiful, ghastly, and weirdly charismatic. For me, Patrick Olliffe’s visual depiction of the Frankenstein Monster is absolutely definitive.

Since its first publication in 1989, our Frankenstein graphic novel has never been out of print. Recently it was published again in a Spanish language version, and a brand new special edition looms in the near future.

That’s amazing and very gratifying.

Special thanks to Frankensteinia for inviting this warm remembrance, and to the gentle ghosts of Boris Karloff, Forrest J Ackerman, and Mary Shelley. I’d be nowhere without them.

— Martin Powell
October 24, 2010

Minnesota-based writer Martin Powell has hundreds of published credits for comic books and prose fiction. His Sherlock Holmes/Dracula graphic novel, Scarlet in Gaslight, was nominated for an Eisner Award. Earlier this month, his book, The Tall Tale of Paul Bunyan, illustrated by Aaron Blecha, won the Gold Medal in the graphic novel category of the Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards. Martin is currently scripting new adventures for such classic characters as The Phantom and the pulps’ The Spider for Moonstone Books.

Martin Powell's blog, and his Facebook page.

Patrick Olliffe is an accomplished illustrator and comic book artist who has contributed to a who’s who of superhero characters, the likes of Spider-Man, Spider-Girl, The Atom, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, for Marvel and DC. He is now taking on The Mighty Samson for Dark Horse comics. Of his collaboration with Martin Powell on Frankenstein, he says, “Although early in my career, it remains one of the projects I love the most.”

Patrick Olliffe's blog.

Young Romantics A Guest Review by the Vicar of VHS

Keys to understanding Frankenstein are found in understanding its author, Mary Shelley: Her influences, her life, her entourage, and the era she lived in. Many answers can be found in the new and highly touted group biography, Young Romantics, by British scholar Daisy Hay.

I’m delighted to welcome a fellow blogger, the virtual Vicar of VHS, one-half of the dastardly duo perpetrating the maddening Mad Mad Mad Mad Movies blog, as an unlikely but strangely fitting Guest Reviewer. You may be surprised, as I was, to learn that The Vicar — he stubbornly refuses to answer to any other name — is a published author and poet! Lord Byron, The Vicar informs me, is his favorite Romantic poet, and Lord Fauntleroy his role model. “One day” he says, “I hope to pose for an oil portrait in Arabesque costume.”

Here is The Vicar of VHS’ review of Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry's Greatest Generation, by Daisy Hay.

There is certainly no shortage of biographies devoted to the key figures in the Romantic movement of English poetry. The short, tragic life of John Keats, the proto-rock star adventures of Lord Byron, and the tumultuous relationship of Percy Bysshe and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley have been the subject of countless published histories since their deaths, and continue to fascinate aspiring scholars and casual readers alike. In fact, so much has been written about each of the group's members that it might seem there's nothing new to be said. To take on any one of these monumental figures in print is to risk merely treading a well-worn trail and repeating all the anecdotes that have long since passed into common knowledge and literary legend.

However, author Daisy Hay manages a fresh approach in her first book, Young Romantics. Her book is the story not of any one Romantic figure, but of all of them--or rather, of the by-turns cohesive and shifting social circle of which they were a part. In doing so, Hay paints a fascinating picture of these often larger-than-life personalities, and also the way those personalities and events interacted to shape what she calls "English Poetry's Greatest Generation."

Hay takes as her focus publisher and author Leigh Hunt, a figure little-remembered outside scholarly circles, but who was instrumental in the publication and rise to fame of many of the Romantic era's greatest poets. Often imprisoned for debt and libel, Hunt was nonetheless able to maintain a salon where he received frequent visits from the literary giants of the age (thanks to influential friends and the nature of life for an aristocrat in debtors' prison at the time). As Keats, Byron, the Shelleys, and others pass in and out of Hunt's circle, Hay sketches the events that occasioned their meetings, friendships, and sometimes tumultuous fallings-out. In doing so she succeeds in giving the reader not only the essential information about each poet and writer's career, but in creating an immersive portrait of the time and place in which they worked, and the important relationships that shaped their lives and in some cases nearly destroyed their reputations.

Of particular interest to readers of Frankensteinia is Hays' detailed treatment of the relationship between Percy Bysshe and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The author traces the couple's relationship from its very beginnings, hitting such touchstones as Shelley's expulsion from Oxford University for atheism, his legendary (and perhaps apocryphal) courtship of the teenaged Mary on the site of her famous mother's tomb, and of course the fabled summer at the Villa Diodati with Byron, Polidori, and Mary's half-sister Claire Clairmont. The composition of Frankenstein, its publication and popularity, and its importance to Mary's financial well-being in later life (after Percy Shelley's tragic death by drowning left her and her children destitute) are all compellingly detailed, as are the tragedies of Mary's lost children and Claire's protracted struggles with Byron over their illegitimate daughter. Hay explains the scandals caused by themes of free love and incest that pervaded not only Shelley and Byron's work but also that of Hunt and others, and how public perception of the group was shaped (sometimes justly) by them.

The book contains a wealth of information for anyone interested in Romantic poetry generally and the Shelleys in partcular. Included in photo plates are many famous portraits of Mary Shelley, the famous painting "The Funeral of Shelley" by Louis Fournier (with entertaining commentary on the painting's accuracy, or lack thereof), and manuscript pages from Frankenstein in Mary's own hand, with marginalia by Percy Shelley showing a deft editorial hand. I was surprised to find one of the more memorable-to-me lines from the book, wherein Frankenstein laments that at university "I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth," was apparently suggested by Percy, as can be seen on the page.

Hays' treatment of the triumphs and tribulations of the other figures of the Romantic movement are just as entertaining and informative. Part biography, part history, and part soap opera, The Young Romantics might not have the focus and depth of some scholarly works, but is definitely more fun. If you're interested in Frankenstein, Romantic poetry, or just literature generally, I can highly recommend it.

Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry's Greatest Generation by Daisy Hay (2010, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Daisy Hay’s website
A video interview with Daisy Hay
A 3-part podcast from Blackwell Online

The Vicar of VHS’ Mad Mad Mad Mad Movies blog.

Related:
The Funeral of Shelley

Celebrating Dick Briefer's Frankenstein

Yauuggghhh! It’s Frightful Frankenstein Friday! Join the mob as we pick up our torches and chase down Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein!

Today, I’m joining fifteen fellow bloggers in celebration of Craig Yoe’s new book about legendary artist Dick Briefer and his extraordinary Frankenstein comics, published between 1940 and 1954.

Click through the links for reviews, reflections and, best of all, a selection of classic Briefer Frankenstein episodes! But beware…. If you’ve never read a Briefer Frankenstein before, you are in for a real treat, whether its one of his gruesome horror version, or the surprising “Merry Monster” version. I’m guessing you’ll love them both, and you’ll be a fan forever more.

Here are the participating blogs:

And Everything Else Too

Blog of Frankenstein

Cartoon Snap!

Comicrazys

Four-Color Shadows

Magic Carpet Burn

Pappy’s Golden Age Comics Blogzine

Random Acts of Geekery

Sekvenskonst

Sequential Crush

Stephen Bissette’s Myrant

The Big Blog of Kids Comics

The Comic Book Bin

The Fabuleous Fifties

The Horrors of It All

The ITCH Blog

For my own contribution to Frightful Frankenstein Friday, in the spirit of Book Month on Frankensteinia, I asked Craig Yoe to speak about his book and his love for Briefer’s art.

The ridiculously talented Mr. Yoe is an artist and writer, art director, toy designer, and formerly a creative director and VP with The Muppets. As a writer, editor and comics historian, Yoe has published a number of important books such as Felix The Cat: The Great Comic Book Tails, George Herriman’s Krazy & Ignatz in Tiger Tea, The Art of Steve Ditko, and Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman Co-Creator Joe Shuster, just to name a few. Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein, published by Yoe Books and IDW Publishing, is out NOW.

Here’s Craig…

When Dick Briefer died in 1980 I drew a picture of his Frankenstein with a tear in his eye running past his monster’s upturned and misplaced nose for the Comic Buyer's Guide newspaper. I said in the copy that accompanied my cartoon that I was not only sad about the artist’s passing, but also that so few people knew of Dick Briefer or his genius. It has taken me a long time, but at last I'm doing my part to help rectify that with a full color hardback book, Dick Briefer's Frankenstein (Yoe Books/IDW), about the monster and the man behind him. Though it does go into depth about the artist's colorful life, mostly the book proves Briefer’s genius by just reprinting a crypt full of comics as evidence.

Briefer was of two minds. The cartoonist drew a horrific version of Frankenstein during the horror comics craze of the 50s. The stories were dark, grim and foreboding. But, before that he drew a humorous Merry Monster version that was lighthearted, nutty, and wacky. Think The Munsters or The Addams Family--kooky and creepy, altogether ooky. This was the version Briefer himself preferred. Actually, when I was putting together the book I discovered that there was a THIRD version. The early 1940s original stories in Prize Comics, starting in issue #7 were almost a synthesis of the two known styles. At least art-wise. These seminal stories were gritty, but the art had a bit of that boffo, gusto, and bravado of the early Golden Age comics that had a simple cartoony flair, almost humorous, approach. Those comic books are trez expensive. I had to almost beg a collector to scan his valuable and fragile inaugural Frankenstein stories for me. So I am thrilled to present the fascinating rare first three Frankenstein stories in the book.

