Walton aboard a ship on expedition to the North Pole, it explores his inspiration for the creation of life, and then follows with the promise of suffering the Creature vows to rain down on his creator. The narrative is furthered via Victor Frankenstein’s narration to Mr.

We see little to no change in chain of events, character deaths, or subplots. The adaptation does an exceptional job in sticking close enough to the source material so as not to lose sight of the elements that make the story’s characters so believable within their world. In fact, his Frankenstein’s Monster never strays too far from Shelley’s in terms of how it reflects the creator’s own delusions and failings. Ito is careful, though, not to sacrifice the Creature’s tragedy with his design. It still stands to represent our own biological imperfections and how our attempts at achieving the opposite are doomed to fail. Its physical dimensions are exaggerated but not entirely inhuman. It mostly keeps to bandages and big dirty pieces of clothing that do little to conceal his ugliness. Ito goes for an impossibly tall, slender, and chaotic mess of body parts that resembles the Frankenstein Creature as portrayed by Christopher Lee in the Hammer horror films. The Creature’s look can determine the ideas it represents and can either guide or derail the story’s tone. One of the most important decisions any creator looking to adapt Frankenstein must contend with lies in the final design of the Creature, the thing Victor Frankenstein creates. Using Mary Shelley’s monumental gothic horror story on science gone wrong and men playing at god, Ito finds a way to extend his exploration on humanity’s monstrosity by making it clear that any creation born out of human curiosity can only result in misshapen monsters. With Frankenstein, Ito takes the introspective element of human horror and applies it to creativity. People become spiral shapes themselves, offering their bodies as proof of humanity’s inner monstrosity. In Uzumaki, he turns an obsession to spiral shapes into a metaphor on how people twist, turn, and contort to fit their strangest desires into their daily routines.

Junji Ito’s original body of work often turns its human characters inside out to show how monstrous we truly are. Touch-up Artist and Letterer: James Dashiell

Frankenstein ito junji