Gris Grimly's Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (review)

While most everyone knows the story of Frankenstein and his monstrous creation, approaching the original text can be a daunting prospect. Grimly succeeds admirably, following the novel by first setting the scene through letters from Captain Walton (the eventual finder of the monster) reproduced in a sepia font resembling handwriting on parchment, before moving into a more recognizable graphic narrative format. When the monster tells his story, text disappears in favor of wordless sequential art, mirroring the process whereby he came into language through watching the happy family of a blind man. A limited watercolor palette of nature-inspired neutrals foregrounds the exaggerated features of the inked figures, and Grimly, being the good postmodernist that he is, adds touches of steampunk-inflected humor, contemporary parodies of nineteenth-century newspaper caricatures, and old-school horror movie posters. The monster himself is always shown at oblique, incomplete angles, a technique that stresses his ragged construction and forces readers to fill in his physicality with their own imaginings. In this, as in the construction of the graphic narrative itself, Grimly proves himself a more adept assembler of parts than his subject proved to be; his product is no monster, but a pastiche of style and substance that will reanimate the original for yet another generation of readers.