So there are three styles of Dick Briefer's to chose from and adopt as a fave. In early reviews of the book people are already stating which ones they grok the most. Me, I love them all, but I'm going with Briefer in that I dig his all-out funny take on Frankenstein the best. When I became the Creative Director/VPGM of the Muppets I was versed about the appeal that the Sesame Street lovable monsters like Bert and Ernie and the Cookie Monster have. Jim Henson himself explained to me that kids fear monsters, but that the Muppets, warm and friendly and silly and approachable, human-like, helped the young set deal with their childhood fear of monstersunder the bed. I think as adults we never outgrow our fear of the Monsters of Life. Maybe they are no longer the things-that-go-bump-in-the-night variety of monsters. But, as adults there are monsters like Politicians, Left Wing and Right Wing TV Commentators, Corporation CEOs, Bill Collectors, War Profiteers, Heads of Insurance Companies that keep us awake at night--they TRULY horrific and real threats! So a fun, approachable, lovable Monster like Briefer's Funny Franky with his peculiar proboscis can help give us some relief and help us face ghosts and ghouls whether we're snot-nosed kids or a full-grown relatively clean-nosed adult human beings.

Or the Frankenstein comics by Briefer can just be a great read. We do have to remember that, in the words of the great R. Crumb that “’It’s is only lines on paper, folks!” There doesn't have to be a Deep Reason to like Dick Briefer's Frankenstein. In fact, ultimately I'm going to avoid any really deep scholarly dissection of the Monster here as I did in the book, too. Briefer's Frankenstein, like Shelley's, was a man of many parts and I'm not going to take them apart in my La-BOORRR-a-TORY today and kill him in the process.

I'm only going to ask you to have a grand time reading all the great Dick Briefer comics on all the great blogs participating in Frightful Frankenstein Friday. I deeply thank Pierre, with his frightfully fantastic Frankensteinia blog, for giving me this little soapbox today. Now start reading the on-line comics, and order my book, Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein, if you like what you see. I think you'll scream with delight!

Thanks Craig!

The Rivals of Frankenstein, Edited by Michel Parry

There are probably enough collections of short fiction inspired by Mary Shelley’s original to qualify Frankenstein Anthologies a sub-genre of horror and science fiction. Some collections hew close to the original and its characters; others explore themes of artificial life, and the presumption and consequences of mad science. Titles include The Frankenstein Reader (1962), edited by Calvin Beck, The Frankenstein Omnibus (1994) by Peter Haining, The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein (1994) by Stephen Jones, and The Ultimate Frankenstein (1991), packaged by Byron Preiss, all reprinting fiction from various sources.

Frankenstein: The Monster Awakes (1993), edited by Martin H. Greenberg, collected new and original stories on the Frankenstein theme and Hideous Progeny (2001), edited by Brian Willis, proposed new stories exploring the premise of how Frankenstein might have impacted history had he really lived to re-animate the dead.

The book at hand, The Rivals of Frankenstein: A Gallery of Monsters (1977), edited by master anthologist Michel Parry, casts his net very wide, and far back. Most of the stories here are from the first half of the twentieth century, all dealing with man-made men or outright monster-making. All but one of the selections are unrelated to Frankenstein, with no reference to Mary’s Monster, but Frankenstein’s unmistakable DNA is present in all of them.

The mood is set with the first story, The Colossus of Ylourgne, Clark Ashton Smith’s superbly written and formidably gruesome tale that has a necromancer and his unholy minions carving a giant golem out of the boiled down remains of human corpses. Another major classic horror tale included here is H.P.Lovecraft’s unsettling Herbert West – Reanimator.

Several stories deal with robots and their implacable, deadly logic. Two seminal robot stories included are Ambrose Bierce’s Moxon Master (1909), featuring a fearsome fez-wearing mechanical chess-player, and Jerome K. Jerome’s The Dancing Partner (1893) whose waltzing automaton doesn’t know when to stop. Similarly, in D. Scott-Moncrieff’s Count Szolnok’s Robots, the automated servants do their jobs too well. In a reverse situation scenario, Eando Binder’s Iron Man is a human being who thinks he’s a robot.

The one story directly connected to the Frankenstein myth is Don Glut’s Dr. Karnstein’s Creation, a rousing romp that plays with monster movie conventions, complete with a storm-lashed castle laboratory high in the Transylvanian Alps, a brain-switching mad scientist, and a Monster who rises from his slab and delivers a trick ending.

