Frankenstein: Lemire's run

I have not bothered to count it, but I feel like Jeff Lemire is most prolific Frankenstein's writer. He wrote a mini, an ongoing and later did use Frankenstein in his various other books. In this blog post I'll be covering his solo adventures, while stuff like Justice League Dark (or Futures End if we ever get to that!) might warrant a separate post entirely.


Lemire started writing Frankenstein during Flashpoint event. Frank got his own mini and was paired up with other universal movies inspired monsters. This pairing makes sense and I wonder why previous versions of Creature Commandos did not include some version of Frankenstein*? Anyway, this miniseries is often praised as one of the good things that came out during Flashpoint event and... it probably says a lot about overall quality of Flashpoint event? Frankenstein's mini is not well plotted or well written, artist changes every issue so art direction is all over the place as well and it ends just as it starts going. Only good thing about it really is that it shows promise of what could be and that Frank isn't one of those weird Morrison's creations that nobody will try to use once Morrison is done.

Luckily for us, and for Frank, Lemire took that promise and delivered with New 52 relaunch - it is polar opposite of Flashpoint mini. Nobody really mentions it as one of the gems of New 52, it is well plotted, well written and has consistent art. Well, at least first 9 issues!

One thing that annoys me is badly executed storyline delivering some important bits to character's lore that you can't really ignore. You know, stuff like Snyder's Rotworld. So I was very pleased that opening arc, War of the Monsters, had another go at introducing Frank to Creature Commandos and this time it is executed way better. And Frank gets to kill some big monsters! But it doesn't stop there. One of my negatives about Morrison's run was that SHADE felt a bit generic and Lemire fixes that for me. We get ant farm, we get Father Time changing bodies and lots of weirdness in general. And all that in opening 4 issues.

Fifth issue is a crossover with OMAC, another New 52 gem that everyone should read. It lasts only one issue and each series describe the same event from different angle. Due to that you don't have to read another series to get the full story. I wish all crossovers were like that.

Following 3 issues form a mini arc where we discover that Frank and Bride had a child, but things didn't really work out. One thing that I dislike about this arc is that we are shown Frank being active in Vietnam (in a weird Watchmen reference) and working for SHADE. This clashes with Morrison's established continuity and Melmoth is never referenced either in this series. Furthermore Ponticelli stops inking his pencils and art, to me at least, takes a slight dip in quality. On the positive side we see that the child was created by Father Time and at the time he was using old body - same as we saw in Morrison's run.

Final issue of Lemire's run is a soft tie-in to what was going on in Animal Man and Swamp Thing titles. You don't need to read those titles to understand what is going on, but it is preparing title for eventual tie-in that happens later. On its own it is a decent one-shot story.

One annoying thing about this ongoing is that there are only two trades and first one doesn't collect Lemire's entire run. Issues #8-9 are in second trade with Kindt's run. And well, #6-8 form one story arc...

I'll also add Men of War #8 to this post since it was written by Lemire and Kindt, who followed Lemire's run, and is collected in second collected edition of Frank's ongoing. Story is a bit generic with captured scientist building a robot (JAKE) that eventually turns on the captors. JAKE and Frank form a partnership and beat up big monster, the end. Their friendship never really gets referenced asides of couple of issues in Jeff Parker's Justice League United that will be covered some time later.

One interesting thing about this one-shot is that we see Father Time again in different body. This one looks similar to how he looked in Battle for Bludhaven mini and Freedom Fighters follow up. At the time it was confusing since he looked and acted differently to how Morrison wrote him. Body swap wasn't established at that point either so it was just another case of writers trying to follow up on Morrison's work and screwing it up. Time line obviously doesn't really work, but I guess you could now try to rationalize that Father Time was switching up bodies for different "missions".

Anyway, final verdict? 

  • Skip Flashpoint mini. 
  • First 5 issues of the ongoing are a must for every Frankenstein fan.
  • Issues #6-9 are weaker, but enjoyable and have some important developments.
  • Men of War #8 isn't bad, but it is more for completionists.
* Late update, but, while writing this post I forgot that Patchwork was a member in Creature Commandos.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

From the Batcave: Batwing of Africa

Image
Batwing, David Zavimbe, was basically African Batman that Morrison created during Batman Inc. Not much was done with him there, but as is usual with Morrison's work there were enough bits and pieces that could be explored and built upon to something interesting. So New 52 happens in the middle of the Batman Inc. run and DC felt like it was a good opportunity to try him out as a solo hero. Did it work? First red flag for me was that Winnick got to write this ongoing. I know that he has his fans and some of his stuff like Red Hood turned out to be big commercial hits, but his work really never clicked for me. On the positive he got Ben Oliver on the art who I tend to enjoy. So yeah, I wasn't very thrilled with the creative team, but I was interested enough to try it. Unfortunately, while he still has the same name and is based in Africa it does feel like this is entirely different character. Maybe editors wanted this, maybe Winnick wanted it. Who knows, who cares. At the end of t...
Read more

Trinity: First Act

Image
Trinity is a big series so I'm not going to cover it all in one post, but I'm going to divide it into three parts just like the collected editions are divided. At the same time I'm going to cover some things that happen in other parts if they are relevant for what was going in this particular part. Yes, it might get a bit confusing. Lets start with the structure. In theory each issue is divided into two parts, one main story drawn by Bagley and a backup drawn by one of the collaborators. In practice you can't really say that one part of the book is more important than another, they are equally important and you can't ignore them like you could with "traditional" backups in other books. Bagley simply isn't a robot and couldn't draw 52 issues in a year + however long the lead-in time was. Trinity, as the name suggests, appear a lot in the first part of this series, but you can already see that Busiek and Bagley are going to play with lots and lots of...
Read more

From Morrison's mind: Death of The All-New Atom

Image
So what happened with our new Atom after Simone's run ended? Looking at the title of this post we can already see that fate wasn't kind to Ryan. But before we get to that we have to cover few other things. Simone's run had two fill-ins and they were good fill-ins. Good in a sense that they advanced the main plot of the series and their one and done stories weren't bad. But I didn't find the main plot well executed even before Countdown derailed everything. If you liked what Simone was doing then they are worth checking out, otherwise? Not really. After Simone left we got a new writer - Rick Remender, and I'm not sure what DC was really thinking here. Simone's run didn't end with good sales numbers so were they really expecting that Remender, who wasn't well known at the time, was going to turn the ship around in couple of issues? So what happened is that the title got canceled after 5 issues. But were those issues good? It is hard to judge them since...
Read more