The only time this youthful image departs is toward the end, when he has been through so much and is wasting away. For once, he looks like his canonical age: like the egotistical, damaged twenty-something he is supposed to be, which is excellent. With his messy burst of dark hair and leather clothes, and his sharp cheekbones and intense gaze, he twists the usual “mad genius” image so often given to Frankenstein. Victor, on the other hand, has probably never looked quite so emo/goth before. Either way, the creature will certainly steal the show but also gross you out at the same time.
Or perhaps he looks this way to fit the aesthetic of Grimly’s vision. Perhaps this is due to the fact that this is not a live action film in which the creature must be portrayed by an actually normal-looking person, but has the luxury of being purely imagination in ink form. He bears the main features Shelley focused on in the novel - the pale yellow eyes and long dark hair - but he is far more visceral and repelling than many other creatures portrayed in media thus far.
He is massive (as he should be!), bulging, and only vaguely humanoid.
GRIS GRIMLY FRANKENSTEIN SKIN
He really looks like a monster, but not like a version we have really seen before: gone are the green skin tones and neck bolts of Boris Karloff, as are the cheekbones and narrower frame of Bernie Wrightson and Danny Boyle’s interpretations. Two standouts in terms of character design are - quite rightly - Victor and the creature. The historical elements are stretched slightly (they drive steam-powered cars, for one), but what is within the text is still here, and the change is perfectly believable and acceptable. The people have rather punk-ish, darkly Gothic clothes and styles, while the world in which Grimly has placed them has an unexpectedly steampunk sort of feel. The people and settings all have a distinctly tilted, odd, Tim Burton-ish style (or perhaps, Tim Burton has a Gris Grimly-ish style…?), with rather skeletal proportions, wild hair, and sunken eyes. The artistic style and tone of this book is excellent - every image is rather unsettling and grotesque. (Personally, I sometimes missed the text, but that is simply me speaking as a Frankenstein fan.) Grimly is a gifted storyteller, and the plot is perfectly clear even with large portions of Shelley’s text left out. Naturally, he instead uses his drawings to tell much of the story, some of the pages telling paragraphs and paragraphs of narration with nothing but images. Grimly uses the original text of the novel (the 1818 version, which differs in several ways from the more widely-read 1831 version) to accompany his illustrations, though he does not use all the words. I’d been wanting to read this graphic novel version of the classic story by Mary Shelley for ages, and luckily I got it as a birthday present this year! And overall I was not disappointed Gris Grimly’s Frankenstein is a marvelous interpretation.
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