Buzzing
electricity.
Reanimated flesh.
A yellow eye slowly opening.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has given pop culture some of its most iconic horror images and
ideas. For the last two hundred years, her work impacted all types of books,
movies, songs, and TV shows. It’s been reinvented so many times that people
forget what is and what is not in the book itself.
Flipping through the book
today, modern readers may be surprised by the lack of any flat-headed,
green-skinned monster. They might expect something very different from the
short, ambiguous descriptions of the laboratory or the long, drawn-out scenes
in the Arctic. These ideas have evolved so much in the last two centuries that
vast chunks of the novel are near-unrecognizable to those who grew up on the
Universal films or, say, Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet Frankenstein.
What better
time, then, to rediscover what started it all? 2018 is the bicentennial
anniversary of the story’s first printing, so why not check it out before the
end of the year? Even better, why not check out the glossy, beautifully
printed, fully illustrated version? I was lucky enough to have my art featured
in this collection, and I absolutely love how the text and illustrations work
together to both recreate and reinvent the story.
The art doesn’t just capture
the events of the iconic novel, it filters those events through two centuries
of adaptations. It’s a coffee table book with all the original text intact, but
it also riffs on that text in ways that even surprised me.
Now, this is a big project with a big price tag to match, but I really stand by it. The thing is
gorgeous. And just like the monster itself, it’s pieced together from dozens of
different sources, mixed and matched in a way that makes everything come alive.
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