Frankenstein and Dracula

What? These weren’t the guys you were expecting? 🙂

Appar­ent­ly back in the mid/late-’60s, some­one at Dell Comics thought it would be a good idea to take some of the clas­sic mon­sters and re-imag­ine them as super­heroes. There had been a sort of resur­gence of inter­est in the old Uni­ver­sal Mon­sters, due to their expo­sure to a new gen­er­a­tion on TV. You cou­ple that with a burst of inter­est around that time in super­heroes from a pop/camp per­spec­tive (thanks to the Bat­man TV show), and you can see the reasoning.

I’ve nev­er actu­al­ly come across one of these books to be able check them out for myself. My aware­ness of them is very lim­it­ed, gleaned only from their occa­sion­al men­tions in places like Roy Thomas’ Alter Ego mag­a­zine, or on var­i­ous blogs or comics sites.

Then why am I draw­ing these char­ac­ters? I guess there’s a fun sense of wonk­i­ness to the whole thing that kind of appeals to me. Sort of like watch­ing Plan 9 from Out­er Space. I thought it would be a kick to just take a crack at these guys and see what it might wind up look­ing like.

Hap­py Halloween!

4 thoughts on “Frankenstein and Dracula

  1. Lyle Dodd

    Awe­some draw­ings! So the Dell Franken­stein’s arms were skin tone and not green? That is a lit­tle dis­tract­ing to me.

    The Doc Strange cov­er is also real­ly nice!

    Reply
    1. Mark Post author

      Thanks! Glad you’re lik­ing the stuff.

      Yeah, Dell real­ly did give Franken­stein a green head while col­or­ing his arms the stan­dard comics short­hand col­or for Cau­casian skin tone. Why? I don’t know. I just played along with what they did, because it’s kind of part of the fun of doing some­thing like this.

      Reply
  2. John G. Pierce

    I remem­ber those books. Not so much the sto­ries them­selves, but the cov­ers and the gen­er­al idea. A goofy con­cept which deserved­ly did not last long, but on the oth­er hand, one might posit that the Sil­ver Age was momen­tar­i­ly enriched by their pres­ence, since they were some­thing dif­fer­ent, while still fit­ting in with the gen­er­al goofi­ness of the period.

    Reply
    1. Mark Post author

      It seems like start­ing around this time peri­od (per­haps embold­ened by the suc­cess of Mar­vel’s attempt to do some­thing dif­fer­ent), a num­ber of pub­lish­ers began to exper­i­ment. They would try things, throw stuff against the wall, see if any­thing would stick. I believe it’s how you wound up with DC (for one exam­ple) doing books like The Doom Patrol, Met­al Men, Bat Lash, Angel and the Ape, The Creep­er, etc., etc. Maybe not every­thing the pub­lish­ers tried would be suc­cess­ful, but there’s cer­tain­ly some Sil­ver Age gold to be found in the midst of those offer­ings if you look.

      Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *