Category Archives: frankenstein

Legion of Frankensteins – Who’s Who

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While most of the creatures here do have a specific inspiration, only a few of them are intended to be direct representations of a specific creature. I haven’t seen all the films that these creatures have appeared in. I only know them from photos or plot descriptions. Since this is was meant to be a fun diversion I didn’t worry about whether any of them looked much like their original inspirations.

1. A Brain That Would Not Die – Lots of inspirations and therefore not based on any one story. There are plenty of stories featuring disembodied brains that then develop amazing psychic abilities. I thought of just drawing a brain in a jar but went with the mummified head because I thought it worked better with the rest of illustration.

2. The O’Brien – Inspired by the monster in Willis O’Brien’s unmade King Kong vs. Frankenstein. I haven’t been able to find much about the plot of that story. I imagine that the monster must have been made from the parts of large animals rearranged to resemble something more human – a sort of reanimated Moreau thing.

3. The Aborted – When I was in London in 1983 I saw posters on buses for a novel Spawn by Shaun Hutson. For some reason the poster image burned itself into my memory. I finally read the novel last year. It concerns (among other things) evil reanimated aborted fetuses with psychic powers.

4. The Heart-Eater – I’m surprised that there haven’t been more Japanese versions of Frankenstein. As far as I know Frankenstein Conquers the World is the only one.

5. Henry – If I were to illustrate Mary Shelly’s original novel this is how I would represent Frankenstein’s monster. I named him Henry after the Frankenstein in the 1931 film.

6. Leftovers – One of two creatures here inspired by the movie The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. It’s a movie that, sadly, I haven’t seen. No doubt it would fail to live up to my expectation. Number 6 here is the thing in the closet composed of the leftover body parts of previous experiments.

7. The Unknown – Originally I was going to draw a golem here. The Golem story is arguably one of the inspirations for Frankenstein. I decided against it because then I felt like I’d need to include more than one version of the Golem. And may I should include a cyborg or two. So this fellow isn’t inspired by any specific creature.

8. The Hood Inspired by I Was A Teenage Frankenstein. The monster in the movie is actually much uglier than this.

9. Beauty – For some reason the Frankensteins seem to have had better luck with their female creations than their male ones. This lady here was inspired by a number of good looking creatures, most specifically Jane Seymour in Frankenstein, the True Story and Susan Denberg in Frankenstein Created Woman.

10. The Doctor – The Hammer Studios series of Frankenstein films featured the Doctor, rather than the Monster, as their anti-hero. Peter Cushing played the character in all but one entry. In one of the films he was killed and then reanimated, making him both creator and creation.

11. Eddie – Of course there was a blaxsloitation version of Frankenstein.

12. Prowse – This one is loosely inspired by the David Prowse version of the creature from Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell, the last of the Hammer Frankenstein series.

13. Old Faithful – Obviously based on the 1931 Universal Pictures version of the story. This design of the creature is trademarked by Universal. They used it in all their subsequent sequels. And products. (And Herman Munster.)

14. Cursed – Since Unversal had trademarked the make-up for their version of the creature, Hammer had to come up with something very different for their version. Number 14 is inspired by the Christopher Lee portrayed monster in The Curse of Frankenstein.

15. Apenstein – Does anyone need a reason to draw a gorilla version of the creature? Of course not. Frankly I’m surprised that there haven’t been any ape versions of the creature in any of the movies.

16. Edison – Number 16 here is inspired by the creature in the Edison Films version of the story – the first filmed version of the novel.

17. Ivory and Ebony – Very loosely inspired by the creature in The Thing With Two Heads. The movie featured Ray Milland and Rosey Greer as the monster, but you’d never know it from my version.

18. Elsa – as in Elsa Lancaster who plays the title character in Bride of Frankenstein. (Technically the title should have been Bride of Frankenstein’s Monster but that would have sounded awkward.)

19. Not Beauty – I’m not sure which film inspired this creature. It may not have been a Frankenstein movie at all. I just have an image of this heavy browed woman stuck in my head. I’ve tried finding it online but had no luck.

20. Lurker – also known as There’s An Empty Space In This Illustration That Must Be Filled By Something Weird and Sort of Formless.

21. Liza – inspired by the Helena Bonham Carter creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, movie that is a closer adaptation of the novel than many before it but still hardly a faithful adaptation.

22. The Head – my version of the title creature from The Brain That Wouldn’t Die.

23/24. The Hounds – my excuse for these critters is two-fold. One, Tim Burton’s first movie was Frankenweenie concerning young Victor’s restoration of his pet to life. Two, most medical experiments are performed on animals before they are performed on people. At least one Frankenstein must have experimented on the “lower animals” before stitching together human corpses.

Legion of Frankensteins – Finished Inks

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Something that became clear to me as I was drawing the different creatures – I might go to a Frankenstein to bring my dog back to life but I wouldn’t trust one to treat a paper cut. Good lord, Frankensteins are lousy surgeons. It’s not like they had to work fast to save a patient’s life. They were working with corpses. They had plenty of time to sew the parts together neatly and cleanly. They just obviously couldn’t be bothered.

One change between the inked version and the pencil one is the addition of the monster from Frankenstein Conquers the World in the upper right corner. If I were to do this illustration again there are about a dozen other creatures I would have included in the picture that only occured to me after it was done.

