Frankenstein Underground #1 (of 5), comes out in March.
Cover by Mike Mignola. Copyright Dark Horse Comics.
Frankenstein Underground #2 comes out in April.
Cover by Mike Mignola. Copyright Dark Horse Comics.
Frankenstein Underground #3 comes out in May.
Cover by Mike Mignola. Copyright Dark Horse Comics.
By Andrew A. Smith
Tribune Content Agency
Mike Mignola is getting weird.
You'd think Mignola, creator of Hellboy, Baltimore and Witchfinder, had gone as far with weird as weird gets. You'd think the man who wrote and drew The Amazing Screw-On Head had pretty much set the standard for odd.
But that was before Frankenstein Underground, the new five-issue miniseries written by Mignola and drawn by Mignolaverse veteran Ben Stenbeck. In a telephone interview about the new book, which launches in March, Mignola described his new horizons.
"There's almost a fairy-tale quality to this book," said Mignola about a title that stars a reanimated, patchwork corpse. "It's a very odd book. And it changes from issue to issue. My editor kept saying every time I turned in a plot that this is the weirdest comic I've done. Which, considering some of the stuff I've done, that's saying a lot."
Perhaps one reason is that the book wasn't written so much as it suggested itself to be created — and then evolved. Because, when asked what about the Frankenstein monster intrigued him, Mignola said with a laugh, "Almost nothing."
And yet, the monster has already appeared in a Hellboy story. Which surprised even Mignola at first.
"I did this graphic novel with Richard Corben, House of the Living Dead. I had this monster (in the story) when I had to write the back cover copy for the book — the book's full of monsters, and so I was kinda running down a list of the different monsters in the book. And there's no (other) way to say 'a Frankenstein-like creature' or 'a reanimated corpse. ... Just to be funny, to get the absurdity of the text I was looking for, I had to write ' ... and the Frankenstein monster.' And then I went, 'Oh, I guess it is the Frankenstein monster, since I put it on the back cover of the book.' So that's how I suddenly had the Frankenstein monster in the Hellboy universe."
Of course, Frankie could have remained unused after House of the Living Dead, a book that was an homage of sorts to the Universal ensemble monster movies like House of Frankenstein and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. But then artist Stenbeck got tired of buildings.
That needs explaining. But before we get to that, Mignola explained why he loves working with Stenbeck.
"There's a great charm to Ben's stuff," Mignola said. "He's kind of realistic in that his people move like real people; they're very solid, as opposed to a real stylized cartoonist. But at the same time he does have this wonderful cartoonish quality to his work — it's really hard to define."
"He's a great character actor — he moves his characters around real well," Mignola continued. "He's great with subtle facial expressions. He's a killer when it comes to reference. I've worked with him several times now. You know he did the Baltimore series with us, set in World War I, and he did Witchfinder with me, set in the Victorian era. He's a hound for research. He crowds stuff with authentic-feeling detail, but somehow you don't get lost in the detail. I'm thrilled to work with him."
Which is how we got to Frankenstein, and the building thing.
He'd been doing Baltimore for several years, and he was kind of itching to do something else," Mignola explained. "And I want to work with him, so I pitched a couple different things at him. I think he was tired of doing cities and buildings and stuff like that, so I pitched a couple different things at him. The Frankenstein book had been banging around in the back of my head as kind of a vague idea, and that was the one he got the most excited about. So I said, "Yeah, all right, let's do that."
That's not uncommon for Mignola, he explained. At most publishing companies, a writer writes a story, the book is scheduled, and then the company finds someone to draw it. Mignola, though, likes to find the artist that matches the content first.
"I can't imagine writing a book when I don't know who's going to be drawing it," he said. "I like to tailor a book to a guy's strengths. I certainly like to do a book that a guy wants to do. If I can do it early enough with an artist, I can say — and I think I did with Frankenstein — 'Ben what do you want to do? Is there a scene you want in here? Is there a list of things you want me to work in?' It doesn't always happen. But the more excited I can get an artist on a project, the better it's gonna be."
Which sort of explains the first issue, where the monster gets buried underground. "Ben didn't want to draw cities and stuff," Mignola said, "so what if the monster went to the center of the earth and did nothing but fight monsters?"
Then Stenbeck wouldn't have to draw anything but monsters and a lot of rocks. Perfect! However, the rocks-and-monsters thing didn't quite work out.
"That was the original idea. The second issue is very much like that," Mignola said. "But then it turned into something else. It started out as a sort of mash-up between Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the Edgar Rice Burroughs center-of-the-earth stuff. But then I started kinda bringing in other things from the Hellboy universe, mythology things. There's always mythology and ancient history stuff that I've cooked up that I don't have a place for. So every time I come up with a book I kinda say, 'well, does any of this stuff fit? Is it gonna flesh out the mythology and stuff of this world?'
"Then the book started taking on a different shape," he continued. "Originally it was going to be a series of books that would just have the monster roaming around underground running into different stuff, and God knows how long we'd do it, but we would do it until Ben was sick of it. (But) once I started bringing these other things in, the book kinda closed up. It became a graphic novel. It became a five-issue series that told the whole story. Then I had to break it to Ben, 'I think this is it.' "
None of which can really be discerned from the first issue, which involves some familiar faces from Hellboy books, as well as the dark gods that have always been a part of the mythos. The art is very attractive, and the story has some good hooks. It's not very weird at all — just entertaining.
"It gets weirder," Mignola laughed.
And I believe him.
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