Frankenstein 1910 (Edison’s…)

    (Comics Library International, 2003)
™ and © Comics Library International

Thomas Edison’s Frankenstein is generally credited with being the first horror movie. It was so early that the genre had not yet been named. It faded from the public eye after the ascendance of Universal’s 1931 classic and has only resurfaced in recent years.

This one-shot adapts the Edison version of Frankenstein, which differs in many ways from both Shelley’s book and Universal’s adaptation.

For starters, the monster is a creation of alchemy rather than a collection of corpses animated by electricity. (For Edison to suggest that electricity makes monsters would have been bad business sense.)

The ending is so much psychobabble that might work better on the screen than on the printed page, especially the screen of 1910 when psychobabble was still new.
Rounding out the package is a huge text section. While many comics could stand a page or two of text, this one may overdo it with 22 text pages.

The text includes a history of Edison’s Frankenstein, a comparison of the Edison and Universal versions, bios of the cast and crew of the film (and the comic book’s creators), and more. While interesting, it may be a bit more than the average reader signed on for.

The package ends with increasingly emphatic pitches for Frederick C. Wiebel Jr.’s Edison’s Frankenstein book and DVD set. Its lack of subtlety makes the reader feel, retroactively, as if he or she has just finished reading the comics equivalent of an “infomercial.”

— Jack Abramowitz
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