Legion of Frankensteins – Pencil Sketch

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I draw for practice. I draw for fun. I draw because an image pops up in my imagine and hangs out there until I put some version of it on paper. For the last year or so I’ve had this “Legion of Frankensteins” phrase lurking in my head. There’s not much more to it than the words imply. Technically it would be “Legion of Frankensteinian Creatures” but we’ll ignore that for the sake of brevity.

I decided to use this image for both fun and practice. I didn’t worry about making the creatures direct portraits of any specific creations (though most of them are inspired by specific films or stories) and I decided to use the drawing as a coloring practice. Over the next few days I’ll be posting the different stages of turning this into a finished color illustration.

Frankenstein is An Ass

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I’ve finished Frankenstein or A Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Victor Frankenstein is, without doubt, the most self-centered, whiny and ineffectual protagonist I can remember reading about. I’m sure there are other, more annoying heroes out there in fictiondom but I’ve been lucky enough to have avoided them. Once Frankenstein has created his creature he does little else than brood over his misfortune, faint and take to his bed when faced with tragedy and then moan some more. I kept wanting to smack him. Smack him, kick him and pour cold water on his head.

I know, it’s not a modern novel. It’s written in the style of the time. It’s an allegory. It’s metaphorical. It’s a classic. I don’t care. Allegory and metaphor are pretty much lost on me. Sure, I can take apart a story and tell you what it all “means” but that’s vivisection to me. I read a story for the story not for what it all means or for the commentary on society. I read to experience something other than being me. If I want an author’s opinions I read their essays and editorials. As for classic, ask me my opinion of Shakespeare sometime.

After Dracula, Frankenstein is probably the most filmed horror novel. I’ve seen Frankenstein, the True Story; The Bride; Frankenstein Conquers the World; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; The Munsters; Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and probably a few other versions that I can’t remember at the moment. Frankenstein’s creature is a major figure in horror’s supernatural pantheon. I’ve got various versions of the creature in my sketchbook, in story ideas and even one in my gallery. I’ve read a lot more about the novel than I had about Jekyll and Hyde so I was pleased to find parts of it that hadn’t been dragged out and hung in sunshine already. The bit with Felix and the Arabian. Frankenstein’s constant self-pity (the more I read of it the more annoying and therefore funnier it got). The lack of detail of the creature’s creation.

Ah, the creature’s creation. We all know that Frankenstein made his creature by stitching together the body parts of dead men, right? Maybe. Perhaps somewhere in the 1831 revision Frankenstein says he did. Probably somewhere Shelley actually says he did. But, for my purposes, if it isn’t on the page it’s not canon. In the 1818 text Frankenstein never actually says how he constructed the creature. He says he doesn’t want anyone else to repeat his mistake. He says he made it huge, eight feet tall, because the larger size made it easier to work with. If he were simply reanimating a corpse, making it bigger; making it by matching various body parts together wouldn’t make it easier to work with. Unless there were a lot of huge corpses lying around it would actually make it harder. Frankenstein would have to graft bones together, extend muscles, veins, arteries; everything about the creation would be more work than if he were simply trying to reanimate a dead body.

Consider this –
A new species would bless me as its creator and source, many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve their’s. Pursuing these reflections, I thought, that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in the process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption.

A new species. Impossible [to] renew life. Bestow animation upon lifeless matter. This sounds more like Frankenstein were creating some sort of golem or homunculus than actually reviving the dead. Something manlike but not a man. Certainly the creature is physically dynamic. This is no mute, lumbering creature. It scales mountains and glaciers with ease; it teaches itself to speak and to read in a year; it can move silently despite its great size.

Then also consider; when Frankenstein prepares to create a mate for the creature he acquires what he needs in London while traveling with his friend Henry Clerval. He and Henry travel around England and Scotland for four months before Frankenstein insists that he has to spend a month on his own and heads off to a desolate island in the Orkneys. It’s unlikely that Frankenstein just picked up the basics in London and intended to supplement the odd arm or leg once he got to the island. The island is five miles from the mainland and has only five other inhabitants. Frankenstein must have had everything he needed with him when he left London. How does one conceal human body parts for from one’s traveling companion for four months?

Whatever the creature is, I’m thinking that it isn’t just a patchwork of corpses. Frankenstein says he frequented graveyards, charnel houses and dissecting rooms. Human bones play a part in the process. But there’s enough undescribed to imagine Frankenstein creating something that is less a hodgepodge zombie and more a fleshy Victorian android – a thing formed from the sorceries of ancient alchemists and the engineering and chemical sciences of the modern era.

Of course, you can only apply so much logic to the novel. Once Frankenstein has brought his creature to life the story is driven by coincidence followed by unlikely coincidence. Hell, it starts with the coincidence of Frankenstein finding Walton’s ship in the Arctic wastes. The creature has Frankenstein’s notes. It’s smarter than its creator and it’s certainly more driven. Why doesn’t it just create a mate for itself? (Besides the stubborn desire to have Frankenstein actually behave responsibly and think about someone other than himself for one goddam minute.) That’s okay. I don’t want to rewrite the novel. Not exactly. I read it looking for something new in an old friend. And what I found is a creature who is weirder and more interesting than the scarred and stitched together fellow I’d grown accustomed to. I’m going to have a lot of fun the next time I attempt its portrait.