Universal Monsters Frankenstein #1 // Review
A boy is visiting the grave of his father. He’s having a conversation twith the memory of the man when other men come for his body. It’s the 19th century. The grave robbers are bringing the stolen body of the boys’ father to a doctor. What he has in mind for the body is no mere dissection in Universal Monsters Frankenstein #1. Writer/artist Michael Walsh does a far better job with the visuals of Mary Shelly’s novel than director James Whale managed in the 1931 Boris Karloff movie that the series is inspired by. It’s dark and gothic stuff that works with primal images in a very classy way.
The boy stows away aboard the carriage that is carrying the coffin and corpse of his late father. He might not have known what to expect, but he certainly didn’t expect a massive laboratory in an old castle. The boy sees just enough around the edges of the horror to know that Dr. Frankenstein is doing some very unspeakable things. He must be stopped. How can a boy stop a scientist with the power to reanimate dead bodies? Perhaps the simplest solution is the most likely to be effective. Perhaps the boy is going to have to commit murder to stop the Dr. from committing more atrocities.
In his note at the end of the first issue, Walsh mentions that he’d always dreamt of doing a comic book based on Frankenstein. Anyone can say that at the end of a high-profile issue, but given the thought, care and love that clearly has gone into the framing of the first issue, it’s very difficult not to believe Walsh. Framing the story of the creation of the monster from the eyes of the son of the man whose hands were used in its creation? Brilliant. It’s brilliant in a whole bunch of different ways.
Walsh frames the drama and the horror of the story in a way that Whale would never have conceived of. The flow of motion across the page feels starkly cinematic in a way that wouldn’t have made it into a big budget horror film back in the 1930s. Walsh draws on powerful and powerfully primal images as he shows the monster and its creator from striking, symbolic angles. The imagery of the human hand and what it’s capable of lash out of the edges of the page and into a deeper examination of human endeavor that feels a hell of a lot more accomplished than the 1933 film.
This is still only the beginning of the series, but it’s a REALLY promising beginning that feels quite powerful. The scenes that are drawn more directly from the movie DO feel a bit flatter than those that were drawn specifically from Walsh’s dark imagination. With any luck, Walsh will have the good sense to continue to frame the classic story from the edges of marginal characters who all might have had some impact on the story as it developed. The strength of Walsh’s series seems to lie in the darker margins of the movie.
