Rating: WARTY!
Note that this is an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
This graphic novel, which is confused at best, attracted me because the Frankenstein idea is a compelling one even though I haven't had the best relationship with novels on this topic. The problem with this one is that it misrepresents itself. It really had far less to do with Frankenstein than it did with a zombie apocalypse, and if I'd known that's all it was, I would never have asked to read it in the first place.
Written by Dixon and Hoskins, and illustrated by Ponce, this has nothing to do with the original Frankenstein novel which I reviewed back in January of 2014. It's based on Dean Koontz's series of a purportedly reinvented Frankenstein, which failed to live when electrified in its TV incarnation. In it, the "monster" is the hero and Frankie-ducks is the villain (but wasn't that the original story?! LOL!). Note that there never was a 'monster' in Shelley's creation - it was a "creature" - but there isn't a lot of creation going on here. Because American authors are, based on available evidence, largely incapable of writing stories set anywhere other than the USA, this all takes place in New Orleans, during Katrina. That felt highly inappropriate and disrespectful to me
This Victor Frankenstein keeps creating females named Erika. I'm not making this up - Dean Koontz evidently is! In this volume, which is the only one I've read, we're not told why he's doing this, nor why he created a portal to another universe. Instead we learn that he has a whole bunch of naked Erikas bottled (literally) downstairs, which he can activate whenever he wants. The current living one is number five, and she is quite evidently there only as eye-candy, sporting herself in flimsy, clinging, split-sided dresses and intent solely on escape. It's not an attractive proposition and would likely have shocked Mary Shelley, no matter how liberal and progressive she may have been for her time.
The story is largely incoherent, featuring multiple parallel worlds, one of which is undergoing a festering outbreak of zombies. Of all the parallel worlds in all the galaxies in all the universe, I had to be thrown into this one! Why Frankie-ducks feels compelled to take off after Erika 5 when he has a couple of dozen more in his basement is unexplained. Why there are zombies running amok in a flooded New Orleans is unexplained, but it has something to do with electricity, which ironically is something this novel fails to elicit.
It's only a hundred and thirty-some pages, but I couldn't finish it. It was boring, and the art work nondescript. The exploitation of women particularly in the form of Erika, a leading female once again in need of a muscular man to both validate and rescue her, was rife and obnoxious, which I admit seems inevitable in comic books, but it doesn't have to be that way if we chose not to let it, and I sure don't have to support this kind of thing. I cannot recommend this, nor anything like this.
