Few works by comic-book artists have earned the universal acclaim and reverence that Bernie Wrightson's illustrated version of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein was met with upon its original release in 1983 and the original forty-seven full-page illustrations that stunned the world with their monumental beauty and uniqueness.
This edition reprints the full novel by Mary Shelley (1831 edition), with illustrations by Wrightson. Wrightson spent seven years drawing approximately 50 detailed pen-and-ink illustrations. The book includes an introduction by Stephen King and from Wrightson himself. The illustrations themselves are not based upon the Boris Karloff or Lee films, but on the actual book's descriptions of characters and objects. Wrightson also used a period style, saying "I wanted the book to look like an antique; to have the feeling of woodcuts or steel engravings, something of that era" and basing the feel on artists like Franklin Booth, J.C. Coll and Edwin Austin Abbey.
Wrightson has said that it was an unpaid project:
I've always had a thing for Frankenstein, and it was a labor of love. It was not an assignment, it was not a job. I would do the drawings in between paying gigs, when I had enough to be caught up with bills and groceries and what-not. I would take three days here, a week there, to work on the Frankenstein volume. It took about seven years.
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