The Rivals of Frankenstein: A Gallery of Monsters has an entertaining introduction and wraps with a checklist of Frankenstein Films. The book was part of a series that included The Rivals of Dracula: A Century of Vampire Fiction and The Rivals of King Kong: A Rampage of Beasts. Michel Parry, a most prolific anthologist, also collaborated on collections with Christopher Lee and Milton Subotsky.

Copies of Rivals of Frankenstein can be hunted down online. I suggest using Abebooks.

With warm thanks to Michel for graciously providing me with a copy for this review.

Related:
The Ultimate Frankenstein
Hideous Progeny

The Covers of Frankenstein : Daniel Clowes, Penguin (2007)

Launched by Londoner Allen Lane in 1935, Penguin Books turned the publishing world on its head with the new concept of making quality books widely available in inexpensive paperback editions, selling them not only in bookstores but off racks in tobacco shops, chain stores and train stations. The Penguin design, featuring strictly typographical covers color-coded for genre, was just as revolutionary. Fine-tuned, refreshed and reinvented through the years, Penguin packaging has remained a reference for high excellence in book design.

In one of Penguin’s most ambitious and imaginative cover projects, supervised over the last half-decade by American art director Paul Buckley, comic book and graphic novel artists such as Chris Ware, Charles Burns and Richard Sala were commissioned to create new covers for classic titles. In 2007, Daniel Clowes, of Ghost World fame, brought his unsettling, angst-filled comics style to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It was a perfect fit.

The cover, couched in rain swept chiaroscuro, is the scene where Frankenstein, seeking solace in the Swiss Alps, encounters “the wretch, the filthy deamon” he has created. The scene continues on the front flap, done in a lighter cartoon style, but no less operatic, as Frankenstein curses his creation, only to be answered, “Have I not suffered enough that you seek to increase my misery?”

The backcover shows a fearful Frankenstein returning to the garret he had fled from, abandoning his creation. It’s a surprising but excellent choice of scene, illustrating Frankenstein’s fragile state of mind.

The back flap is devoted to Mary Shelley, presenting, in six simple panels, a capsule recap of the book’s genesis at Villa Diodati, with a young Mary — “I’m only nineteen!” — awake in a moonlit bed, trying to come up with a story.

In a November 2007 interview with the Regina Leader-Post, Clowes revealed that he picked Frankenstein to illustrate after having an operation to repair a defective heart valve.

“I felt a very great kinship with the poor fellow after my operation” Clowes said. “… my blood is finally pumping as it should, I feel totally reinvigorated and I have this ghastly Frankenstein scar that I can scare my son with."

Daniel Clowes’ cover for Frankenstein is certainly one of the most original and imaginative ever given the book.

Frankenstein, Penguin Classic Deluxe Edition (2007), with cover by Daniel Clowes.

An interview with Daniel Clowes from The Guardian.

An interview with designer Paul Buckley on The Casual Optimist.

Paul Buckley’s Flickr site.

A history of Penguin Books Design, on the British Design Museum site.

Ides of October Updates

Not a book, and more than an audiobook, the Quicksilver Radio Theater’s Frankenstein: Modern Prometheus is a full-bodied dramatization of Mary Shelley’s classic novel, with the benefit of a full cast, sound effects and an original score. Craig Wichman wrote, produced and stars as The Monster.

The hour-long drama is now available for download on iTunes.

We’re already halfway through this year’s Countdown to Halloween. Click the pumpkin on the side menu and go trick or treatin’ among the 150+ participating blogs. You’ll find Halloween crafts, costume and prop making, monster movie reviews, Halloween snack and drink recipes, art and Halloween iconography and lots of orange-colored stuff to be discovered and enjoyed. Go look!

Pandora's Bride, by Elizabeth Hand

Published by Dark Horse Books in 2007, Pandora’s Bride is one of a series of paperback originals featuring the classic Universal monsters — Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Wolf Man, The Creature from the Black Lagoon — and this one, based on Bride of Frankenstein.

I must admit I approached the book with a measure of wariness. Being an officially licensed product, I thought it might be constrained, cutting requiredly close to the source material, extrapolating a plausible and predictable sequel. I prefer fiction that challenges and surprises over something that would read like the novelization of a film exactly like Universal might have made back in the Thirties. I needn’t have worried. Elizabeth Hand, the commissioned author, takes The Bride into fascinating, unexpected territory.

The book opens where the film quits. Rejected by The Bride — “I reacted as any sane woman would: I screamed.” — The Monster throws the big lever and blows the laboratory all to hell. As Frankenstein flees the collapsing tower and The Monster is consumed by flames, The Bride picks up the staggered Dr. Pretorius and escapes through a breach in the wall. From there on, the story turns on its head — quite literally when The Bride’s trademark crown of hair is burned off. This book, we are to understand, is about the character, not the logo.

Potentially upsetting for Universal Frankenstein purists, the villains of this piece are Frankenstein and Elizabeth, exposed as merciless Monster Makers with an apocalyptic plan, using their considerable power and influence to track and capture the escaping Bride. I was comfortable with the concept, having always thought of Frankenstein in the James Whale movies as arrogant plutocrat, criminally irresponsible, and the true monster of the piece. Conversely, the irresistibly sinister Dr. Pretorius, the evil presence in the film, is cast in the book as a benevolent minder and mentor to monsters like his homunculi — the tiny mermaid is given a perfect name, Undine — and The Bride.

The story’s timeframe and locations are much more precise than anything suggested in the films as The Bride flees all the way to Berlin circa the late Twenties, at the height of the Weimar Era. Think Frankenstein backed with a Kurt Weill soundtrack.

The Bride journeys through one of those alternate universes peopled with characters from then contemporary life and fiction, with an enormously satisfying preference for German silent films. When The Bride is given a name, It is Pandora, and Pretorius has a narcoleptic assistant named Cesare. On the road to Berlin, Pandora has a wilderness adventure straight out of Zane Grey and Karl May. Upon reaching the city, Pandora encounters underworld characters such as a flapper named Lulu, the grotesque Professor Unrath, a certain Rotwang and his mechanical woman, and a beady-eyed childkiller who whistles In the Hall of the Mountain King.

It’s not really a spoiler, I think, to reveal that The Monster — indestructible, as we ought to know by now — reappears at a crucial moment. I won’t spoil the fun for you of meeting his new friends, and hearing the name they’ve given him.

Through extraordinary adventures, and on to its delirious climax, Pandora’s Bride is a solid novel of horror-fantasy that takes a respectful cue from the classic film, but allows itself to transgress freely.

Author Elizabeth Hand’s novels and short stories have been rewarded with such prestigious prizes as science fiction’s Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award and the International Horror Guild Award. She had written for comics, as well as film tie-ins and novelizations (Twelve Monkeys, X-Files: Fight the Future).

The Bride of Frankenstein: Pandora’s Bride (Dark Horse Books, 2007). The book’s cover is by Stephen Youll.

An 8-page preview of the book on Dark Horse website.

Elizabeth Hand’s website.

Black Frankenstein, by Elizabeth Young

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of the most thoroughly examined books in literary history. Its themes and manifestations permeate our culture and have yielded a massive and ever-growing body of work. Elizabeth Young’s Black Frankenstein, The Making of an American Metaphor (University of New York Press, 2008) is an important addition as it effectively breaks new ground, proposing a deep analysis of Frankenstein as a racial metaphor in American culture.

Perhaps the first metaphorical reference to Frankenstein came in 1824, shortly after Mary Shelley’s novel of 1818 had been adapted, with phenomenal success, to the theater. George Canning, the British Foreign Secretary, addressing the issue of the West Indian slave trade, referred to “the splendid fiction of a recent romance” in which a dangerous creature is “raised up” with “the thews and sinews of a giant” but with no perception of right and wrong. Canning, an abolitionist, was promulgating a slow and gradual approach to ending slavery, paternalistically warning against immediate emancipation of the Negro who possessed “the form and strength of a man, but the intellect only of a child”.

Canning’s statement, without benefit of context, was used in America by proslavery apologist Thomas Dew as a vivid illustration of the dire consequences of abolition, and with it, the Black Frankenstein entered American consciousness.

Elizabeth Young tracks the onset of the metaphorical Monster and its affinity with the vocabulary of racial rebellion through political cartoons, editorial and fictional uses. In 1829, for instance, the language of Mary’s Monster, cursing his wretchedness, is identical to that found in an antislavery manifesto of free African American David Walker who wrote of “the Coloured people” as “miserable, wretched, degraded and abject”. The Monster spoke of revenge on his creator much like Walker’s admonition that, “some of you… will yet curse the day you were born.”

Young grippingly documents the Frankenstein parable in American fiction, touching, among others, on the automaton in Herman Melville’s The Bell-Tower (1855), Stephen Crane’s The Monster (1898) about a black coachman disfigured in a fire while saving the life of a white child, and The Sport of Gods (1902) by Paul Laurence Dunbar, that namechecks Frankenstein in reference to its murderous protagonist, a monster made by racism. Moving on to films, Young examines Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) as a monster movie, replete with its ugly stereotypes, and James Whale’s Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein playing out against the backdrop of the 1931 Scottsboro trial and the failure of an anti-lynching bill in 1935. Theme obliging, even the execrable Blackenstein (1973) merits analysis.

The book wraps with a fascinating exploration of comedian and activist Dick Gregory’s own explorations of the Black Frankenstein concept.

“I told Momma, ‘I just saw Frankenstein and the monster didn’t scare me’¨, wrote Gregory in his essay, Dreaming of a Movie (1968). “But now that I look back, I realize why I wasn’t frightened. Somehow I subconsciously realized that the Frankenstein monster was chasing what was chasing me. Here was a monster, created by a white man, turning upon his creator. The horror movie was merely a parable for life in the ghetto. The monstrous life of the ghetto has been created by the white man. Only now in the city of chaos are we seeing the monster created by oppression turn upon his creator.”

Note, the cover of Black Frankenstein uses Milton Glaser’s art from the inside-cover spread for Dick Gregory’s Frankenstein live album of 1971.

In an afterword, Young reflects briefly on Frankenstein references in the contemporary art of Glenn Ligon, pointing, perhaps, to the need for a full-blown survey of Frankenstein in the visual arts.

Black Frankenstein is a relentlessly serious, scholarly tome and the reader best come prepared to be challenged by some of its concepts, and provoked by some of its ideas. A chapter dealing with metaphor-making, the definition of monster metaphors, meta-metaphorical meanings and Frankenstein as a metaphor for metaphor itself demands careful reading and will no doubt boggle a casual reader.

On the other hand, if you’re willing to wade into this robust, remarkably researched study of Frankenstein’s cultural and racial significance in America, you’ll find there is much to discover here, and much to think about. Elizabeth Young’s Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor is a necessary and important addition to Frankenstein scholarship.

Elizabeth Young’s Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor (University of New York Press, 2008).

A short profile of author Elizabeth Young.

Read the introduction to Black Frankenstein, courtesy of NYU Press.

Black Frankenstein on Google Books.

Questioning Authority, a short interview with author Elizabeth Young.

New York University Press page for Black Frankenstein

The Covers of Frankenstein : Ignatius Critical Edition

Public domain permitting, there are countless editions of Mary Shelley’s novel to chose from, differentiated by various introductions and covers, though cover art tends to be repetitive. A gander at Amazon shows an inordinate number of Frankensteins illustrated with a picture of Boris Karloff, almost always in his burned face makeup from Bride of Frankenstein. When classic paintings are used, you can to expect Friedrich’s The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, brooding over a mountain maelstrom, or Fuselli’s The Nightmare, depicting a reclining woman with an imp on her chest and a horse head poking through the curtains.

The edition shown here, interestingly, is the only one I have found (at least so far) using this particular and strangely appropriate painting, Pierre-Auguste Vafflard’s Young et sa fille (Young and his Daughter), also called Young enterrant sa fille (Young Burying his Daughter), and known in English as Young Holding his Dead Daughter in his Arms.

The Paris-born Vafflard (1777-1837) was famous for overseeing art restorations made at Versailles and the Palais des Tuileries. Of his personal works, Young et sa fille is the best known and most admired because of its near monochromatic palette suggesting the pearly glow of moonlight. When Vafflard’s painting was first shown in 1804, a reviewer composed a verse about it to the tune of the French folk classic Au clair de la lune (By the Light of the Moon), celebrating the moonlight effect that made the painting so unique. In 1838, Young et sa fille was one of ten paintings donated by artist and collector François Ringuet to his home town of Angoulême, France, as the initial collection for the city’s Museum.

Appropriately for Frankenstein, the image of a man carrying a shovel and a dead woman wrapped in her shroud, evokes nightime grave robbing.

The apocryphal painting actually refers to a notorious incident from 1736. Elizabeth Temple, stepdaughter to English Romantic poet Edward Young, died while traveling through France. A Protestant, she was banned from interment in a proper cemetery — reserved exclusively for the catholic dead — and committed to a lowly Swiss graveyard. Vafflard imagined the outraged Young righting the wrong, re-burying Elizabeth.

Young’s sorrow would reach epic proportions when, in 1740, Elizabeth’s husband and then her mother, Young’s wife, also passed away. The poet, overwhelmed by accumulating grief, was driven to write a series of dark poems, fantastically popular, collected under the title Night Thoughts. A young Goethe was deeply influenced by Night Thoughts and French revolutionary Camille Desmoulins, awaiting the guillotine with his friend Danton, read Night Thoughts as preparation for death.

Vafflard’s Young et sa fille makes for a great Frankenstein cover, although considering the painting’s backstory, its inspiration drawn from a case of eighteenth-century catholic zealotry, it’s an intriguing choice for this particular publisher, Ignatius Press being a staunchly traditional, catholic publisher.

Ignatius Critical Editions version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Musée d’Angoulême.

