Saturday Splash Page #175

"Frank Stein of Mars," in Seven Soldiers: Frankenstein #2, by Grant Morrison (writer), Dough Mahnke (artist), John Kalisz (colorist), Phil Balsman (letterer)

Seven Soldiers of Spring cannot die, but can words on an electronic screen be said to truly live?

Frankenstein starts in 1870, with the monster confronting Melmoth aboard a train. Which ultimately explodes and crashes into a valley. A town grows there, only to be hit by falling trains two more times, until finally, in 2005, Sheeda faeries spawn and latch on to a boy, letting him see into the thoughts of others, and eventually bend them to his will.

And in the midst of that, Frankenstein digs himself out of the ground and sets to killing. And he doesn't really stop killing for the remainder of the mini-series. Issue 2 takes him to Mars, and another confrontation with Melmoth (who is recovering from the thrashing he got from Klarion at the conclusion of his mini-series.) Mars is also where the his "Red Team", the promotion that awaits the kids Klarion briefly ran with, are promoted to. A life of slavery and toil digging through the ruins of some long-dead Martian civilization for the resources to help Melmoth defeat his one-time wife, the Sheeda-Queen.

(Mahnke draws one crumbled statue with a head that generally resembles J'onn J'onzz true form, but otherwise, there's not a lot that resembles what I've seen depicted of the Martians, green or white.)

After that, Frankenstein is roped into working with S.H.A.D.E. a shadowy government agency that deals with weird shit, and whose ranks include the Bride, now with a few additional arms and a wry sense of humor. An attempt to weaponize water (that seems to be Chemo, though never referred to as such), and then a confrontation with the Nebula Man, or Neh-buh-loh, the Huntsman, who Morrison seems to have turned into DC's version of the Cosmic Cube, as his "infant" form is a glowing cube. The adult form, as depicted by Mahnke, is a black shape full of tiny stars (or maybe they're galaxies.) The body has huge muscles, but ridiculously tiny hands, not sure why Mahnke went that route.

The vice of this mini-series would seem to be Wrath. Frankenstein is angry a lot, and unforgiving. He's out for vengeance. He allows Melmoth to escape the "red zombies", only to throw him to a hungry herd of the creature he's riding in the splash page. He knows it won't kill Melmoth (though he later tells the Queen Melmoth is dead) , but he'll still be alive, as dung. But the contrasting virtue is supposedly Patience (according to Wikipedia which attributes it to a couple of people, including Pope Gregory I, so take it or don't), and that's harder to see.

Maybe in the sense that Frankenstein doesn't go to confront the Sheeda Queen directly, but takes the time to sabotage six of her invasion ships first. He does hold off from killing Father Time, the leader of S.H.A.D.E., which would have resulted in being melted with hydrochloric acid darts, leaving him unable to assist in the coming conflict, and S.H.A.D.E. even more unprepared for the Sheeda. He, um, waited to get Melmoth until after the guy probably thought he was safe?

Maybe I'm thinking of it too much as Patience reining in or subsuming Wrath entirely, when it's really about not being controlled by the Wrath rather than eliminating it entirely. But even there, I'm not sure. Because a lot of what comes up in this mini-series seems to be about compromise, or shades of grey morality, and Frankenstein not having it. The kid in the first issue was being controlled by one of the Sheeda fairy, but Frankenstein chucked him through a window and decapitated both of them at the same time. Melmoth is cozying up with various rich asses by promising he can protect them and humanity from his ex-wife. We've already discussed Melmoth's fate, the rich bastards don't do any better.

Did Frankenstein compromise Earth's ability to defend itself? I don't have a lot of faith in Melmoth, let alone the rich shits, but I don't think it even factors momentarily in Frankenstein's thought process. These guys were looking to profit off slavery, so he killed them. End of discussion. He doesn't approve of S.H.A.D.E. trying to weaponize water, then nuking a city to cover up their fuck-up. Enough so he'd rather walk to Tibet and his confrontation with Neh-buh-loh than hitch a ride with them. Of course, the last time he hopped in one of their choppers he got shot in the head and woke up imprisoned, so maybe that's just good common sense.

Frankenstein's not dead, even if he's a bunch of stitched-together dead things, but he's also not exactly alive. He apparently came to be with some help from Melmoth, which makes him cousin to the "Grundy Men" Klarion's people use for labor. Not alive, but not dead. He's a sort of compromise himself, but isn't open to the notion.

The big reveal of the fourth issue, when Frankenstein follows the Sheeda back to their base, is that they're us. Rather, they're what humanity becomes in a billion years. They live on the burned out husk of an Earth that's been cooked by the sun, and then they leap back in time to plunder the resources of the Earth's past.

(Mahnke draws cities beneath the floating "harrower" ships the Sheeda will invade with. At first I thought they were just ruins, which was strange enough. Cities that look like they're from the mid-20th Century or older - brick chimneys and everything - would still exist on that Earth, but it looks like Sheeda still actually live in them. Which makes me wonder how many still live on that world.)

There's no sign the Sheeda ever considered working with their ancestors. That perhaps by preventing past societies from collapsing or ravaging the world, the Sheeda might have better circumstances in their own time. Probably not on Earth, I doubt there's much to do about the Sun growing hotter and larger, but it doesn't seem like humanity ever expanded beyond our birth world here. At least, there's never any mention of humans elsewhere in the galaxy. For the Sheeda it's "see it, take it, have it." Anything else is not even worth considering, and against a force like that, you can't compromise. So maybe that makes Frankenstein the perfect one to fight them.