Another week, another Seven Soldiers miniseries.  Frankenstein is the last of the seven to start, and keeps up the pattern of having a totally different tone from everything that's come before.

By this stage it's not too hard to see the plot threads jumping from book to book, although Grant Morrison hasn't actually turned the event into an outright crossover.  Central plot points from one series are background details in another, but in a way that sheds more light on the principal story.  If you're not reading that story, though, they generally work just as well as background details.  The notable exception is that each series seems to end with a lead-in to the final Seven Soldiers Special - scheduled for next April - which does slightly undermine the claim that each would stand as a miniseries in its own right.

Anyhow, after reviving six DC characters of varying degrees of obscurity, Morrison's final choice of character is Frankenstein.  The lumbering thug has the advantage of being out of copyright, and of bringing in another genre that Seven Soldiers hasn't tried yet.  (The cynic in me wouldn't be altogether shocked in Frankenstein was the Soldier who dies in the final issue, what with him being the only character of no potential commercial value to DC.)

One of the more interesting things about this whole project is that while the plots overlap, the tone of the seven books is wildly different.  Some, particularly Guardian and Bulleteer, read like very convincing pitches for series in their own right.  It's difficult to imagine how all these characters are going to co-exist in the final issue, although this being Morrison, no doubt he's thought of that.

Morrison doesn't bother with the tedious business of recapping Frankenstein's origin, on the assumption that we all surely know the basic idea by now.  Instead, the series picks up in 1870 with Frankenstein already fighting the Sheeda, the villains of the whole event.  He looks like the traditional Frankenstein, he's definitely a bunch of animated corpses, but he's played much more as a traditional hero than you might expect.  He seems to have been at this a while - it's basically Frankenstein transplanted into a role we're not used to seeing him in.

As you'd expect, the big lug soon ends up buried and we fast forward (in a page rendered unfortunately confusing by a misplaced caption) to the present day.  From there, it's an odd spin on high school drama with the oddball outcast (under Sheeda influence) developing the power to see people's thoughts in the form of actual thought balloons, learning that they're as insecure as him, and luring them into very ill-advised behaviour.  I've seen this stuff described as a glorified episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and subject to the metatextual stuff about thought balloons (which mirrors similar meta-elements in Zatanna #4), it's hard to disagree with that.

This is odd material to use Frankenstein in, but then that's probably the point.  While the rest of the characters in Seven Soldiers are obscure, Frankenstein is a cultural icon, and you can do interesting things by dropping him into stories where he doesn't immediately seem to fit.  If it wasn't for all the background we already know about Frankenstein, he'd be a one-dimensional character in this story - but because everyone already knows him, instead it reads as an extra dimension being added.

A curious issue, and I'm not entirely sure what to make of it.  The preview for next issue has Frankenstein going to Mars, of all places, which seems to have nothing to do with anything in this issue.  Perhaps Morrison is taking Frankenstein on a tour of wildly inappropriate genres, but if so, it's still perversely entertaining to read about.

Rating: B+

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