Frankenstein: Kindt's run

While I love Frankenstein I'm fully aware that he is a D-lister at best and well, characters like him usually don't have long ongoing series. With that in mind it is not surprising that Frankenstein's New 52 ongoing didn't last even two years. So, lets see how Matt Kindt wraps it up.

In my earlier posts I praised that Morrison, and to lesser extent Lemire, moved Frankenstein away from the traditional interpretations. Unfortunately Kindt moves in the opposite direction and much of his run is focused on Doctor Frankenstein. We also spend some time on Frank having some visions about the previous owners of his body parts that starts and stops without much narrative purpose. Didn't like either of those two things.

Kindt basically writers two one-shots and two three issues long arcs. First one-shot and three issues arc slowly sets up the return of Doctor Frankenstein, while second arc is a tie-in to Rotworld crossover. And final one-shot does its own thing.

So, Doctor Frankenstein. Turns out that he was real badass and SHADE, The Green, The Red and The Rot all wanted to recruit him. In the end he joined The Rot and became one of its top agents. When the entire DC Universe gets transformed into the Rotworld he is obviously there as well. He is such a badass that he even has a weapon that can destroy Antone Arcane and Frank obviously need to get it. In the end he dies without doing much and not feeling threatening at all. To me it is almost a perfect case of writer telling and not showing, due to that at the end it felt like a waste of time.

Rotworld crossover ends with Animal Man and Swamp Thing time travelling back to the day when everything went south. It makes sense because this way they keep the character development that they had during the story and manage to stop the disaster before it happens. Problem is that Frank had tie-in issues, but did not time travel so his adventure is erased. There is no logical path from #15 to #16 due to that and if you read this without reading main Rotworld books then you wouldn't understand what is going on here.

At the same time Frank makes few appearances in Lemire's Animal run - he even becomes a Green Lantern for a while. He doesn't get a big role, but he is there and it feels like the point of tie-in arc was just to explain how he got there and how he assembled his Frankenstein army. But it didn't do a good job at it and introduced new problems. Fans of Frankenstein/Nina pairing might also get upset that their developments get entirely erased. So you know, sometimes it is better not to read the tie-in and to know less.

So anything good about this run? Ponticelli stays for the entire run doing decent job on the pencils and the last issue is okay.

So, lets sum it up:

• You should totally read Lemire's Animal Man run. Frank doesn't do much there, but it is a great run. Yes, it takes a dip in quality during Rotworld crossover, but it manages to recover and delivers a strong ending. And you don't have to buy Snyder's Swamp Thing, all the relevant issues are collected in Animal Man collections.
  
• #10-#15 and #0 are not really worth it. They don't do much and what they do is not very interesting. And lots of it gets erased by Rotworld's time travel plot.
• #16 is worth picking up. It is a fun one-shot story with Frank and his team taking out some losers and Frank being very bored by it all. Going straight from #9 to #16 is perfectly fine.