Dick Briefer's Frankenstein Event

Author, publisher Craig Yoe is introducing his new book, Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein, at the New York Comicon this weekend. If you’re attending, don’t miss Craig’s panel on Sunday afternoon.

Frankensteinian : Lives of the Monster Dogs

Kirsten Bakis’ debut novel, Lives of the Monster Dogs (Warner Books, 1997), is a fable laced with strong echoes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and H.G.Well’s Dr. Moreau.

When the Monster Dogs arrive, 150 strong, in modern-day New York, they’re like refugees from a steampunk universe. They are large canines — Dobermans, German Shepherds, Malamutes, Samoyeds, Great Danes — surgically altered, with human-level intelligence, antique prosthetic hands and mechanical voice boxes. Walking upright, they are dressed in Prussian-era long coats, top hat and tails, monocles and pince-nez, bustle skirts and fancy hats.

The creatures, we learn, were first designed in the late 1800s by scientist named Augustus Rank whose mad plan, financed by Kaiser Wilhelm, was to create an army of fierce dog soldiers. The process of animal transformation proves to be difficult and slow and, after fifteen years, his patron disillusioned, Rank picks up and flees halfway ‘round the world with embezzled funds and his coterie of quasi-religious followers, settling in a remote area of Western Canada. They establish a secret laboratory town, Rankstadt, a place so isolated that time fairly stands still and they live there as they had in nineteenth century Germany. Even after Rank’s death, the work continues, breeding Monster Dogs to serve as slaves to new generations of Rank’s disciples.

In time, the inevitable happens and the Monster Dogs revolt. The last of the masters are killed and the Dogs take over their homes, dressing in their clothes, mimicking the Victorian lives of their oppressors even as the town deteriorates and crumbles around them until, one day, the remaining animals decide to establish contact with the outside world.

The story of the Monster Dogs is told by a young New York journalist, Cleo, who has befriended Ludwig von Sacher, a canine historian. She learns their story and comes to understand their plight. Unable to reproduce, no longer being bred and manufactured, the Monster Dogs are doomed. Soon, a strange illness sweeps through their ranks, their civility gradually overtaken by long subsumed animal characteristics.

The Dogs use their wealth of gold once hoarded by Rank’s disciples to build themselves a fortress-like residence in New York where, as if desperate to have their culture and their fleeting existence recorded, they put on an elaborate opera about Mops Hacker, the leader of their revolution. Ludwig, the scholar, devotes himself to writing a chronicle of Rank’s life and the history of the Monster Dogs, but time runs out, his mind begins to go and tragedy looms.

Lives of the Monster Dogs is admirably written, often gripping, and filled with memorable characters. Augustus Rank is an exquisitely mad scientist whose cruel and bizarre ideas are tracked back to his early childhood. Ludwig, the Dog historian, is a perfectly realized character, an otherwise dignified scholar who sometimes sniffs, hound-like, at old diaries and photographs, as if trying to glean extra information from the fading documents. His quest to understand his origins, his kind, is the quest to understand what it means to be human.

This rich fable, sizzling with ideas, streaked with metaphor, is ultimately a sad story. The Frankensteinian theme at work here is not so much the dangerous, amoral experiments of its scientist as it is the disconsolate longings and ultimate despair of its monsters.

Prefacing the book, author Kirsten Bakis, in character as Cleo, writes, “I knew the monster dogs and I loved them, and I hope that, in my own way, I have done a good job of telling their story. I mean to.”

To which I say: Accomplished.

Lives of the Monster Dogs won the Bram Stoker Award for “Best First Novel”, in 1997. It was a New York Times “Notable Book” and listed among the “Best Books of the Year” by The Village Voice. The book has been adapted to the stage and now a film version is being planned as a first live-action feature for director Chris Wedge, of animated Ice Age fame.

Lives of the Monster Dogs, by Kirsten Bakis.

The Covers of Frankenstein : Everyman's Library Edition

An unusual, refreshingly original, award-winning cover for Frankenstein, this edition features an authentic Victorian curio, an old photograph of a man with his suit on backwards, most likely a simple cut and paste trick photo. The twisted head effect speaks to the otherness of the novel’s Monster.

Everyman’s Library was founded in 1906 by British publisher and bookbinder Joseph Dent, collecting the world’s classics in fine, yet affordable editions. “For a few shillings”, Dent proclaimed, “the reader may have a whole bookshelf of the immortals.”

Fifty years on, Everyman’s had published over a thousand titles and sold more than fifty million books. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein hadn’t been readily available for decades when Everyman’s published its edition, in 1912. It has remained in print ever since.

Everyman’s Library was relaunched by Random House/Knopf in 1991, art directed by Barbara de Wilde, one of the world’s most celebrated book designers. The photo cover shown here was picked as one of the 50 best cover designs of 2009 by the prestigious AIGA Design Center in New York.

