Frankenstein as a superhero? Frankenstein in the generic system of comic books

A note on Classics illustrated, genre-shifting and fidelity

The example of the Classics Illustrated version of Frankenstein in December 1945 (#26; the issue went through 19 printings, until 1971) helps provide some context for the uses of the tale in superhero comics of that decade. At the level of the plot, the Classics Illustrated version was ostensibly a faithful adaptation of the novel, as befits the educational project of the series (Gabilliet 27–28), with no extended laboratory scene, for instance.

However, even in the context of an overt literary reference, the cinematic intertext is impossible to miss in the comic book, starting with a cover illustration featuring a recognizable Karloff. Moreover, the adaptation adds strong elements of eroticism and horror to the story (Jones 52–53). As part of a serialized publication, caught into a system of “realistic” representation in which female bodies were routinely eroticized, contextualized by the Universal horror movies, Shelley’s novel was thus reframed within the parameter of popular genres. The Classics Illustrated thus suggest that the aesthetic and commercial conditions of the comic book publishing industry of the early 1940s offered a limited range of possible uses for the Frankenstein motif, even outside of the superhero genre.

Frankenstein and superheroes in the 1960s: hybridization and assimilation

Superheroes went into an eclipse in the late 1940s, only to make a comeback in the late 1950s and early 1960s in a significantly different generic configuration, as science-fiction and romance displaced gangster fiction and horror as major influences on the genre. Superhero comics of the 1940s had shown a high degree of compatibility with exogenous narratives (mysticism, nationalism, etc.), but their self-aware successors of the 1960s interacted with an even wider range of sources, from Scandinavian mythology (Thor) to spy-thrillers (Nick Fury) to teenage comedy (early Amazing Spider-Man, Archie as Pureheart the Powerful).

Popular as they may have been in the context of the late 1950s monster-craze (Skal 268–74; AuBuchon), the Frankenstein creature and his cousins from horror cinema were excluded from these circulations by the 1954 “Comics Code,”4 a self-censorship framework which comics publishers had embraced to assuage public concern about the noxious influence of their products. Part B of the Code’s definition of “general standards” was dedicated specifically to representations of horror and forbade among other things: “scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism” (“Code”). This blanket prohibition made it impossible for the kind of borrowings and allusions of the 1940s to appear in most comic books after 1954.

In Marvel Comics of the 1960s, the Frankenstein monster nevertheless served as a silent intertext for a character such as The Hulk (Mr. Hyde with Boris Karloff’s haircut), as the subject for a knowing joke by the Thing in Fantastic Four #12 (“Can you imagine those lunkheads thinkin’ I was the Hulk??! Next they’ll be mistakin’ me for Frankenstein!”), or as a red herring, when the X-Men encounter a Frankenstein monster (#40), which turns out to be an android (on this specific issue and the constraints of the Comics code, see Darowski). The composition of the covers of these two issues is part of this silent intertext. In both cases, the heroes advance on the right side of the cover, while the creature is hiding on the left, in the foreground. The Hulk and the fake Frankenstein Monster thus occupy the same space and the same position, in what could have been a deliberate attempt to underline the similarities between the two characters. While Marvel thus composed with the Comics Code—with plenty of mad scientists but little horror—one of its rivals, Dell, was in a much better position to capitalize on the monster craze. Dell was the largest publisher in the industry in the 1950s and because it sold mostly unobjectionable comics aimed at pre-teens (Gabilliet 40; 72), it had not adopted the Comics Code. Furthermore, Dell had long specialized in adaptations and narrative extensions of films and tv shows, most notably of Disney properties. It was thus in an ideal position to capitalize on the renewed interest for 1930s movie monsters spurred by television and by such magazines as Famous Monsters of Filmland (Warren Publishing, 1958-1983).5 As a result, Dell was able to publish a licensed “adaptation” of the Universal film in 1964, which repurposed some narrative elements of the 1931 film, but altered, modernized and expanded the story. The 32-page story concludes with the destruction of the creature by fire, on a sinking ship. Dr. Frankenstein’s final words echo his son’s speech in Son of Frankenstein and tease out a possible sequel: “I have created a super-human! And someday very soon, we shall return to this spot to discover how successful I have been” (Segall and Jenney 32).

Two years later, an unexpected #2 did not pick up where #1 had ended, and offered a radically different story: the creature became a super-hero with a costume and a secret identity, in the course of a highly melodramatic plot, which includes amnesia, a tragic accident leading to an unexpected inheritance, a malevolent dwarf and a giant gorilla. The issue did not bear any Universal trademark and is not explicitly connected to the movies. Yet the in-house ad on the inside front cover of the issue makes it clear that the series is meant to be read in the context of Dell’s other media adaptations, promoting the issue along with comic book versions of Bewitched, The Beverly Hillbillies or Mighty Mouse. The revived series lasted for only three issues, and did very little with the Frankenstein intertext, beyond using a few props, such as the gothic castle. Instead, it replayed archetypal scenes from Superman and Batman, with a crafty man-servant, an alluring female journalist bent on discovering the hero’s secret identity, etc. Once more, integrating Frankenstein fully in the superhero mold proved hard to sustain, though in this case, the mediocrity of the craftsmanship may have been a more important factor than any generic incompatibility.

The 1970s, toward assimilation

While horror had been banished from most comic books after 1954, it flourished again in the next decade in magazines of comics, led by Warren Publishing’s Creepy (1964-1982) and Eerie (1965-1982). Their unusual format allowed them to escape the scrutiny afforded to comic books, and they were positioned both as a revival of the most ambitious horror comics of the previous decades, and as comic book versions of the popular monster magazines, including Warren’s own Famous Monsters of Filmland (Labarre). As such, they used the Frankenstein monster abundantly (about 13 stories in Creepy and Eerie in their first two years), often in a self-aware fashion, and always with an implied cinematic reference.

The success of these magazines, coupled with the decline of superheroes, inspired Marvel Comics to return to horror in the 1970s in magazines and comic books. By that time, the Comics Code had evolved to allow precisely the type of referential horror practiced in the Warren magazines:

Vampires, ghouls and werewolves shall be permitted to be used when handled in the classic tradition such as Frankenstein, Dracula, and other high calibre literary works written by Edgar Allen Poe, Saki, Conan Doyle and other respected authors whose works are read in schools around the world. (“Code 1971”)

These “high calibre literary works” thus included Mary Shelley’s novel, though she was not mentioned by name, and came very close to enshrining the confusion between the creature and its creator. In January 1973 Shelley’s tale became the basis for the integration of the Frankenstein creature in Marvel’s shared narrative universe, in The Monster of Frankenstein comic book (17 issues, 1973-75) and in the Monsters Unleashed magazine (11 issues, 1973-75). As a gesture towards the Code, the first four issues of the comic books present a meticulous adaptation of the novel, including the embedded narrative structure. Once this retelling is over, however, the series focuses on monster tales with twist endings, reminiscent of the early Warren formula, including numerous encounters with other canonical monsters (in #5, for instance, the creature rescues a persecuted young woman, only to discover that she is a werewolf). The visual narration is typical of the Marvel house-style of the early 1970s, derived from Jack Kirby’s idiosyncratic approach to superheroes (Hatfield 222). While in Warren magazines, the climax of the monster crossovers was usually the reveal of the creatures’ identities, in The Monster of Frankenstein, stories tend to pivot around a physical monster brawl.

The character was then brought in even closer proximity to the publisher’s superhero titles, as he was brought to the 1970s (like Captain America, he is frozen in ice) and started appearing in other titles. At that point, the whole Marvel line of comics was defined by its intertextuality, either in the form of official adaptations (Classics Comics, Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter, Robert Howard’s Conan, etc.) or as officious transpositions (Luke Cage and Blaxploitation, Master of Kung Fu, etc.). The Frankenstein creature thus functioned as one of these markers of intertextuality, imbued with nostalgia for “classic” horror films, yet compatible with the fictional universe the publisher had been assembling since the 1960s (Denson).6 As illustrated by the aforementioned joke in the Fantastic Four, that universe often acknowledged its sources, yet assimilated them efficiently. In the course of crossovers with most of the Marvel universe, the creature became closely aligned with the characteristics of the publisher’s heroes and antiheroes—an increasingly irrelevant distinction—and duly took its place in the successive versions of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe (first published in 1983).

Further toward the margins of the genre, Swamp Thing (1972-1976), offered another salient example of the use of the Frankenstein motif in superhero comic books. Published by DC Comics, Swamp Thing offered a sensual and baroque version of the myth, complete with a life-creating mad scientist (Arcane) and a heroine whose white hair with a black streak inverts Elsa Lanchester’s iconic hairdo in The Bride of Frankenstein (Whale, 1935). While the series is positioned as a horror title, it is also set in the same universe as DC’s superhero fiction, as exemplified by the encounter between the Swamp Thing and Batman (#7).

Contemporary Frankensteins

The monster did not disappear in the 1980s and 1990s, with numerous comics adaptations and parodies, including erotic versions, but it became less prominent in mainstream superhero comic books. While DC and Marvel were still committed to intermedial properties, the popularity of monster-based comic book horror waned,7 as did Frankenstein’s centrality in popular culture (see the decline in the number of movies in fig.1).

Paradoxically, this obsolescence became the basis for Frankenstein’s eventual return to superhero fiction. In the early 21^st century, the character has become identified with the memory of popular culture, a resource which contemporary superhero comics and their near relatives tap eagerly.8 In 2002, Geoff Clock identified “meta-comics” as a distinct genre, which mined the history and codes of the medium to organize their narratives (Klock), but this mode of writing has arguably become the default configuration for successful superhero comics.9 While the Frankenstein monster does not fit in the chronology of Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (it only appears briefly in The Black Dossier and in the written supplements to the second volume), it is present in Warren Ellis’s seminal Planetary as one of the buried pillars of contemporary popular culture. In the episode (#13), the main character of the series, Elijah Snow, pays a visit to the ambiguous heroes of the 19^th century: Dracula, the Invisible Man and Sherlock Holmes. Frankenstein’s laboratory is depicted at length, and while Warren Ellis’s script directs the reader’s attention to the literary references, John Cassaday’s illustrations draw inspiration from 1930s cinema, while colorist Laura Martin uses desaturated colors, reminiscent of black-and white cinema. The Universal films are no longer a relevant form of popular culture, they are part of the archive, just like the novel which inspired them over a century before. That Frankenstein may be briefly used as an antagonist, but he functions as a relic, excerpted from an obsolete hypotext.

Numerous contemporary series make use of Frankenstein in a similar way, as a powerful index of the history of popular culture, and do not necessarily engage with any specific hypotext, or with the larger architext encompassing the previous renditions of the myth (Genette; Letourneux). In Jeff Lemire’s Sherlock Frankenstein, for instance, the patronym of the character serves as the mere promise of a steampunk tone. A more elaborate but similar approach is to be found in Mike Mignola’s Frankenstein Underground, a mini-series set in the Hellboy universe. Much like Swamp Thing, Hellboy and its spin-offs work on the frontier between superhero fiction and horror, with a keen and often explicit awareness of literary intertexts (Bukatman). Frankenstein’s creature first appears in the Hellboy universe as an antagonist in a short-story, not unlike its uses in superhero comics of the 1940. Since golems and artificial creatures abound in this fictional universe, the introduction of the creature itself could only be read as a move from the architext to a hypotext, a more specific reference. In Frankenstein Underground, however, Mignola transforms the creature as well as the reference and aligns them with the rest of his fictional universe: the monster finds itself in an underground realm inspired by Edgar Rice Burrough’s Pellucidar, Jacques Bergier and H.P. Lovecraft. After a brief prologue, the name of the character is all that remains of Shelley’s novel, again a mere index, or a form of evocative but shallow literary name-dropping.

Frankenstein also functions as a more complex reference, however. Jeff Lemire, who wrote Sherlock Frankenstein, also authored Frankenstein Agent of S.H.A.D.E. for DC Comics between 2012 and 2013.10 In the series, the creature is part of a team of monsters, which points to the Universal crossovers of the 1940s and to their descendance, such as NBC’s Monster Squad (1976), since it also includes a mummy, a werewolf and a creature from the black lagoon.11 The monsters serve as a covert group of morally ambiguous super-powered beings employed by the government for suicidal missions, following a well-established template in superhero comics such as Suicide Squad (DC) and Thunderbolts (Marvel). The title of Jeff Lemire’s series encapsulates this hybridity, by inserting Frankenstein’s name in the structure of Marvel’s “Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.” (first published in Strange Tales, 1965-1968). The S.H.I.E.L.D. was also a covert governmental agency, a kind of fictional C.I.A., and the series was itself a transposition of the popular James Bond films (Dr. No, From Russia with Love and Goldfinger were released between 1962 and 1964) in the Marvel superhero universe.12

However, Lemire is not merely interested in intertextual pleasures at the surface level, but uses the Frankenstein monster to tease out the Frankensteinian undercurrents within the superhero genre. The stories include tales of creators overwhelmed by their creatures and most tellingly, an encounter between the monster and OMAC—One Man Army Corp—a synthetic hero created by Jack Kirby in the 1970s, whose original series include chilling images of mass-produced synthetic humans. Lemire thus highlights not only the compatibility between the monster and the superhero genre—a compatibility amply demonstrated in the examples we have mentioned so far—but also some of the ways in which Mary Shelley’s story and its subsequent retellings have silently provided themes and stories for superhero comics.

While Frankenstein Agent of S.H.A.D.E. displays a high level of awareness regarding these generic intersections, Frankenstein figures with explicit or strongly implied connection to the archive of popular culture appear to have multiplied in contemporary superhero comics. Even The Punisher, a street-level vigilante character with no apparent connection to that story received a Frankenstein story-arc (“Franken-Castlen” 2009-2010), in which the character died and was rebuilt by a community of monsters once more inspired by the mid-century Universal cycle. When the pulp-inspired villains of the story arc attack the community, one of them exclaims: “They have a Frankenstein” (Remender et al. n.p.). The indefinite article is telling: the creatures have become so ubiquitous that they are part of the fabric of the superhero genre.

Conclusion

This overview suggests that Frankenstein has proved compatible with the superhero genre, though the uses of the story have evolved over time. In the 1940s, Frankenstein served as a shortcut to the thrills of horror cinema and the pleasures of a “body genre” which crudely manufactured comic books could only approximate through intertextual borrowings. Though temporarily restrained by the Comics Code from 1954 to 1971, this appetite for combining the thrills of horror with the superhero genre returned in the 1970s; the titles noticeably eschewed the camp and innocuous reading of the movie monsters, which had been prevalent in comics in the previous decade.

Now more than 80 years removed from the Universal movies, Frankenstein appears to be associated in superhero comics with the memory of horror as a popular genre. Crucially though, it remains alien to genre. In spite of multiple attempts at assimilation, it remains a marker of familiar otherness, part of shared culture, which has proved useful to superheroes since their inception. Superhero comics thus appear as a site in which the Frankenstein mythos—as a syncretic architext encompassing the novel and especially the filmed versions—is constantly reexamined and reactivated, helping to maintain its continued relevance in popular culture.