I’ve never before felt the impulse to round up an angry mob of my neighbors, arm them with torches and gardening implements and lead them against an ungodly abomination of nature, chasing it somewhere—perhaps up a convenient windmill—and then setting it on fire.

No, I’ve never felt like that before.

And then I read Frankenstein: Prodigal Son Vol. 1 (Del Rey), the hardcover collection of the Dabel Brothers produced adaptation of Dean Koontz and Kevin J. Anderson’s novel of the same name.

I haven’t read Koontz and Anderson’s novel, so I can’t say how good or bad an adaptation of the source material this may be, but it’s not a very good comic—or even a competent one.

It opens with an introduction from Koontz himself, who also scripts an eleven-page bonus story at the end (which, honestly, is kind of refreshing; that story’s not very good either, but it’s nice to see Koontz personally involved).

In the introduction, Koontz talks a little about his personal experience with Frankenstein, and how the story of the man and the monster haunted him and inspired him to write this particular series of novels. He boils the Frankenstein legend down to one of hubris, of utopians that think they know better than everyone else pushing things too far and falling disastrously far as a result.

There’s no hint of irony in Koontz transitioning from the dangers of hubris to the line, “This is why it seemed to me appropriate to update the Frankenstein legend to our time.”

He may have done so more successfully in prose, but in the graphic novel adaptation, there’s no evidence of this—it’s merely one more police thriller flavored with the fantastic, nothing really distinguishing it from the similar Dresden Files or Anita Blake graphic novels.

It looks just as bad as either of those, thanks to pencil artist Brett Booth (who drew Anita Blake for a while), and a trio of credited colorists (no inking was apparently involved).

Booth has a poor to non-existent grasp of human anatomy, and the inconsistency in his character designs show its not just a matter of style—he draws the same people differently all the time. Arms dangle like those of apes. Torsos, legs and necks shrink and elongate from panel to panel, page to page. Eyes float around faces just as breasts float up and down torsos. Everyone has huge quadriceps and no one has feet.

It would be rough going to read 140 pages of such poor drawing under any circumstances, but the high production values of the book serve to draw attention to them, like a really nice coat of paint on a house whose foundation falls apart as you walk through it.

Given the subject matter, an artist who struggles to depict the human body does a greater disservice to the story than usual. The horror here is a physical, body horror. Regular humans cross paths with artificial, “improved” humans. Surgery and grisly serial killings play important parts. But nobody looks remotely human—every single character might as well be a monster stitched together form miscellaneous body parts.

Comics veteran Chuck Dixon has adapted the story for the comic, and, as I mentioned, his work is hard to judge here without being more familiar with the source material. A lot of it seems rather uninspired, but, on a technical level at least, the dialogue and narration fundamentally works, something that can’t be said of the art (in fact, the words often clear up what was meant to be depicted in the pictures. For example, a few pages after Booth has drawn a panel of large rectangles jutting out of a wall, a character mentions that those were supposed to be razorblades).

Very tall, very muscular, long-haired Deucalion wanders shirtlessly around a snowy monastery, thinking of how he misses the sound of the birds and Cheez-Its. A white guy gives him a sack full of newspaper clippings from New Orleans, and Deucalion realizes he must go there. His monk friend is sorry to hear that, and hastily draws a tattoo on his face using a quill pen, a procedure that takes about thirty seconds.

Meanwhile, in New Orleans, big-breasted, big-thighed Detective Carson and her partner Detective Maddison, whose eyes change color from page to page, are investigating a series of brutal killings, in which young women each have a single part removed from their bodies, almost as if someone were shopping for a complete body made of other people’s bodies.

A blonde man with no wrists and a wardrobe of very tight shirts is stalking an amorphous woman with very beautiful eyes. Someone named Randal Six is doing crossword puzzles. Evil surgeon Victor Helios is being a real dick to his beautiful (the words tell us) wife. Another pair of cops hassle the first pair. And there may be more than one serial killer collecting human body parts.

Basically, Victor Frankenstein has achieved immortality and moved to New Orleans under an assumed name to start breeding a new race of people, some of who have already infiltrated the city. One of them has a screw loose and has started killing women to make his own bride. And Frankenstein’s monster, now going by Deucalion, has come to town to try to put a stop to all this nonsense.

As urban fantasy/police thriller pot-boilers go, I suppose the story has some merit, but it’s definitely not worth fighting through Booth’s art to read, particularly when it’s already available in a prose format, where you can provide the images for yourself. It’s not like you could any worse than this.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 1st, 2009 at 7:47 pm and is filed under Caleb's reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.