AIGA's 50 Books/50 Covers of 2009 Selections.

Barbara de Wilde Biography and Cover Archive.

About Everyman’s Library, and this edition of Frankenstein.

With thanks to This Isn't Happiness.

Frankenstein Fundamentals

Question: What are the basic books, the fundamental texts that would give anyone an introduction, a grasp, an understanding of Frankenstein and its cultural endurance?

I’d start, logically, with Mary Shelley’s original. Search “Frankenstein” on Amazon and you get 3,741 hits, most of them editions of Mary’s public domain novel. You have your pick of the 1818 original or the better-known 1831 revision, and any one of countless introductions by scholars that cast vastly different interpretations of the book. A good read, unfortunately long out of print, was Leonard Wolf’s annotated version, The Essential Frankenstein.

Of all the editions currently available, I’d spring for an illustrated Frankenstein, and that would be a toss-up between the superb Lynd Ward version, originally published in 1934, now in an inexpensive edition from Dover Books, or the equally breathtaking Bernie Wrightson version, first published in 1983 and reissued in 2008 by Dark Horse.

For a wider, cultural and historical perspective on Frankenstein, I find myself circling back to three all-purpose titles. One looks at the roots of Frankenstein, another traces its cultural history, and the last one catalogues the films of Frankenstein.

Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler’s The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein (Little, Brown, 2006) zeroes in on the Villa Diodati event, when Mary Shelley conceived of Frankenstein and it builds its story from there.

The Hooblers trace Mary Shelley’s difficult life and draw fascinating biographical portraits of all the extraordinary and often tragic characters she interacted with, including her parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, her lover and husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, John Polidori, Claire Claremont, and various children, relations, friends, and estranged wives.

It’s a bracing, powerful saga and, like any good, wide-ranging book must, it will send you scurrying back to the bookstore to explore some of these characters in greater detail.

To understand Frankenstein’s significance and its phenomenal endurance, there’s no better read than Susan Tyler Hitchcock’s Frankenstein: A Cultural History (W.W.Norton, 2007). Hitchcock follows The Monster as it precipitates out of Mary’s novel and into popular consciousness, effortlessly adapting to the stage and from there to all forms of media including films, comic books and rock music, ultimately becoming an infinitely malleable metaphor. This one’s not only an essential book, it’s an enormously satisfying and fun read.

Barely five years after Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was first published, it was swiped by playwrights and transformed into some of the most popular plays and pantomimes of the late 1800s. With the advent of film, The Monster’s career was reinvigorated for a new century, with Boris Karloff’s portrayal achieving iconic status. Stephen Jones’ The Illustrated Frankenstein Movie Guide of 1994 (also known as The Frankenstein Scrapbook: The Complete Movie Guide to the World's Most Famous Monster) is a valiant attempt at listing all the Frankenstein films. In fact, Jones casts a very wide net, including films only marginally Frankensteinian.

The catalog format and the sheer number of entries keeps the information on individual titles down to the bare essentials, but this is a very busy and generous book, with tons of stills and posters, that makes it a reference work — a practical checklist, if you will — of Frankenstein and related films.

Jones’ book is out of print and would deserve an update. Used copies can be still be had at reasonable prices. I recommend Abebooks.

Websites for Bernie Wrightson, Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, Susan Tyler Hitchcock,
and Stephen Jones.

Frankensteinia Exclusive! Dick Briefer's Frankenstein Book Giveaway

By exclusive arrangement with Yoe! Books and IDW Publishing, Frankensteinia is giving away two copies of Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein, signed by author Craig Yoe!

Premiering this month, Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein is the highly anticipated, large format, hardcover book celebrating Dick Briefer’s legendary Frankenstein comics. It features original art, rare photographs, letters from Dick Briefer and extras like drawings of Briefer’s Frankenstein by Alex Toth.

Participating in our Exclusive Book Month on Frankensteinia Giveaway is easy. Just send me an email at this address and give me your name and the town, state or province where you live. If the address link doesn’t work for you, send the information to frankensteinia.special(at)gmail and write “Giveaway” in the subject line. Send only one email, please. Multiple emails will result in automatic disqualification.

That’s it! Simple as that! We’ll hold a random draw on Halloween Day and our two winners will be announced here on November first.

Note: Your email address is safe, it will not be used for any other purpose. Winners will be contacted by email. The books, signed by author Craig Yoe, will be sent by the publisher.

So it’s all treat, no tricks, in time for Halloween. Don't wait, click the link, send me your name and where you live, and Good Luck!

If you can’t wait to get your hands on Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein, you can order the book from Amazon through the Frankenstore.