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creator: warren ellis, publisher: avatar press

Frankenstein's Womb was the latest entry in Warren Ellis's Apparat line of comics, the line that gave us Crecy. It's in the same format as that earlier work: a 44-page self-contained one-shot. Also like Crecy, the story is really off the normal Ellis beaten track. It forgoes all of his usual tics and favorite tropes, so that the end result is quite different from his usual fare.

From the product description on Amazon: 1816 was called "The Year Without A Summer." In the weird darkness of that July's volcanic winter, Mary Wolfestonecraft Godwin began writing Frankenstein on the shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. But that is not where Frankenstein began. It began a few months earlier when, en route through Germany to Switzerland, Mary, her future husband Percy Shelley, and her stepsister Clair Clairmont approached a strange castle. Castle Frankenstein, some one hundred years earlier, had been home to Johann Conrad Dippel, whose experiments included the independent invention of nitroglycerin, a distillation of the elixir of life - and the transfer of a live soul into an awful accretion of human body parts! Mary never spoke of having entered the real Castle Frankenstein, stark on its hilltop south of Darmstadt. But she did. And she was never the same again - because something was haunting that tower, and Mary met it there. Fear, death, and alchemy - the modern age is created here, in lost moments in a ruined castle on a day never recorded.



The Frankenstein monster takes Mary Shelley, future author of Frankenstein, on a guided tour through visions of the past.