I promised you something cinematically different for today's post, and here it comes, via the April 1939 debut issue of DC's Movie Comics #1-- Basil Rathbone! Boris Karloff! Bela Lugosi! Lionel Atwill! And Josephine Hutchinson in-- SON OF FRANKENSTEIN! This is a fun, condensed photo comic adaptation of the Universal monster classic from the same year, featuring modified black 'n white film stills from the movie, astoundingly airbrushed into lurid, living comic book color, and in some cases even highlighted with all new illustrated panels, most notably on the final page. This unique DC series only lasted 6 issues, but it did delve into the darker side of Hollywood horror and mystery cinema a few more times too, and we'll take a look at another entry in our next post coming this weekend, please stay tombed...
This is great! It gives us a chance to see what a colorized Frankenstein film from the thirties would have looked like, without spoiling the esthetics of the original black and white version.
ReplyDeleteI love Son of Frankenstein. It's probably my favorite Lionel Atwill performance (from Universal, at least) and it's definitely my favorite from Bela Lugosi. I think Ygor is the single most terrifying character in the whole Universal Monsters stable. The filmmaking brio is on point, too: It's definitely the most adventurous Frankenstein film. You can tell Rowland V. Lee was a veteran of all kinds of Musketeer movies.
ReplyDeleteI like this odd comic, too. The usual movie fumetti style leaves me cold after the novelty wears off. There's just something so static about slogging through a bunch of screen caps. But here images have been resized, cut and rearranged, to the point of collage even before they got around to coloring them. They might have pushed it further, but it still ends up being a strategic visual presentation of the story, over and above simply printing the frames of film.
I guess I like those last two pages best. The two-panel lava pit finale on page eight required quite a lot of original work from whoever made this, and ends up feeling more like German expressionism than the rest of the story. I'm not so sure about the quarter-tone images that overlay the blocks of narration. Sometimes it works (page eight again) and sometimes it's just a little frustrating (like on page five).
Looking forward to the nest one!
Good thing the "loboratory" was built over lava.
ReplyDeleteYup this is super interesting. And there's certainly a lot more work than you'd think; it's not just stills it's stills that are x-atco-knifed out, re-colorized for comic printing, and there's even places where backgrounds were added and even some new art (like the last page, some of it being collage like.)
ReplyDeleteThe coloring is weirdly highlighted but kind of dull at the same time. Looking forward to more of these!
Every time they kill the monster in the universal films they have to somehow kind of bring him back in the next film. Dropping in lava gets a bit hand-waved away, and Ygor is back causing even more trouble in the next one.
One of my favorite things about Frankenstein meets the Wolfman is that the Frankenstein in that film is Ygor -- and he's blind -- but it's never explained! You are just expected to know that. It's a shared universe in the 40s!
Side note: The new art ending a lot more exciting then the movie -- in the movie it's a sulfur pit (which is why you can kind of hand wave it away a bit better) and it's basically a hole in the ground, not a bubbling mass of goo at the bottom of a mountain!