Mary's Monster: Love, Madness, and How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein, the visual book by Lita Judge, is an incredible work of art. It's a visual take on the story of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who wrote one of the most classic horror tales of all time, Frankenstein. This book kept catching my eye at the local library, where I work every day. Finally I picked it up and absorbed it. I didn't just read it, it has over 300 incredible paintings, every page a full bleed to the edges. I spent time checking out all the images that Lita Judge spent five years painting. Mary's Monster is a haunting take on the tragic, yet incredible, life of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.
"At 17 I am already the mother of bones and daughter to a ghost."
-Mary Shelley, quoted in Mary's Monster
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley saw far more than her share of tragedy in her life. She was also a very intelligent young woman, and incredibly well read for a woman in the early 1800's. Have any of you read Dante's Inferno? I haven't. But Mary Shelley read it, and other classics, as a teenager. She wrote the novel, Frankenstein- or The Modern Prometheus, when she was only 18 and 19-years-old.
Not only did she, as a young woman, write a novel that invented the concept of science fiction, it was a deep and brutal look at humanity, a brilliant social commentary that still stands up today. She also created a fictional creature, Dr. Frankenstein's monster, that is still iconic today, 207 years later. Frankenstein, her first novel, has been in print for the entire time since, over 200 years.
After going through Mary's Monster twice, I realized that I needed to read the original Frankenstein. It was not the book I thought it was, not even close. We all have our pictures of the monster, big blocky head, bolts coming out of his neck, but those are from the endless series of movie, TV show, and Halloween versions of Frankenstein's monster. The monster in Shelley's novel is much different, and highly intelligent. Frankenstein, over 200 years later, is a brilliant novel, and it's a story of revenge and tragedy, but in a much different way than I thought. I realized that, probably like many people, I didn't really know the story of Dr. Frankenstein, and his monster, at all.
I've never been a big comic book or graphic novel reader. Super heroes didn't do it for me as a kid. No super hero was around when I could have used one as a kid, so I never got really into comics. I was a nerd, but not a comic book nerd.
Around age 30, though, I worked for a small furniture moving company in Huntington Beach, California. Our moving company office was at a very unique shopping center called Sea Cliff, and there was a small comic book shop in the shopping center, a couple doors away. On days when we finished up working early, I started going to the comic shop, and just browsing all the comics out then. That was in 1996 and 1997. I saw a bunch of comic series that were more interesting to me, stories that were not just super heroes in spandex with extraordinary powers. There were much more complex and interesting stories being told in comics and graphic novels. During that era, I read two Alan Moore classics, Watchmen and V for Vendetta, I read Neil Gaiman's The Sandman later on, some Spawn issues, and bought a few issues of Sin City, which had really cool black and white art. There was one comic that I really loved, Seekers into the Mystery, written by J.M. DeMatteis. I bought and read every single issue of that series. That was is the best comic series I've read, personally. I didn't get into any other graphic novels after that, but I'd check them out from time to time, to see if there were any other stories that interested me.
Mary's Monster is not really a traditional graphic novel, it's a story told through a collection of paintings and a small amount of verse. I'm not going to go into any more detail, but if this post interested you at all, find a copy of Mary's Monster, and check it out. It's a great work of art telling an amazing true story. You may get drawn into the tragic story of Mary Shelley, and maybe you'll wind up reading the actual novel, Frankenstein, like I did.
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