Frankenstein Now and Forever.

FRANKENSTEIN NOW AND FOREVER

BY ALEX BALADI

LONDON: TYPOCRAT. 96 PAGES. $20.

Swiss artist Alex Baladi makes his English-language debut with Frankenstein Now and Forever, a graphic novel that, as the title implies, takes its cue from Mary Shelley's classic gothic tale. Set in contemporary Geneva, Baladi's story centers on two young women: unemployed Eva and her unnamed friend, who works a menial hospital job. Both girls are terribly lonely, desperate, and depressed, and when they run across a used and battered copy of Shelley's Frankenstein, each ruminates over the story in ways that amplify their inner thoughts.

Eva finds little interest in the book itself, but on falling asleep, she dreams she is with the creature. He begins complaining about the state he's in: "Do you have any idea how pathetic it is to be pieced together?... Patched up?... A ... A lousy assembly of ..." Eva answers, "... Well ... we're all a bit pieced together ... We're all an assembly ... uh ... of memories ... of dead and forgotten events and therefore dead?... Um ... and then uh ... pff ... we're all from different backgrounds and ... yeah in short, an assembly ... yes?" And the creature replies, "What's all this bullshit?... I've never heard such nonsense!! ... Still, it's nice of you to try to console me ..." It's disappointing that this cursory and awkward treatment of such large themes stands in for what should be the story's most profound and touching statements.

Eva's friend, for her part, stays awake all night, obsessing over illegible notes scrawled in the book's pages and becoming consumed by bad memories associated with the novel. After a number of sleepless hours, she begins to hallucinate and, behaving in an increasingly bizarre manner, tries literally to pull the hair from her head. Very little is resolved by the end of the story, as both women remain tortured.

Baladi's black-and-white illustrations are noteworthy, particularly when he uses series of spare, expressionistic, wordless panels. His writing, however, leaves something to be desired. Baladi has taken Shelley's complex story and whittled it down to a tale that is all surface. His text, as a result, is not particularly challenging; it's actually rather lightweight and sensationalistic. The publisher, however, notes that Baladi's book has "won acclaim and awards from around the world." One begins to understand why the slightness of some of the new graphic novels causes some to think the medium incapable of producing first-rate art. Outstanding illustrators and writers see books like Frankenstein Now and Forever being lauded to the skies and stay away from the comics medium in droves. Meanwhile, truly profound comics creators, like Frank Stack and Alison Bechdel, continue to be ignored. Until comics fans support the best of comics artists by raising them to positions of prominence, and cease praising the superficial, the general public will not accept it as a first-rate art form.