Abstract
Comics have an affinity for monsters and a particular affinity for generating monsters that arouse a reader’s empathy. This chapter explores the representational strategies of prose and cinema around Frankenstein’s monster before turning to illustration and comics. Prose excels at presenting subjective experience, while cinema is more attuned to the imprint of the external world. Illustration accompanies printed text with the occasional image, but comics, with more persistent images, uniquely and easily allows the reader continual and intermingled access to both the objective monstrousness of the creature and its less monstrous consciousness. External and internal are kept before the reader’s eyes, giving these representations a complex poignance. Close readings of comics from the 1950s, 1970s and 2000s demonstrate the strategies deployed.
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Notes
- 1.
Thanks to my editor Carol Margaret Davison for linking the bodies of these monsters to those of their readers. By the way, these monster-heroes were directly descended from the more monster-y monsters Marvel was featuring in the late 1950s and early 1960s. By turning its monsters into aliens, Marvel was able to elude the Comics Code Authority; Fin Fang Foom, for example, was an extraterrestrial dragon modestly sporting purple shorts.
- 2.
She adds, ‘Once the monster becomes visible within contemporary horror films, monstrosity becomes less and less recuperable’ (Halberstam 1995: 39).
- 3.
That edition featured but two facing images, on the frontispiece and title page (engraved by W. Chevalier from illustrations by Theodor Von Holst). These are effectively discussed in Ian Haywood, ‘Image of the Month: Theodore Von Holst, ‘Frankenstein’ (1831),’ https://romanticillustrationnetwork.wordpress.com/2016/11/26/image-of-the-month-theodore-von-holst-frankenstein-1831/
- 4.
In conversation, 2017.
- 5.
Incredibly, this unique characteristic of the medium has fallen from fashion over the past few decades in favour of running captions that mimic the more cinematic device of the voice-over.
- 6.
Ploog apprenticed under Will Eisner, whose work similarly revelled in expressive close-ups while remaining appealingly cartoony.
- 7.
This device was also used to introduce the ‘monstrous’ Buddy Love in Jerry Lewis’ The Nutty Professor (1963) a few years later.
- 8.
There is so much more to say about Mignola’s work. See my Hellboy’s World: Comics and Monsters on the Margins (University of California Press, 2016).
- 9.
In her editorial notes to this essay, Carol Margaret Davison comments that Mignola ‘opens up an entirely new avenue with Frankenstein in this instance, one that resonates with the narratives of Dracula and other doomed Gothic immortals.’ I fully agree, and wish I had the space to pursue that crucial development.
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Bukatman, S. (2018). Frankenstein and the Peculiar Power of the Comics. In: Davison, C., Mulvey-Roberts, M. (eds) Global Frankenstein. Studies in Global Science Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78142-6_11
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