Frankenstein's Animated Monster

 

Graphite on paper

Something Sketchy

I've been trying out a sketchbook prompting technique that artist / cartoonist Charles Burns has discussed employing in interviews and books of his work. Essentially you tape a reference image to the backside of the previous page (or inside of the front cover, initially, I guess) and then rework the picture out in your sketchbook, in your own style, incorporating your own aesthetic choices.

The following are just a few of the examples of my own exercises in this.

I have no idea what "The Snake Pit" is, or why this Famous Monsters of Filmland trading card is labelled as such. The trading card set came out in 1963, and indeed features stills of creatures and ghastly shots from established horror films, largely AIP teen monster flicks and peplum films. After you get to card 20 or so, of the 64 card set, the images are either misidentified, oddly cropped illustration from movie posters or pulp magazines, and images of contest winners done up in their contest-winning make up creations. One such is the above image. The blurb from FMOF identifying the winner is below. 

Above is country music legend Ernest Tubb. 

I'm not a sports fan in the least. I have zero interest in watching other people play games and get paid millions upon millions of dollars to do it. You might as well have regional Yahtzee players making seven figures with crowds of beer-swilling idiots crowding around them, threatening the referees after each official dice roll count. 

Vitriol aside, this is some baseball trading card featuring Kansas City A's pitcher George Brunet, who was apparently traded often throughout his career, and eventually made his way to Mexico, where he pitched for the Mexican league into his fifties. All of that info came from a cursory internet search. I chose the card because of the unibrow, dyspeptic expression and oddly elongated neck. And while I find professional sport boring, I genuinely can't stomach "professional" sports analysis, particularly when it's a bunch of self-styled oracle blowhards sitting around, pitching speculation about what a certain team needs to do to win an upcoming game. The gist of it is always "I think what (insert team name) needs to do to beat (insert team name) in tomorrow's game, is to win it!"

 

Haunted Hot Rods

I was, and still am, I guess, a monster kid. I think I have shared before the story about how one fateful afternoon in the 1980s I was exposed to Tod Browning's Dracula, and my mind was suitably blown and primed to seek out monster movies, and related ephemera, from that point forward. Of course to present that as the moment I was introduced to monsters in the pop cultural sense, would be inaccurate, because I had by that point, already been toddling around in Incredible Hulk t-shirts since I was in diapers, and had had a shoe box full of Masters Of The Universe figures–a large number of which were monsters of various sorts. 

As I grew older, and my interests diversified, monsters (more so than straight "horror") stuck with me. And as I got into comic books, and later music and other things, I found these amazing overlaps in the spheres of the Venn Diagram of my hobbies. There's surf music about monsters?! There are comic books with monster stories?! I quickly grew to favor supernatural comic book characters like Deadman, Ghost Rider, Werewolf By Night and Swamp Thing, and scoured the weekly TV Guide for listings of monster and sci-fi movies on AMC (back when they were more akin to what TCM is now, than a version of early 90s HBO). Fortunately the late 80s/early 90s burgeoning basic cable market was flush with shows like Werewolf, Forever Knight and Monsters, and the Universal Monsters were back in vogue, popping up in everything from toys to Doritos packaging.  

As I pursued these various interests I found that the offerings to discover were often unilaterally declining in quality the more recently they were produced. Straight-to-video horror might have a certain outsider charm to it, but something like Galaxy of Terror or Creature didn't seem to hold a candle to Creature From The Black Lagoon or The Mad Ghoul. I don't like gore if it's the focal point of a movie/comic/novel, I don't enjoy films about groups of people, often teenagers or thirty-somethings playing teenagers, being systematically butchered in novel ways by some psychopath in a mask. I also don't have time for parodic material that doesn't respect the source. Was I whole-heartedly obsessed with The Misfits when they crossed my path? You bet! But metal that glorifies senseless brutality, not so much. 

Yadda yadda yadda. My brand of horror has always been more Hammer Films, Boris Karloff, EC Comics and Famous Monsters of Filmland than Fangoria, Rob Zombie and the hyper graphic Twisted Tales. That isn't to say there isn't a great deal of contemporary horror stuff that I greatly enjoy, but prior to the 1970s the idea seemed to be providing entertainment, not entrails. I like a bit of fun with my fear and there's lots of great stuff buried in the past if you dig for it. I've dug out a 1964 issue of Pete Millar's Drag Cartoons magazine to share today. It's a quick little hot rod monster mash produced by noted animation designer and cartoonist Alex Toth. Page 3 is a little faded but still reads just fine. Note the resemblance of the Monster in this strip to Dick Briefer's design for the creature in his Frankenstein comics (pictured below).

Cartoonist Dick Briefer had two different creature 
designs for two different iterations of his Frankenstein comics,
one humorous and cartoony, one menacing for straight horror
stories. The above is a panel from a horror-oriented 1954 issue.

 I'm not a gearhead by any measure; both of my grandfathers were career body men for various dealerships, my appreciation, however, is more or less confined to the aesthetic appeal of vintage car body design and the George Barris TV car creations, hence why I have the source material for this here post.

Enjoy.

Frankenstein's Monster Meets Manga

Cultures cross-pollinate all of the time, and while some channels of transmission are more (or less) reputable  and/or harmful than others, it can only benefit all people everywhere to be exposed to things outside of their tiny spheres of influence. Though context is important. Despite any anti-American sentiment other cultures may hold, or xenophobic tendencies seem to be rearing their disgusting head here in the U.S., the exchange and assimilation of various cultures' pop ephemera can show how our interests are more aligned across cultural and geographic boundaries, than alien. Such things have been stigmatized in recent years with the constantly argued and blurred demarcation of cultural appropriation and exoticizing over cultural fascination and celebration, but this isn't a political blog and 100 different people may have 100 different definitions of any of those aforementioned concepts.

An example I present to thee...the appearance of the Americanized Frankenstein's Monster in Japanese manga. Seems pretty trivial, I know. You may point out that the Frankenstein's Monster isn't American at all, but English, since it stems from the 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. True. I guess you could argue that The Monster is potentially German, since the titular Frankenstein is in fact Dr. Victor Frankenstein, the medical student who builds and animates the creature, does so at the University of Ingolstadt. Its birthplace, so to speak. On the other hand, I suppose, if Victor Frankenstein made life, and that life is The Monster, and therefore is considered his progeny, I guess it could be argued that The Monster is Swiss, since Victor Frankenstein's family is Genevan. But Victor himself was born in Naples, which would undoubtedly make him an Italian citizen, which might make The Monster Italian? The phrase "it could be argued" gets bandied about a lot here, because that's all it is, meandering rhetoric. 

No, we're talking specifically about the repurposing of the Frankenstein image created by Jack Pierce for James Whale's 1931 Universal film Frankenstein. It is by and large the default visual shorthand for the Frankenstein Monster and has been since the picture's release. Below are some examples from my personal manga collection.

First off we have some excerpts from Tetsujin 28-go, initially created in 1956. The volume these images are presented from are from a tankobon reprint released in 1970. Herein we see Tetsujin 28-go square off against a very familiar-looking green-pigmented monster.

The cover to the first volume of Sunday Comics' Tetsujin 28 Go   
(aka Iron Man 28, aka Gigantor in the U.S.) by Mitsutera Yokoyama.

                              

Below are some samples of the Frankenstein story from Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy, originally serialized in Shonen magazine between November 1952 and April 1953 per the Tezuka In English website. This english version is from the Dark Horse Comics Astro Boy Omnibus 7 collection released in 2017.

 I'm sure there are other examples, the Junji Ito adaptation for one. If anyone has any other examples, please feel free to let me know. I'd be interested in seeing them.

The Ultimate Poker Face

Poster for the Sam Katzman produced
The Man Who Turned To Stone, 1957.

Monster movies have always needed new fields to farm regarding the menace of their product. Once you've exhausted all of the most prominent literary ghouls and goblins, stretched their source material threadbare with almost-unrelated sequels and spin-offs; once invaders from beyond the stars or beneath the waves lose their impact; once the vengeful spirits of slain lovers no longer successfully haunt the halls of the local theaters, nor the sound of voodoo drums is able to conjure the beat of feet to the cinema, it's time to look for other sources of box office bank. 

There is plenty of folklore to glean (or culturally appropriate, depending on whom you talk to) in regards to the animation of inanimate objects via possession by wayward souls or demons, or other supernatural means. Cultures the world over have various poppets, dolls and fetish figures, like the Kongolese nkisi figures, that are allegedly vessels–or prisons, depending on the context–for spirits. We've seen these ideas repurposed into everything from the killer Zuni fetish doll from the 1975 television movie Trilogy Of Terror, to the seemingly endless list of possessed doll/mannequin/ventriloquist dummy films from 1945's Dead Of Night, to the bread and butter of Charles Band's Full Moon Features company with their Puppet Master and Demonic Toys franchises. There is also the Golem. Fairly prominent in the pop cultural zeitgeist, Golem is a word that roughly translates from Hebrew to mean "shapeless mass", and in Jewish folklore, has a plethora of permutations based on the context of the usage; but the one we're interested in here is the one regarding a clay figure brought to life via supernatural means to serve its master. Sort of an earthen zombie if you will. 

Paul Wegener as Der Golem.

The concept of the Golem itself was adapted early to the silver screen by director/actor Paul Wegener in 1915 with Der Golem, the first of a trilogy of silent films, followed by Der Golem und die Tänzerin (The Golem and the Dancing Girl) (1917) and, Die Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How He Came Into The World) (1920), of which the final film is the only known to exist in a complete and intact version (see it here). The Golem mythos was revisited in 1937's Le Golem directed by Julien Duvivier, and in a French telefilm in 1967; and in between when the American b-movie boom of the mid-1950s came a-calling, it was looked to again for inspiration.

