“Frankenstein: New World” #4 brings this arc to an end, but it’s clearly just the first chapter of something much bigger. Read on for our spoiler-filled review.
Written by Mike Mignola, Thomas Sniegoski, and Christopher Golden
Illustrated by Peter Bergting
Colored by Michelle Madsen
Lettered by Clem RobinsLilja and Frankenstein’s exploration of the surface world takes a dangerous turn—between monstrous people and genuine monsters, not everyone will survive.
Frankenstein: New World, from Mike Mignola, Tom Sniegoski, Christopher Golden, and artist Peter Bergting, explores a new chapter in the world of Hellboy!
Mark Tweedale: I suppose this isn’t really news anymore since it was kind of already revealed in my interview with Christopher Golden and Thomas Sniegoski two weeks ago, but “Frankenstein: New World” #4 is not the last issue of this story. I don’t think either James or myself were particularly surprised with this development. As we said in our last interview, it would be a shame to create this vast world for storytelling and then only spend four issues in it.
James Dowling: We spent a lot of our last review deliberating on what would be a satisfying ending to this miniseries, and figuring out now that this is only the ending of the opening chapter, while exciting, doesn’t particularly help this issue as a conclusion. There’s a lot of plot to burn through in these twenty pages, and if you’re wondering how this story ends, whether it’s tragic, heroic or symbolic, the best adjective would probably be “quick.”
I absolutely agree, I can’t wait to spend longer in this New World. I love how this series has contextualized all the stories that came before as a new mythology, like the Hyperborea we read about all through the earlier Hellboy Universe stories. But “Frankenstein Underground” was such a singular story when it came out; it’s frustrating to see that quality lost in service of worldbuilding.
Mark: I think as an opening chapter, the ending is appropriate, especially in the way it focuses on showing two girls, Lilja and Cadoret, brought back from death—one through Vril, the other likely through Shakti. It focuses on this parallel as the new status quo for the series, Lilja traveling with Frankenstein and Cadoret traveling with Murk. Perhaps it would’ve benefited from being upfront about being a longer story from the beginning? Or did you just want this particular arc to have more finality to it? I do have to agree it was very quick at certain points. Like the moment right after Lilja is killed.
That needed more breathing space, especially since the enemy is suddenly gone and we get a frog person saying they’ve escaped. It’s just a lot for three panels, and I would rather have seen this play out while Frankenstein clutched Lilja rather than being told about it. Plus, it just makes that frog person seem really intrusive—he needs to back off and give them some space.
James: I think the problem for me in the structure is it both falls short of the reader’s inferred pacing, while truncating the book’s own actual pace. I agree that the ending does set a really good status quo, a McCarthy-esque hunter/hunted travel story that highlights geography and partnerships, which is what this book should absolutely be. But I think that’s what we expected from issue #1, and by breaking this into multiple arcs, they had to insulate the story in the middle with the village sequence, which then adds too much plot to be resolved for four issues. So all at once the story becomes too slow and too rushed.
I’m not saying every “Franktenstein” story has to be a monolithic six issues, but I don’t know if every “New World” story has to have him in it to succeed. In fact, there were moments where I sort of chafed against the story this issue was putting across because of the characters established here. Together, Frankenstein and Lilja are really charming, they carry this book. But the majority of the issue is spent with them split apart and you begin to see how wooden Frankenstein becomes without strong narration, and how overly zany Lilja looks without a foil.
Continued belowI don’t think this issue fails the book at all, it’s just that it’s a final chapter that reminds me of all the shortcomings baked into the premise.
Mark: I guess Lilja’s zany-ness worked for me, but only because it was clear how much danger she was in and how unaware of it she was. We see stories with kids banding together and saving the adults often, and it can often strain credibility and be difficult to swallow. . . But here I felt the danger. Maybe it was in part because of the cover which showed Frankenstein holding Lilja in his arms—knowing something was going to go wrong, all her confidence seemed horribly misplaced.
Lilja just has to get the sword back to Frankenstein, but even then everything goes to shit. She gets killed and all her friends get killed. The whole sequence when the frog children getting attacked by dragon-wolves and then dragged away feels so slow and excruciating. Maybe it loses some of its impact because they’re frog people, so there’s a bit of distance, but for me that was a pretty dark turn for the book to take. And that must’ve been an important thing for the storytellers, because they spent a lot of page real estate there. It was a moment where I felt the pacing was really spot on, because it makes you feel their helplessness.
But yeah, Frankenstein has always been a bit dry. He works best when he has someone else to play off of.
James: The bit with the dragon-wolves definitely hit with some impact for me, which I would put down to Bergting and Madsen. As negative as I am about this chapter, they really shine through. It’s the art here that consistently reverberates through with the story’s emotion and kineticism, even when that’s forced to take place in singular panels where sequences would work better.
Bergting really has an eye for imagery that has shone through in this series, but I think this last issue really cements his creature design, calling to mind the best of Guy Davis.
As much as the final fight feels like “they fight until someone runs away,” every moment in it is still heavy, intense, and dangerous. This is a book where you can sort of understand the mythical power of the Sword of Hyperborea just by how it’s rendered on the page.
Mark: I think there was a little more to the fight than that. With the Bih’tak fight, we don’t see Frankenstein fighting as we’d seen “Frankenstein: Underground,” where it’s just fists and rage. There’s still the physical fight, but we can see from the blue flame over his head that Frankenstein’s tapping into Vril—the real fight is between him and the poison in Bih’tak.
The problem is that’s a psychological fight, but the focus here is still very much on the physical fight. In part that’s because this story isn’t told from Frankenstein’s point of view. We’ve been external witnesses to him in this story, so it would be odd to go internal for this one scene. But I feel like there’s a more going on with Frankenstein I’d like to see. I mean, his spirit is bound together with one of King Thoth’s daughters, and honestly, part of me just really wants to see what she thinks of this New World and what’s happening to it.
I would have liked to have her in grief with Frankenstein as he held Lilja’s dead body in his arms. Or consoling him. Or spurring him to action. I feel like this is an untapped relationship that makes him a more complex being.
Written by Mike Mignola; Illustrated by Ben Stenbeck; Colors by Dave Stewart; Letters by Clem Robins
James: Yeah, I’d love to get a bit more of that internality with Franktenstein as an avatar for the Vril, something we got with Liz Sherman that undoubtedly helped layer her as a character.
Mark: Oh, like the visions she has in “B.P.R.D.: Hell on Earth—Monsters”? Yeah, I loved that stuff.
James: I can see how some of that shines through in the final fight, but I just don’t think invoking that here makes it any thematically stronger of a story. The conflict between Vril and Shakti is another kind of monomyth that has been fed really expertly into the wider framework of the Hellboy Universe’s flirtation with mythology, but it needs to be used to invoke a deeper thematic or emotional revelation in the story, and I don’t think that happens here.
Continued belowYou could maybe say there’s a comment here on corruption versus transformation in this final conflict, but that just comes with any dynamic story arc. To me it really feels like a monster-sized fist fight from bottom to top, without the architecture to make that fun. It could be a theme that works great for Frankenstein, is this literal and figurative “sum of his parts” something greater than the components, or a perversion of the human form, but on one hand we’ve almost moved past that with “Underground,” and even if they wanted to keep exploring it, Murk still makes a better antagonist to explore it with than Bih’tak.
Cadoret could even lead into a great exploration of that theme for Lilja, but it feels a bit frustrating to keep banking on future issues to solve the growing pains of past issues.
Mark: I didn’t really read anything thematic into the fight with Bih’tak. For me, what I missed in the issue was what came after. So many of the frog people they befriended have died, and we don’t really see the aftermath of that affect them. Once Lilja is saved, they just continue on. It just feels kind of inhuman not to mourn with the surviving people.
And I don’t know how I feel about that. In part, that’s because the next issue could totally change it. Knowing how Mignola writes death, bringing a character back is not a magic “Yay, it’s all undone!” kind of thing—I suspect going into the next arc, Lilja will be dealing with that and the trauma of the fight and the loss of her newfound friends.
I suspect it’s partially a format issue. We have certain expectations for how complete a miniseries ending should feel versus the end of a chapter in an ongoing series. If this series had been announced as an ongoing from the get go and then paused at this issue, do you think you might’ve felt differently?
James: Yeah, absolutely. It wouldn’t set the goalposts as strictly, but I still think there would be underlying issues with how this series is paced in relation to the amount it’s trying to fit in. We might have seen a more multifaceted Frankenstein, or a better send-off for Lilja’s newfound friends, but there’s definitely deadweight that dragged this book, and I’m hoping we’ve gotten past the worst friction-burn of it with this issue. There’s some great art on display here, but it’s a 4.5 for me. Let’s hope the journey at the center of this book leads to better horizons.
Mark: I’m going with a 7. I will say, I’m excited for the future of this series. In particular, I like the way Christopher Golden has dealt with long-running plotlines in “Baltimore” and so I’m eager to see how he and Mike Mignola and Thomas Sniegoski handle Cadoret going forward. That said, this isn’t the first time we’ve had a plotline like this, with a former ally being turned into a subservient zombie. I still remember Agent Vaughn in “Abe Sapien: Dark and Terrible” which had nearly thirty issues of build-up only to have no real payoff at all. He just died again and his death had virtually no impact on Abe at all. It was such a cold choice. So if we’re going to do this zombie-friend plotline again, it needs to have some teeth this time and real emotional payoff.
Final Verdict: 5.75 – We were quite torn on this one. Some scenes were quite effective, but Frankenstein’s fight with Bih’tak felt almost like padding and other scenes felt truncated. It’s an abrupt end to an arc which has otherwise been characterized by meditative moments and carefully curated pacing.
