Frankenstein, the Shadow and other comic books read

Prompted by some of Alan Stewart’s reviews, I began reading Marvel’s Bronze Age Frankenstein series on the Marvel app. It opens with a descendant of the sea captain who met Frankenstein in the original novel finding the Creature, then hearing his history from his own lips over the course of several issues (courtesy of Gary Friedrich and artist Mike Ploog). The Creature then sets out to destroy the last of Frankenstein’s descendants, leading to adventures in the 1800s, then a jump forward to the present.

This starts well but as it changes creative hands and becomes more conventional for a Marvel monster magazine (moving to the present, for example) it ran out of steam, then picked up energy again (a plotline involving a meeting with Frankenstein’s descendant Veronica) then in the last issue (written by Bill Mantlo) fell on its face, so I don’t think cancellation was any great loss (though the Monster would return in various later superhero books).

As a fan of both the Shadow and the Twilight Zone, THE TWILIGHT ZONE: The Shadow by David Avallone and Dave Acosta was irresistible, though the idea of the Shadow wandering through various settings from the series (“While I’m battling the Howling Man, I can’t stop the immortal conspiracy of Walter Jameson and the Queen of the Nile!”) struck me as difficult to pull off. Unfortunately the miniseries goes for a much duller angle, remaking the episode A World of Difference in which a man discovers his life is nothing but a TV show.

As Margo and Lamont bicker about whether he’s getting too ruthless, the Shadow finds himself suddenly an actor playing the Shadow in a radio show (the jokes about what the series gets wrong are the best part), then a pulp writer creating the Shadow … “All your adventures are imaginary!” is a twist that’s been done a lot (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, St. Elsewhere) and I didn’t find this take fresh or clever at all.

GIRL GENIUS: Sparks and Monsters by Phil and Kaja Foglio improves on the previous volume in that all the disparate plot threads seem to come together as everyone begins working on ways to stop Agatha Heterodyne’s monstrous mom Lucrezia from taking her over and wreaking havoc (though there’s a lot more going on too). As always, the series is goofy, charming and entertaining; annoyingly the next volume seems to be hard to find and correspondingly pricey, but I’ll get it eventually.

LAGUARDIA by Nnedi Okorafor and Tana Ford is a good, whimsical drama about a serious subject, immigration. In the near future, alien refugees are arriving on Earth and we’re not handling it entirely well. Freedom, the protagonist, returns from Nigeria with an intelligent plant she smuggles into New York but settling into a new life will be more complicated than she’d like … Immigrant = Alien is a touchy analogy but I think it works here. In a minor note, as someone old enough to remember when Biafra’s secession attempt from Nigeria was front-page news, it’s interesting to see the regional dispute hasn’t completely died down.

All rights to images remain with current holders. Covers top to bottom by Ploog, Acosta and Foglio.