In 1958, Edward L. Cahn (Sam Katzman perennial who directed Creature With The Atom Brain and Zombies of Mora Tau, as well as classics like Invasion Of The Saucer Men and The Four Skulls Of Jonathan Drake) directed Richard Anderson in Curse Of The Faceless Man, (trailer here) about a calcified Pompeiian warrior who comes back to life to reclaim to current reincarnation of his ancient love. More or less a version of Universal's The Mummy (1932), but with the rock-coated corpse of a dead slave in place of a revived Egyptian. A year prior, we had the Sam Katzman-produced The Man Who Turned To Stone (trailer here) about a group of devious doctors who've found a way to prolong their own existence for centuries by draining the vitality out of other humans, which they currently (in regards to the plot) are doing to girls at a reform school. Without rejuvenation, the docs start to petrify and take on a decidedly Zacherley-esque appearance. That same year, moviegoers were also threatened by The Monolith Monsters, (trailer here) a Universal b-picture starring Grant Williams and Lola Albright, in which a small southern California desert town is menaced by water-thirsty space crystals that petrify (literally) anyone who touches them in contact with water.  In 1967 a very Norman Bates-ish Roddy McDowall helped reawaken the Golem mythos with It!, also known as Anger Of The Golem or Curse Of The Golem, in which he awakens The Golem of Prague to do his bidding (trailer here).

The peplum films of the early-to-mid 60s feature plenty of rock men for our oiled up muscle men to battle, like in 1964's Hercules Against The Moon Men and the Mario Bava directed 1961 feature Hercules In The Haunted World.

I suppose the allure of these stone monsters is that they seem invincible, and we the audience are supposed to sit, anxiously watching, wondering how our protagonists are going to defeat something that is impervious to temperature, bullets, fire, wooden stakes, etcetera. When the villain is unfeeling, in every sense of the word, it's akin to trying to defeat Superman; alas, each of the aforementioned creeps have their own Kryptonite which the heroes successfully find, or accidentally stumble into, before the running time is up. 

Nkisi Nkondi (Power Figure), from the collection
of the Brooklyn Museum

The list of similar films is far too long to try and collate a comprehensive list of, and ultimately a pointless task. If you're looking for a good monster made of rock movie, the ones listed above should be a good start. If you're more into possessed killer trees, might I recommend From Hell It Came or the infamous Evil Dead.

If anyone has any favorites of the so-called sub genre, I'd be glad to hear about them.

Even Supes had to deal with malevolent minerals. From The Adventures of
Superman #470, Sept. 1990.

La momia enmascarada

Some more sketchbook filler. Inspired by precode comics, The Wild Wild West and other zany pulp western adventure television and movies, and, well, the bizarre blender that is my brain.

Shocktober Silver Screams Day 3: The Mummy

Day Three needs no explanation. I could go into the pre-code madness that is the great The Mummy, starring Boris Karloff. I could point out how the opening title sequence alone is better than the sum total of most movies in the cineplex this very moment. I could gabba-gabba on and on about how it was directed by Karl Freund, who was the director of photography on Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Tod Browning's Dracula and John Huston's Key Largo.

Lobby card for Karl Freund's 1932 film The Mummy. Boris Karloff is wonderfully
billed here as "Karloff The Uncanny"! 

I could do all of this, or I could just show you my meager marker scribblin's in the semi-form of Boris Karloff as Adreth Bay / Imhotep, the titular Mummy. 

Shocktober Silver Screams Day 2: The Brain From Planet Arous

I went with a decidedly more comic book art approach for Day Two's material, since 1957's The Brain From Planet Arous is kind of the penultimate schlock fest that people either knowingly or unwittingly spoof and reference when they're poking fun and cracking wise about "bad" movies from the 1950s. 

The film is a thick slab of atomic age cheese, but a helluva fun watch. John Agar, prince of the B's, plays a nuclear scientist who becomes possessed by a cosmic brain from the planet Arous. Gor, the brain in question, has a taste for world domination, and, after being introduced to Earth women vis a vis Agar's fiancee Sally (Joyce Meadows), becomes a big ol' floating mass of prurient interests. Of course another, kindlier brain is trying to stop Gor; his name is Vol, and he hides himself in Agar's fiancee's dog.

A lobby card featuring John Agar with his "possessed" foil-lined contacts,
the very same used by Gary Lockwood on the Star Trek episode "Where No
Man Has Gone Before."

The film was directed by Nathan H. Juran, a Jewish Romanian filmmaker whose family emigrated to the USA and settled in Minneapolis, where Juran studied architecture. He did eventually set up his own architecture office in Massachusetts, but the Great Depression forced him to try his hand at freelance illustration due to the construction freeze. He found work as an art director in Los Angeles and was nominated for Academy Awards for his work on John Ford's How Green Was My Valley (1942) and the 1946 film The Razor's Edge. He did win the award for How Green Was My Valley, but eventually moved out of the art department and into the director's chair for some Audie Murphy westerns and, eventually, landing a deal at Universal, directed some of the classics of 1950s b-cinema; most notably The Deadly Mantis, Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and 20 Million Miles To Earth (both with Ray Harryhausen!). 

Apparently Juran wasn't too thrilled with his horny world-enslaving brain picture, because he changed his name in the credits to Nathan Hertz. The film received more jeers than cheers, but found a new life in the fallout as a cult classic. You can see a neat press package from Howco International films at the great Zombo's Closet website.