Number 1710: Frankenstein and the Terror

David J. Skal’s excellent 1993 book, The Monster Show, A Cultural History of Horror, reminds us that what we take for granted now, horror movies, were widely criticised, censored and reviled in the days when Dracula and Frankenstein became cultural icons. To paraphrase an old saying, everybody hated them but the ticket-buying public. A couple of decades later the comic books took the same kind of heat over horror. With the benefit of history and an overview of pop culture, nowadays we see both old horror movies and horror comics as relatively harmless entertainment...even quaint, if I can use that word. We can watch a television program like The Walking Dead (itself made from a comic book) with graphic violence, exploding heads and gruesome walking corpses, and it makes the original horror movies look tame by comparison. But those original movies made a real impact. Unlike about 90% of the motion pictures made at the same time as Frankenstein and Dracula, the horror movies are still being watched.



Trading on the popularity of the movies, cartoonist/writer Dick Briefer kept his own versions of Frankenstein going through three different incarnations over a dozen years or so. The Comics Code, not villagers waving torches, killed his Frankenstein.



In this tale from Briefer’s cartoony, funny Frankenstein, the monster meets his mirror image in a Wild West tale from Frankenstein #15 (1948). At 17 pages the story is longer than usual, setting up a whole series of situations based on a Frankenstein “doppleganger.”



Shifting gears and becoming like the critics I criticise, I have a criticism of this otherwise harmless story. There is one panel of a bloody bullethole in a forehead used as comedy that seems over the top. Bulletholes are not funny. This was from 1948 and a bullethole in a forehead was probably a spillover from the crime comics that proliferated that year.

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