1. FRANKENSTEIN 1818-2018 Corinna Treitel, Department of History
Washington University in St. Louis

2. BRITISH AFTERLIVES

3. T. P. Cooke as the monster in the stage adaptation Presumption (1823)
T. P. Cooke as the monster in the stage adaptation Presumption (1823). His face was green, his lips black, and his body blue. Cooke’s portrayal was the dominant visual image of the monster in the nineteenth century.

4. “The Brummagen Frankenstein” (Punch, 1866)
“The Brummagem Frankenstein,” in The Right Hon. John Bright, Cartoons from ‘Punch’ (London: Punch Office, 1878), p. 25. Illustrator John Tenniel, a conservative, pictured the British working man as a Frankenstein monster waiting to receive voting rights from liberal members of British Parliament (the one pictured was John Bright).
A large British worker cast as a Frankenstein monster waits to receive voting rights from a member of parliament.
“The Brummagen Frankenstein” (Punch, 1866)

5. “The Irish Frankenstein” (Punch 1882)

6. AMERICAN AFTERLIVES

7. Here, the cartoonist Henry Louis Stephens attacks both slavery and secession by showing the uprising of black power during the Civil War before formal liberty had been granted to the nation’s slaves. A black monster flings Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. Henry Louis Stephens, “The New Frankenstein,” Vanity Fair (1862), p See:
Henry Louis Stephens, “The New Frankenstein: A Glimpse of the Horrible Fate in Store for Jeff Davis at the Hands of the Monster Rebellion” (Vanity Fair, 1862)

8. Dick Gregory, St. Louis civil rights activist and comedian
Image: Gregory (1965). For an excellent discussion of the “black Frankenstein,” including versions created by Dick Gregory, see Elizabeth Young, Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor (New York: NYU Press, 2008). Note that Elizabeth Young will be attending the “Frankenstein at 200” conference at Wash U on 13 October 2017.
Dick Gregory, St. Louis civil rights activist and comedian

9. Dick Gregory, The Shadow that Scares Me (1968)
I remember coming home from the movie theater one day in tears. I had just seen Frankenstein. My momma asked me what was wrong. Still crying, I told Momma, “I just saw Frankenstein and the monster didn’t scare me.” Momma couldn’t explain it and I couldn’t understand it. I was afraid I wasn’t normal. But now that I look back, I realize why I wasn’t frightened. Somehow I unconsciously realized that the Frankenstein monster was chasing what was chasing me. Here was a monster, created by a white man, turning upon his creator. The horror movie was merely a parable of life in the ghetto. The monstrous life of the ghetto has been created by the white man. Only now in the city of chaos are we seeing the monster created by oppression turn upon its creator.
Dick Gregory, The Shadow that Scares Me (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968), p. 206.

10. The cover is by Milton Glaser.
Dick Gregory returned to the Frankenstein story in an album (cover at left, 1971) and in a speech at Kent State in 1971 (audio)

11. “Sometimes I wished to express my sensations in my own mode, but the uncouth and inarticulate sounds which broke from me frightened me into silence again.” From: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818), volume II, chapter III.
“Sometimes I wished to express my sensations in my own mode, but the uncouth and inarticulate sounds which broke from me frightened me into silence again.” Here, Glenn Ligon quotes from Frankenstein to deal with issues of race and social invisibility in the United States.
Glenn Ligon, “Study for Frankenstein #1” (1992). Saint Louis Art Museum

12. Due to be released in May 2017, thanks to Rebecca Wanzo for bringing this to my attention
Victor LaValle’s comic book series Destroyer (2017) features a scientist who tries to bring her son, a black boy killed by the police, back to life. The series aspires to fuse Shelley’s Frankenstein with Black Lives Matter.

13. Apple, Frankie’s Holiday (2016)

14. Apple, Frankie’s Holiday (2016)

15. Apple, Frankie’s Holiday (2016)

16. Apple, Frankie’s Holiday (2016)

17. Apple, Frankie’s Holiday (2016)