Off of the Wish List and Into My Library: The Monster of Frankenstein, Volume I

More Christmas present kookiness. We read in this series from at least the early Seventies, but never managed to buy more than four or five issues. The scattered ones we acquired were certainly odd and intriguing, but to see the complete series is dumbfounding.

It begins with the expedition of in the late 1800’s, with the descendant of John Walden locating the Monster frozen in ice. It is accidentally thawed, revives, and tells its story to Walden, basically recounting the gist of Mary Shelly’s tale. This version (drawn by the great Mike Ploog) is articulate, intelligent, and even humane, wandering the earth like another Cain. After the death of Walden and his crew, the Monster continues his journey facing (among other things) a werewolf in a village of Norsemen, the last surviving batch of Neanderthals, and Dracula. Eventually he is frozen again and awakens in the Seventies into an even more bewildering world.

In this era, he finds himself reduced to the rage and inarticulation of the Karloff-era movie monster. I suppose one cannot undergo so many freezings and thawings without sustaining SOME brain-damage. In this ‘modern’ incarnation he encounters body-switches, cloned beasts, Satanists, robots, and a clandestine organization out to garner his secrets (probably with some nice long sessions of vivisection), not to mention the last descendant of the Frankenstein family aided by none other than the long-lived Igor himself.

The volume ends almost exactly where we stopped buying the comic books themselves, and there does not seem to be a second volume yet. It is a moot point if I would ever buy one if it did come out. In this collection I have all the comics we ever read in our childhood and all the ones we missed. I suppose I wanted it for the nostalgia of it all. It certainly couldn’t be for the crazy wandering storyline. I was more interested in what had happened in between than in what comes next.