Frankenstein #2

I know that's not the whole title but I think Shade as an acronym is silly. Getting that right out of the way.

Spoilers as well.

In my last post I heaped praise on Lemire's Animal Man #2 like potatoes at Thanksgiving dinner. Well, now I'm on a diet. Frankenstein is, um, not good.

Essentially: Frankenstein discovers a bunch of kids and that other kids apparently were used as sacrifices. Frank bitch slaps the priest across the cellar and then mutters a one-liner about his wrath not discriminating by age. Ho-hum.

Then the crew inside the church walks out into the street where they were just moments ago last issue, and suddenly the street is clear of monsters. Well, living monsters. The vampire and werewolf dudes are standing over a massacre of vaguely drawn monsters. Apparently, they cleared out what was a huge effin deal last month in no time. Maybe in the time between issues they were still killing all the monsters that had overrun the town. Whatever.

So Father Time has figured out where the monsters are coming from so they head over. He picks the fish lady as his companion to go see the portal under the lake. In some lackluster storytelling, fish lady jumps into the water and narrates some stock narration intro to the effect of "while I should have been thinking about the mission I could only remember blah blah blah."

She gives us her back story that includes a dead child (sad) and then the resulting work she's done for SHADE. The first monster-making project actually made monsters (whoda thunk) and so they have to ditch them into a different dimension (hm, sounds suspiciously familiar). Later she used actual human adults for the existing team test and so that is the genesis of the team (yay now I know).

Of course we find out more about the monster portal and that the town has been superstitiously sacrificing children to it, and that the monsters they already fought were scouts, and the rest of the planet is set to invade.

Someone then makes the stupidest conclusion ever that they need to take the fight to them as a result. Or, you know, you could figure out a way to close the fucking portal to an evil monster filled planet set on invading your own. But no, they pull some dimensional ship out of someone's ass then they head through.

Science scanners tell them the planet's surface is organic but when they get through it's full of monsters. Oh no! And Frankenstein's "wife" is standing atop a pile of these monsters and she quips "about time". And scene.

Now, I realize I summarized here and summary is not criticism, or so M keeps telling her students, but I wanted to go through the plot to point out how ridiculous this story is. I don't require a serious or lofty story, but I do want one that makes sense, and this story is a disaster.

Worse, it really does seem like those monsters that fish lady made in our shoehorned narrative flashback have a good shot at being the monster planet. Which would be super lame. And super convenient. And, worse, very poorly foreshadowed. I hope I'm wrong.

I also joked before about the vaguely drawn monsters, but the art in this book is a little underwhelming. Where Animal Man has a weird art style that compliments the genre it is working in, Frankenstein's art style just seems lazy and fails to illustrate this convoluted world they are constructing. This is a real campy series, and I dig the premise, but give me some details and consistency in the art. When characters are not in focus they are drawn like after thoughts, and the whole village/planet of monsters loses all impact because they look like a mass of monster masses. Nothing can be too scary or threatening because they just look like body shaped squiggles with some teeth and eyes. Save me.

So then my final complaint is one I wrote about in my impressions of Frankenstein #1, and that is Frankenstein's lack of character. This guy is supposed to be the main character of a series that is inherently campy. The werewolf dude makes a joke with Frankenstein and he's all like, hrrm, I don't have time for humour. Of course, by the end he does make a joke, and he says that he is learning to adapt. He better learn to adapt pretty damn quick and make that a defining characteristic, because a campy comic with a main character without a strong sense of irony is a comic that falls as flat as the last two issues. If you're going to rip off Hell Boy, at least rip off the reason people like Hell Boy.

I still like the mummy. If nothing else, they should make the comic about him. Cuuuurse...