James Gunn’s DCU will kick off with Frankenstein’s monster

This is a strange but important fact: Frankenstein will be the first installment of the new DC Comics cinematic universe. James Gunn, himself, stated that the premiere installment in the interconnected series of movies, TV, animation and video games, based on DC Comics characters, will be Frankenstein. Creature Commandos. And smack in the middle of our first look at the animated series It is a familiar figure that looks a lot like Frankenstein’s monster.

And that’s because he just is Frankenstein’s monster. The DC comics universe version of the monster isn’t licensed from the rights holders of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. But he also isn’t a ripoff or an inside joke. He’s an undead being who was created 200 years ago by Doctor Victor Frankenstein, who sewed together several corpses and brought the results to life. The monster — who goes by the name “Frankenstein,” don’t get at me in the comments — was later lost in the arctic of the DC Comics universe for a long time, and when he thawed out, he became a secret agent.

You can see it. Frankenstein, or the Modern PrometheusThis information is public domain.

Image by Patrick Gleason/DC Comics, Mick Gray, John Kalisz/DC Comics

Frankenstein-the-monster as a character recurs surprisingly often in DC Comics, both as a one-off and more recently with his own intermittently ongoing continuity. He’s got an extra heart, for example, in case one of them gets torn out. The angel who used to own his sword was also his.

He owes his modern editorial (un)life to writer Grant Morrison, artist Doug Mahnke, and their mid-’00s web of Seven Soldiers books, in which Frank battled supernatural horrors as only an undead creature with no conscience can. 2011’s New 52 Reboot saw Frank re-imagined as a fully fledged agent of SHADE, the Super Human Advanced Defense Executive. Via the convergent evolution of cool and obvious ideas, he’s developed something of a Hellboy-like niche.

It’s that niche that makes it possible for DC to publish him, much less for Warner Bros. to put him in an animated series. Because while Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus — in which Dr. Frankenstein’s monster is articulate, even erudite, and winds up frozen in the arctic — is in the public domain, Universal Pictures’ 1931 classic Frankenstein — in which the monster is a monosyllabic hulk who burns alive in a windmill — is It is not.

Frankenstein now joins the ranks of literary characters in public domain who have strangely important meanings for our current superhero worlds. For example, Dracula and Sherlock Holmes are vital for X-Men continuity in Marvel Comics. This raises the question of courage and daring.

The world is asking: Which brave writer or artist would make Jay Gatsby a permanent part of the superhero universe? Personally, I think he’d make a great Batman villain.