These mags were scarce and hard to find on the newsstands in my area back then for some reason. I never passed up an opportunity to get them whenever they turned up.
This particular issue comes with an olfactory association that most don't have. I was 15 when I found it in one of my weekend walks down to Chi-chester's drugstore on Vineville Ave. in Macon Ga. As I headed back to (you guessed it) my Grandma's house, where I was visiting for the weekend as I liked to do, I took the railroad tracks instead of the main road. The tracks ran beside Vineville about a block over, and as such went right behind my Grandma's house, which was on the short dead-end street Carolina Avenue across from the GA Blind Academy. As my zippered boots crunched in the gravel, the odor of the treated railroad ties was strong in the summer heat. Reading as I walked, the scent became attached to my times walking from the store, but also when I read this particular magazine I can still almost smell it!
"Give my creation... li-i-i-i-i-ife!"
View the cover over at the entry on Sweet Skulls.
The art is exceptional, and the story unusual; Frankenstein's Monster and futuristic flying cars are not something you'd ever expect to see together. And the way the woman are fighting over him in the story, one supposes they heard about the oversize dimensions of all his body parts as discussed in "Young Frankenstein!" "He's going to be very popular," as Igor rightly surmised.
Starting off abruptly with the Monster's unexplained return to life, the story gets underway rapidly without going into all the details that can be taken for granted; although one does feel as if a page is missing. Unless a mistake was made in printing (it's been known to happen) all of the pages are here, I counted good while scanning. UPDATE: I have found the earlier story that explains how he got there! Read it here.
Not strong on bone-crushing action as we might expect, the idea is engaging nonetheless, one of the highlights being the flashback of his creation by the Modern Prometheus. I think you'll enjoy it.
I have another "Frankenstein's Monster in the future" from another issue, which I'll post as soon as I can find it in my bookcase!
Oh, and just as a freebie, in case you didn't get enough Frankenstein to satisfy your craving yet, here is an extra: a scan of "Master And Slave!!" from my dog-eared copy of Marvel's July 1971 issue of "Creatures on the Loose." It was a reprint from the original Atlas comics in 1961.
3 comments:
HI, Found your site while surfing the Net. Nice story (Frankenstein 2073. Just wanted to check to see if page 1 is missing (you started with page 2.
Thank you,
dave
Dave,
Thanks for stopping by! I wondered that about the story also, it seems to start abruptly. But the page numbers in the magazine are sequential, so if anything was left out it was done during the layout process, and not the printing.
Like the number of licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop, the world may never know!
Your site is one of my favorites! I swear we must have had VERY SIMILAR childhoods. My home was oppressive and I used to go to my grandmother's for escape and to read Vampirella, Savage Sword of Conan, Heavy Metal and more. Those memories, smells of the store, magazine rack, comics... They're all still with me. I love your posts! It's almost like reading about myself. Thank you!
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