Had this book come out right after The Matrix, I would have been unbelievably excited. Hell, if it had come out right after the mildly disappointing Matrix Reloaded, I still would have been pretty jazzed. Now, however, it is a year after the disappointment of The Matrix Revolutions, and The Wachowski Brothers name is no longer the promise of exciting and mind-blowing geek excitement that it was for a couple of years there. Could they bring the excitement, energy and strong storytelling of the first Matrix film to life with their storyboard artist (and comic book artist) Skroce, or would we be getting something a little more muddled, more noise than signal, like the second and third Matrix films? From my point of view, it's a little of column A, little of column B. Doc Frankenstein has a neat high concept and is undeniably gorgeous and action-packed, but the narration and dialogue is a little clunky and at times overwritten.
Doc Frankenstein opens on a high note, with the hero of the piece hanging from a bit of destroyed skyscraper, having just taken down a big Godzilla-sized monster in what we can imagine was a battle royale. Right there, the Wachowskis and Skroce grabbed me, as the captions indicate that the President and his team are talking about this as if it's just one of many monsters that are out there to be destroyed, and immediately the imagination is firing. Frankenstein's monster has loaded up weapons and is taking down other monsters that are threatening society in modern times. Cool stuff.
Unfortunately, the Wachowskis then dive back into the origin story. To some extent, I credit them for including important backstory, but there are two notable problems with it here. One is that the backstory of Frankenstein's monster is pretty well known, and while it's interesting to see the event that dug him out of his cave (literal and philosophical) to return to humanity, it hardly needs this amount of explanation. The other is that the style they've chosen, the widescreen action storytelling style, doesn't require this level of origin for its heroes, unlike conventional superheroics. It also doesn't help that for all of the look at Frankenstein's life from the early 1900s to modern times, we then jump into a modern or slightly futuristic time with no explanation of that era, and certainly no explanation of the villains who come at him in the end or the support structure that he's built around himself. The origin misses all the information germane to the story and focuses instead on neat but generally irrelevant detail.
I also take issue with some of the actual style of the dialogue and narration. It seems like the Wachowskis are going for a style like that of Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman or Grant Morrison, one in which they paint word pictures to accompany the visuals in the book. It's a laudable goal, but it's far too easy to go wrong in aiming for this style, far too easy to hit wide of the mark and instead hit pretentious or even goofy. "I am a cesarean inflicted upon the womb of your reality" and lines like it are, unfortunately, the kind of thing to guard against. It's a close miss, but for me, this line and others like it seem out of place in a book whose high concept is more of a fun action story, and hits more in that pretentious and overwritten category for me.
While I have some issues with the writing, however, I have none with the artwork. Steve Skroce has always been good, but ever since he took some time off to do storyboards, he has returned to comics as a legitimate artistic force of nature. His work here blends the exquisite detail of Geoff Darrow with the photorealism and widescreen staging of Bryan Hitch. The colors are not quite as nuanced as those of a Laura Depuy or Paul Mounts, but they're solid, and certainly the art still just pops off the page as it should. The Wachowskis and Skroce have come up with some stirring visuals here, from the crucified Frankenstein being born to the double-page splashes of him hunting down criminals in the old west to the awe-inspiring flight of jets raiding Frankenstein's installation at the end. This book is a visual delight.
Doc Frankenstein's literary roots are in Mary Shelley's novel, but it's comic-book roots lie in the spectacle-driven event books of Morrison's JLA or Bryan Hitch's work on The Authority. Unfortunately, while the visuals can compete, the writing doesn't have the same clever turn of phrase, sense of humor or wild imagination that characterized those books. If you're looking for pop visual thrills, you could do worse than Doc Frankenstein, but the attempts to give the book more weight fall a bit flat. 7/10
