“‘Cause it’s rare that you ever know what to expect from a guy made of corpses with bolts in his neck”
10 Ton Press brought out this “artisan edition” of Becoming Frankenstein, but you can get a trade on their web site, if you’re interested. What’s strange about this book is that there are very bad credits. You can see on the cover that three names are listed: Cirocco, Sheikman, and Robbins. When I saw this in Previews, I got it because I very much like Alex Sheikman’s work, and he doesn’t do too many comics, so I was curious about it. 
Inside the book are no credits. Those three names are the only ones on or in the book. When you poke around a bit, you find that the comic is written by Mel Smith and Paul H. Birch and drawn by Frank Cirocco, although it’s clear Sheikman did some work on the interior. Of “Robbins” there is no trace, although I assume he/she is the inker or colorist (this edition is in black and white, but it appears the original issues were in color). It’s very odd, and I wonder why it happened. Weird.
Anyway, this is an “origin” story for Victor Frankenstein, which isn’t really needed – Shelley gave him a perfectly good one in the novel. This expands on it a bit, as in the novel, we never really know what Frankenstein is doing to create life – he just says he’s going to, we get some vague pages about him figuring it out, and then, hey presto! the monster is alive! The book is far more concerned with what the monster and Victor do after it gets away from him, and Shelley was simply not concerned with how Victor created life in the first place – this is a very early example of both “hand-waving” and, it seems, a MacGuffin: she needed Victor to create life and for that life to get loose, and she wasn’t overly concerned with how she got there. For two hundred years, that seems to have bothered people who want to do a Frankenstein’s monster story, so we get the lab and the lightning storm and all that other crap. Shelley just gave zero fucks about all that.
Smith and Birch, however, are concerned about that, so we get a Victor who arrives in Ingolstadt in 1789 (perhaps a deliberately ominous date, given that he arrives a month before the Bastille is stormed) to begin his studies. 
He is quickly picked on as a nerd by bullies, but he’s rescued by Henry Clerval (in the book, they’re childhood friends, but in this comic, this is their first meeting) and Clerval’s buddy, a famous boxer. As Victor studies, he is also courting Elizabeth Lavenza, whom he wishes to marry but can’t because he doesn’t yet have the right social status. The book jumps back and forth between Victor’s early days, his more recent days, and after the monster is created, and it’s slightly annoying trying to track the narrative (it’s not too complex, just annoying). Victor gets a teaching job at the university but is fired for his unusual experiments, but he rents a house from a local baron and continues his work. The baron, meanwhile, turns out to be a true villain, and he also gets involved with the Illuminati, who are concerned about Napoleon doing his thing and want the baron to help them. They suggest he recruit Victor, because of his work with … well, reanimating dead tissue, which they don’t exactly know about but suspect, and it’s something that could obviously help soldiers in a war. There’s a lot going on, in other words.
It’s a frustrating book, because it zips all over the place. Victor is a horrific human being, to be sure, but it feels like the tone of the book wants us to be on his side, to a degree, especially when it comes to his dealings with the baron, who’s also pretty terrible. Victor’s romance with Elizabeth feels a bit perfunctory, as if Elizabeth’s only function is, ultimately, to prove that the monster isn’t that bad a dude. 
The writers turn this into a more clean-cut morality tale, with the baron getting his just desserts, both Clerval and Elizabeth escaping the fate that awaits them in the book, and Victor getting punished by the establishment instead of coming to terms with his own monstrous side as he does in the book. Shelley’s novel is a morality tale to a degree, but it was a much more “internal” one, as Victor wrestles with his own conscience and comes up lacking. I understand that that doesn’t really make a good visual comic, hence the changes the authors made, but it’s still frustrating that this is a far more simplistic story than one a teenager wrote 200 years ago.
However much of the art Cirocco did and however much Sheikman did, the art is excellent. It’s dense and detailed, and we get a wonderful sense of Ingolstadt of the late 18th century (I mean, I wasn’t around so I can’t say how true to life it is, but it feels right), from the beautiful architecture and cobbled streets and exquisite mansions to the dark alleys and the busy wharves (although it does feel like the wharf at Ingolstadt – which is, after all, far inland – is much busier than it would have been in the 1790s). The clash between the upper- and lower-classes works very well, as Victor, who’s technically upper-class even if he doesn’t quite have the means to live like it, heads into the dark places of the city to find people on whom he can experiment. The fashion of the characters is richly detailed and also shows this divide, as Elizabeth is tightly corsetted and proper while some of the lower-class women show a bit more skin. The artists use a lot of good chunk blacks to add a sinister tone to everything, and they drop a lot of holding lines, especially in the backgrounds, which makes the detailed work in the foregrounds pop more. 
This book is very dense, both in writing and in art, but the layouts are very nicely done, allowing us to see a lot of what’s going on even though there are plenty of words. I’ve seen a bit of this in book in color, and it looks fine, but it seems to me that the black-and-white is better, as it allows the line work and shading to really come through well.
As nice as the art is, this comic is still frustrating, because it feels like the writers are a bit too reductive about Victor Frankenstein. The book becomes a bit too … not “superheroic,” exactly, but far too clean-cut in terms of its heroes and villains. Even the writers can’t make Victor too heroic, however, as his own monstrousness keeps coming through, but they seem to fight against it because they want a hero. They get one in the end, but it’s a bit frustrating because they have to bend the narrative far too much, and the book suffers from it. It’s a beautiful book and it’s compelling at times, but it doesn’t quite get the job done. As I noted above, it does appear you can get it at the 10 Ton web site, however, if you’re interested in it!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
