Frankenstein Underground, written by Mignola, with art by Ben Stenbeck and colors by award winning colorist Dave Stewart. Readers will find a new take on a familiar creature–one who is alone, abandoned and grappling with his existence.
Mignola told us:
To be clear, I do love the Mary Shelley monster. We know he started out like a giant baby, wandering around, horribly abandoned by his creator, but we know this because he tells us this. Most of the time we actually “see” him in the book he is all grown up, super articulate and (justifiably) pissed off. The Karloff monster is actually the version much closer to my heart. He never gets a chance to grown up, never gets anywhere close to articulate, and when he does get angry it’s like when a little kid gets angry—other than the killing it’s actually kind of charming. I have always thought of the monster as charming—a charming simpleton. That’s the version I wrote when I introduced my reanimated corpse character in the House of the Living Dead graphic novel, even before I realized that he was the Frankenstein monster. He did some bad stuff, but that’s because the bad guys were pushing him around. When I wrote Frankenstein Underground I was writing a character that at least started out as the Shelley character, so I went out of my way to bring up some of the really unpleasant things he did in the book, but I just did it so he could tell everybody how sorry he was about all that.
Mignola’s fascination with ghosts and monsters began at an early age; reading Dracula at age twelve introduced him to Victorian literature and folklore, from which he has never recovered. Starting in 1982 as a bad inker for Marvel Comics, he swiftly evolved into a not-so-bad artist. By the late 1980s, he had begun to develop his own unique graphic style, with mainstream projects like Cosmic Odyssey and Batman: Gotham by Gaslight. In 1994, he published the first Hellboy series through Dark Horse. As of this writing there are twelve Hellboy graphic novels (with more on the way), several spinoff titles (B.P.R.D., Lobster Johnson, Abe Sapien, and Sir Edward Grey: Witchfinder), prose books, animated films, and two live-action films starring Ron Perlman. Along the way he worked on Francis Ford Coppola’s film Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), was a production designer for Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), and was the visual consultant to director Guillermo del Toro on Blade II (2002), Hellboy (2004), and Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008). Mike’s books have earned numerous awards and are published in a great many countries. Mike lives somewhere in Southern California with his wife, daughter, and cat.
Below, Dark Horse have provided us with the complete issue one of Frankenstein Underground:
