Mine for Horror Week: Wrightson's FRANKENSTEIN

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

My contribution to horror week. Nice juicy scans of five of the illustrations Berni Wrightson did for FRANKENSTEIN.
Along with "the Black Cat," this is the apex of his career, for me.

The style Wrightson chose to use was following the approach of Franklin Booth(and led me to studying him), which is
mistakenly called crosshatching, and there is plenty of that too, but what's surprising is that, when you look at it closely,
it's more made up of parallel lines than anything else.
Side personal note: When I was first reading comics with an eye to maybe being an artist myself, this, Dave Sim, and
Bissette/Totleben all hit me at the same time and warped my hand for life. This stuff is dear to my heart. Enjoy.
(And for those interested in seeing the rest, I think it's only fair to leave this link. )




And the greatest single piece of them all. I've nearly gone blind failing to imitate this kind of linework.
(c)Berni Wrightson.

Comments

Damn that's good.

[nefrekeptah.insanejournal.com]

On a related note, I don't know what's more surprising about Frankenstein, that it was written by a 19-year old woman more or less on a whim, that it has never left publication since, or that many people dismissed it when it was first published because it had the audacity to be written by a woman.

...no wait, that last one I can understand perfectly, considering the time period.

Re: Damn that's good.

[parsimonia.insanejournal.com]

Well, it does make a bit more sense with respect to why she wrote it when you consider that a number of people in her life had died or committed suicide, and IIRC she had a baby who died as well. Combine that with talking to people about ghost stories and reading about emerging science at the time, she apparently had an image of a mad scientist feverishly at work and she thought it would be scary and fascinating to make the story about a scientist discovering the essence of life.